Doug asks, why should we want pople to be proud of their country?
Not least because they are going to, most of them, and it will be on out terms or
someone else's, so whose do you prefer? Look, intellectually speaking, I can
understand that most group identifications don't make a lot of sense. It's sort of
arbitrary to say, "Because that's the way we do things around here." And who are "we"?
"We are the people do do things like that." Hegel wrestled with the "We that is I and
the I that is we." And I grant you, mere accidents of birth are somehow unsatisfying
bases for these identifications. Moreover, it might be better to have a pure
class-based identification. But Marx was wrong. The workers do have a country--ask
them! And they will dismiss you if you deny it. it's important to them. I don't go
with those who argue for progessive nationalistic populism as ooppsed to class
politics, but I do agree with Nathan that, taking national pride as a given, we should
reclaim it for the left.
Nor am I immune When I took my kids to Gettysburg, I quite involuntarily found tears
in my eyes and a catch in my throat when I saw flowers heaped on Little Round Top at
the site where Chamberlain's 20th Maine Volunteers held off the Alabamans on Day Two,
firing all their ammo, and then scattering the battle-hardened Southerners with a
bayonet charge, saving the left flank, probably the battle, and quite possibly the
Union. Am I a sap? No doubt. But I would want you to take that away from me. I am
proud of Joshua Chamberlain, who ran away from a cushy professorship in defiance of
his college, raised a regiment of volunteers, risked his life, and saved his country
to make it better than it had been. What's wrong with that?
And I can appreciate the flowers I saw heaped in the yard of the Museum der
Widerstand, the resistance museum, in the former Wehrmacht HQ in Berlin, in the yard
where the Nazis executed von Stauffenberg and many of the July 20 Conspirators, where
the plaque now reads, They Died for Germany. And indeed, for us all, but _they_ did it
for Germany. And what's wrong with that?
--jks
--jks
In a message dated Tue, 1 Aug 2000 3:34:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<< [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>One wants people to have pride in their country
Why?
Doug
>>
