Bill Ayers, On Patriotism, in His Own Words, from his blog on July 4, 2006

Bill Ayers, On Patriotism, in His Own Words, from his blog on July 4, 2006
Bill Ayers Blog ^ | July 22, 2006 | William "Bill" Ayers

...On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Patriotism is perhaps the single concept in greatest need of being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning in our country today. We live, after all, in a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, of war without borders and seemingly without end, of greed enthroned and of a rapidly widening gulf between rich and poor, of the elusive and seemingly intractable barriers to racial justice, and of patriotism rehearsed and paraded in every corner, and yet the basic questions of who we are and where we are eludes us.

....This enforced ignorance is part of the logic of patriotism, which is of a piece with the logic of nationalism: anyone who by chance was thrust onto this small specific patch of earth is to consider himself or herself superior to all those unfortunates who were thrust onto some other patch. This beatified place is imagined to be qualitatively unparalleled, so different from all other places that it’s as if a high wall shuts it off from the rest of the world. And walls as metaphors are reinforced with barbed wire erected in East Germany, Israel, and now the US on its southern border. Here, within the wall, a chosen people, so to speak, live blessed lives that are nobler, greater, deeper and wiser and more beneficent than the lives led by any other human beings anywhere else.

This is the constant conceit of patriotism, the narcissistic and arrogant stance. The result is that we are willing to fight, kill, and die—or as is almost always the case, to at least send the children of the laboring classes as proxies to do the killing and dying—in a patriotic fever for real estate before reason.

Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Bertrand Russell, “the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons”—patriotism is justification for murder. And the great Malcolm X advised that no one become “so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality…Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” Howard Zinn describes the typically disingenuous justification for war: As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American solider is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture. Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

Great find. Wow. And just think Obami in the White House puts Ayres in the White House too. I honestly believe Ayres is the power behind Obama. Unbelievable this guy walked and went scot free. We need to send this to Hannity, Rush, Fox, anywhere and everywhere we can think of.