I'm with Nathan, here. (There, Nathan, that should make you reconsider!) It is
political suicide to go around talking about "fascist Amerikkka," burning flags, etc.,
unless the only people you are interested in organizing those already terminally
disaffected and utterly alienated from the existing order. I mean, _you_ may be, but
most people who might have some interest in political activity are not. If you start
talking about how America is simply a crime against humanity, you will not get them to
pay serious attention to the crimes against humanity that America has committed.
Before the Gulf War, I was giving an antiwar talk, and some young man, a ROTC type,
questioned my patriotism. I replied, "Would I be doing this if I didn't care about my
country?" He aapologied and admitted, maybe not. Wasn't that better than saying, "This
country is a concatenation of evil?" One wants people to have pride in their country,
but for the right things. For the rest, as Norman Thomas said, "My country, right its
wrongs."
--jks
In a message dated Tue, 1 Aug 2000 2:56:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Nathan Newman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<<
On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Charles Brown wrote:
> the crimes of past generations. But I want to say something else:
> that you will hardly get young Americans interested in improving
> race/gender/class relations unless you give them some pride in
> what their country has indeed accomplished in its past.
>
> )))))))))))))))
>
> CB: By and large, they already have too much pride in the past of
> their country. There is beaucoup de patriotism, here. Actually, we
> need to take their patriotism down a notch or two, in the best
> interest of all of humanity.
Actually, they have too much pride in the wrong things. "Their country"
and its history is made up of hundreds of millions of people, many of them
admirable. That corporate government promotes a few of them in the
history book does not erase the admirable qualities of those not
mentioned.
Undermining rightwing patriotism does not accomplish much if it is just
replaced by narcistic consumerism. What is needed is a positive meaning
of history worth emulating, from Shays to Frederick Douglas to Sojourner
Truth to Eugene Debs to Mother Jones to A. Phillip Randolph to Cesar
Chavez and Martin Luther King. And movements that they folks were
associated with.
-- Nathan Newman
>>
