[THS] Remembering Howard Zinn on July 4th: Put Away the Flags

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25862.htm

Put Away the Flags
Remembering Howard Zinn on July 4th

By Howard Zinn

July 03, 2010 "The Progressive" -- 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?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on --
have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military
power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many
more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass
destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant
nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an
exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring
civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were
resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of
Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the
Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give
thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy
possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and
children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less
than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest
Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of
Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our
destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines
shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino
people.

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 soldier 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.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they
return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing
of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the
justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by
Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who
announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the
other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, was the author of the best-
selling "A People's History of the United States" (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest
edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.

    Howard Zinn died on January 7. Please read Matthew Rothschild's "Thank you,
Howard Zinn," for more about his legacy.