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Saturday, November 12, 2005
The Music Of The Icosahedrons: The Nature Of Patriotism
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”—Left-wing slogan of recent vintage
It appears your Curmudgeon got everyone’s glands in an uproar over sex yesterday. He was tempted to hide for the weekend, in the hope that it would all blow over, but this topic requires the Curmudgeonly sledgehammer. Besides, one never knows what that Fran person will do when allowed at the keyboard a day out of order. Accordingly, he’s decided that as long as he’s on a roll, he might as well service another emotionally charged topic. (In military jargon, to “service a target” is to bomb it to rubble.)
Surely no one can forget the frequent, petulant whinings from John Kerry and his confreres during Campaign 2004 that it was illegitimate to question their patriotism. But note that they never said why it was illegitimate. Note that they preferred to leave the nature of patriotism unexamined, the better to protect their own version of it. And note how little their “patriotism” meshed with the common conception of the thing held by the common citizen.
Patriotism, like rights, is an abstraction. To have a fair claim to reality, an abstraction must have a perceptible and consistent effect on the decisions and actions of men. That is, if they were suddenly disabused of the abstraction, their behavior would change in demonstrable ways. So the most fruitful approach to the contentions over patriotism would be to ponder how we would expect patriots and un-patriots to act, in as broad a range of test circumstances as possible.
The patriot, it is assumed, is ever ready to defend his country. But defense implies attack. An attack isn’t always a simple matter of assault by men with guns. Worse, “his country,” in this day, has a more extended meaning than ever before. We usually wrap a number of things into that envelope:
- The physical land mass that goes by the name of the country;
- The country’s citizens, whether inside or outside its borders;
- The country’s acknowledged extra-territorial possessions;
- The country’s “interests.”
On the first three elements, there’s little to no debate. A country that fails to extend its protection over those things is unworthy of respect. Win, lose, or draw, it must act to defend them, for not to do so would cause mass disaffection from its political and governmental structure, and ultimately, dissolution by conquest or schism.
The fourth element is where much of the contention centers. When not identified specifically with one of the first three, the country’s interests are a matter of opinion. For example, there’s a community of “thought”—yes, those are “sneer quotes”—that holds that it’s no part of America’s interests to ensure Americans’ access to world markets, particularly as regards natural resource commodities such as oil. Such persons are even more dismissive about Americans’ interest in selling their wares to willing buyers in other lands. Schiller called this inability to learn from the historically well documented consequences of economic autarky and national flaccidity “short intestines.” Indeed, and productive ones, too.
There are also communities of thought, somewhat more respectable but still short-sighted, that argue that, to uphold America’s full interests, the nation should be ready to spring to the defense of the threatened or the liberation of the oppressed at all times, wherever they might be. The inevitable evolution of so militaristic a society into a full-blown garrison state has not occurred to them. They maintain that our national ideals would prevent any such thing, completely discounting the many venues in which those ideals have failed to safeguard us from lesser encroachments on individual freedom.
The extent of our national interests, to be sure, is not easily settled. All the same, it ought to be possible for intelligent men to avoid ridiculous formulations at any extreme, while preserving the civility of our discourse over what remains. Yet today at least, this is not the case.
Since arguments about patriotism are so often tangled up with support for the exertions of force by government, it is imperative that we distinguish between the interests of a country and the interests of its ruling regime.
Throughout recorded history, nearly all countries have been ruled by regimes whose interests were demonstrably antithetical to those of their countries. That is, they battened on their nations’ wealth for their own pleasure and aggrandizement, prosecuted wars and lesser policies that weakened their nations militarily and economically, caused net losses to their subjects on any timescale, and often precipitated revolutions that brought about still worse conditions. Therefore, it is incontestable that a ruling regime can act against its nation’s interests, and that therefore support for the regime as such is not a requirement of patriotism.
However, opposition to the ruling regime is not therefore a requirement of patriotism either. There have been cases where a nation was being badly misruled, stumbled into a war, and was then led through that war with exemplary courage and precision by the very rulers who’d previously been abusing it. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a case in point.
The subject obviously requires greater clarity than either reflexive opponents of a ruling regime or reflexive backers thereof have brought it.
Perhaps, in place of the unadorned notion of “interests,” we should substitute the more compelling, and potentially more definable, concept of vital interests.
A vital interest is easily understood: it’s something which, if undermined, would threaten the survival of the country. Threats to survival would include invasion and conquest, economic collapse, or social disturbances verging on civil war. They would not include a ten-cent increase in the price of a gallon of gas, or meaningless denunciations by the potentates of has-been powers. It’s obvious that such pinpricks are unworthy of an armed response. At least, it ought to be obvious.
Under the knife of vital interests, most of the fuzz on the concept of patriotism is cut away. For Smith to argue that the United States must go to war, putting the lives of many thousands at risk, to lower the price of gasoline by ten cents or to take vengeance for a verbal slight by a foreign panjandrum is clearly unpatriotic; it promotes a paltry interest, in no way connected to the survival of the country, above the lives of American servicemen and the unfortunate collateral casualties that occur in every war. Similarly, for Smith to argue that the United States must not go to war against a nation that has mounted or facilitated attacks against Americans, American property, and American extra-territorial possessions (e.g., warships docked in foreign ports) is clearly unpatriotic; the armed services exist precisely to redress such things, and to leave them idle when a villain has acted and stands in plain sight is criminal nonfeasance.
To “question Smith’s patriotism” under such circumstances is not an option; it’s a duty.
Of course, today’s loudest shouts about the questioning of patriotism emanate from the angry Left, which demands that the United States cease to pursue its anti-terror campaign, in which the liberation of Iraq was a keystone, with armed force. Pro-war figures have suggested that those angry persons are less interested in the welfare of the country than they are in besmirching the Bush Administration, advancing their own political fortunes, or both.
This does indeed constitute an indictment for un-patriotism. More, it’s richly deserved.
As President Bush said only yesterday, it’s always legitimate to debate the efficacy or efficiency of a particular policy. It’s legitimate to question the motives of the person proposing the policy, when the policy has proved ineffective or destructive in the past. It’s mandatory to question the patriotism of one who argues against the use of the armed forces for the precise purpose for which they’re intended: the punishment of a State that actively threatens the lives and properties of Americans.
Given the well-established behavior and aims of the Taliban and Ba’athist regimes we’ve overthrown, and given the mountains of evidence that both were deeply in bed with the international Islamist terror network commonly called al-Qaeda, there is no longer an objective basis upon which to argue that overthrowing those states was either morally wrong or contrary to our true vital interests. Therefore, those who continue to claim that Saddam Hussein is the “rightful” ruler of Iraq, or that our intervention into Afghanistan to rout the Taliban was criminal under “international law,” should ponder well the following words:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
If the shoe fits…
Comments
So then Rumsfeld and Bush, Sr are traitors for allying themselves with Hussein in the 1980s.
And Reagan was a traitor for giving both bin Laden, the Taliban, and al Qaeda all of the weapons and training they used to fight us.
And I guess Bush, Jr is a traitor for giving vast amounts of aid to the Taliban in 2001.
Maybe you should start reading books and stuff. They have information you might need so you don’t look so stupid all the time.
Posted by Brad on 11/13/2005 at 12:23 AMBrad, I think you’re missing the point. At the time that the US helped Saddam (minimally, by the way; it was hardly an alliance, more on the nature of the enemy of my enemy is at least entitled to some intelligence we’ve gathered), Saddam had not attacked the US or threatened our vital interests. Similarly, the Taliban didn’t exist until after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and neither did al Qaeda IIRC; we gave a tribal people who were no threat to us aid in defeating the most significant threat to us. The Taliban in 2001 were certainly a threat to us, since they harbored al Qaeda, but prior to 9/11 that seemed like a pretty distant threat.
Passing quickly by your ad hominem attack on Fran, I might note that reading books is a useful thing for everyone to do.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 11/13/2005 at 01:57 AMIt’s only treason if they’re an enemy of the United States at the time the actions in question were taken. If they become an enemy later, and use the aid formerly rendered to harm the US, it’s merely an ordinary human error with unusually serious consequences.
I’m all for calling the actions in Brad’s question serious errors, even in light of the limited predictive value of the information known at the time by those who made the decisions. But that does not rise either legally or morally to the level of treason. (The deals Reagan made with Iran are another story...but Brad doesn’t mention those, and they don’t really bear on the current American political situation anyway.)
Posted by Matt on 11/13/2005 at 05:27 AMUnlike most of the (admittedly few) shrieking leftists who’ve visited here, Brad was kind enough to leave a backtrail. If you’re in any doubt where he’s coming from, you should visit. It won’t take you more than 30 seconds to diagnose his particular illness.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 11/13/2005 at 08:04 AMSorry. Remiss. Distracted. Nothing to add. Agreed. Thanks for the note.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 11/14/2005 at 11:52 AM"Schiller called this inability to learn from the historically well documented consequences of economic autarky and national flaccidity “short intestines.” Indeed, and productive ones, too.”
Remind me not to get on your bad side, Fran. That was a vicious blow!
Posted by Rusticus on 11/14/2005 at 01:23 PM
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