Liberal Patriotic Quotes

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.

Statism ends with an eye roll.

The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

We cannot, of course, expect every leader to possess the wisdom of Lincoln or Mandela’s largeness of soul. But when we think about what questions might be most useful to ask, perhaps we should begin by discerning what our prospective leaders believe it worthwhile for us to hear. Do they cater to our prejudices by suggesting that we treat people outside our ethnicity, race, creed or party as unworthy of dignity and respect? Do they want us to nurture our anger toward those who we believe have done us wrong, rub raw our grievances and set our sights on revenge? Do they encourage us to have contempt for our governing institutions and the electoral process? Do they seek to destroy our faith in essential contributors to democracy, such as an independent press, and a professional judiciary? Do they exploit the symbols of patriotism, the flag, the pledge in a conscious effort to turn us against one another? If defeated at the polls, will they accept the verdict, or insist without evidence they have won? Do they go beyond asking about our votes to brag about their ability to solve all problems put to rest all anxieties and satisfy every desire? Do they solicit our cheers by speaking casually and with pumped up machismo about using violence to blow enemies away? Do they echo the attitude of Musolini: “The crowd doesn’t have to know, all they have to do is believe and submit to being shaped.”? Or do they invite us to join with them in building and maintaining a healthy center for our society, a place where rights and duties are apportioned fairly, the social contract is honored, and all have room to dream and grow. The answers to these questions will not tell us whether a prospective leader is left or right-wing, conservative or liberal, or, in the American context, a Democrat or a Republican. However, they will us much that we need to know about those wanting to lead us, and much also about ourselves. For those who cherish freedom, the answers will provide grounds for reassurance, or, a warning we dare not ignore.

Far-seeing patriots should turn scornfully from men who seek power on a platform which with exquisite nicety combines silly inability to understand the national needs and dishonest insintcerity in promising conflicting and impossible remedies.

People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.

Patriotism is about improving the lives of one’s fellow citizens and improving one’s country’s contribution to the world. In the conservative moral hierarchy, our country is taken as simply better than other countries. This is jingoism, not true patriotism, which rests on progressive values.

People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.

For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

The prevalence of anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals led some of them to warn their fellow liberals of the consequences of such attitudes for the future not of America but of American liberalism. Most Americans, as the American public philosopher Richard Rorty has written, take pride in their country, but 'many of the exceptions to this rule are found in colleges and universities, in the academic departments that have become sanctuaries for left-wing political views.' These leftists have done 'a great deal of good for . . . women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. . . . But there is a problem with this Left: it is unpatriotic. It repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of national pride.' If the Left is to retain influence, it must recognize that a 'sense of shared national identity . . . is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.' Without patriotism, the Left will be unable to achieve its goals for America. Liberals, in short, must use patriotism as a means to achieve liberal goals

A Marxist–Leninist nationalist political party, determined to rectify the historic shame of losing territory to British imperialists, was hell-bent on controlling a liberal, multicultural, international-minded city that thrived on open borders and freedom of speech. There was no possibility of a win–win resolution.

People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.

…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.

A Libertarian’s just a Democrat whose vote doesn’t count. Same thing.

A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn’t open to anywhere good.

I wrote many things for and with John. I know this is one assignment he'd rather I didn't have to take on. Although I had a close – head to head, arm to arm working relationship with John, that proximity never affected the fact that from the moment I met him, through all work, I remain his number one fan. He was a brilliant performer, writer, tactician, business strategist and most importantly, he was the only man that I could dance with. He was a great – a world class – emissary of American humor. John was a patriot, a resident of the most wide open, liberal society on earth, and he took full advantage of it. In come cases, real greatness gives license for real indulgence; whether it's as a reward, as therapy or as sanctuary. For as hard as John worked, there had to be an additional illicit thrill to make the effort all worthwhile. John was a nighthawk, true. But he was not an immoral individual. He was a good man, a kind man, a warm man, a hot man. What we are talking about here is a good man – and a bad boy. Johnny – you can be sure that I'll have my antennae out for the paranatural and the spiritual, and believe me, if there's any contact with him, I'll let you know.

Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light.

I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions.

I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause.

We teach history to instill in new generations the values of patriotism, citizenship, and love of country, but sometimes we must also remember that we teach history so that we can liberate ourselves from the past.

Given the choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose? Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they'll do the terrorists' work for them. They'll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud , the the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women's equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Angle-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

On March 8 Danton mounted the tribune of the Convention. The patriots never forgot the shock of his sudden appearance, nor his face, harrowed by sleepless nights and the exhaustion of traveling, pallid with strain and suffering. Complex griefs caught sometimes at his voice, as he spoke of treason and humiliation; once he stopped and looked at his audience, self-conscious for a moment, and touched the scar on his cheek. With the armies, he has seen malice, incompetence, negligence. Reinforcements must be massive and immediate. The rich of France must pay for the liberation of Europe. A new tax must be voted today and collected tomorrow. To deal with conspirators against the Republic there must be a new court, a Revolutionary Tribunal: from that, no right of appeal.

Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight. Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.

Christian nationalism is not a politically enthusiastic version of Christianity, nor is it a religiously informed patriotism. Christian nationalism is a prosperity gospel for nation-states, a liberation theology for white people. In that it has more in common with the lifeless establishments, the old liberalisms, and some of the social gospels, which preferred a gospel that changed externals and did not demand personal repentance and faith. It submerges personal transformation under social transformation, thus making both impossible.

Hitler’s own people ‘liberated’ from him? The Viennese and other Austrians, so many of whom had ecstatically welcomed the annexation of the country to the Reich in March 1938, now suddenly so patriotic for the Red-and-White, so insistent that they were not actually ‘German’ at all?

Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they’ll do the terrorists’ work for them. They’ll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud, the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women’s equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Anglo-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, denounced the war as one “of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine—marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity . . . ” Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation’s leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs.

The implications of Bonhoeffer’s pairing of Jesus and culture were significant; Christians were virtually invisible in German society, absorbed into the German culture of Protestantism, with its liberal Christian language of human achievement and of nationalism. A good Christian looked no different than a patriotic German, tethered firmly to Volkish, or German-centered, loyalties.

Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?

Of course, these liberals were not, as I was, forever being found by the police in the “wrong” neighborhood, and so could not have had first-hand knowledge of how gleefully a policeman translates his orders from above. But they had no right not to know that; if they did not know that, they knew nothing and had no right to speak as though they were responsible actors in their society; for their complicity with the patriots of that hour meant that the policemen were acting on their orders, too.

But the old 1840s split between the religious, patriotic, Slavophile establishment and the progressive, humane, revolutionary Westernizers was giving way to the exacerbated conflict between the alienated positivist radicals of the 1860s who adopted the name Turgenev had given them, Nihilists, and those who thanked Russian Nationalism, Orthodoxy and Autocracy for the bloodless liberation of the serfs, introduction of trial by jury, reduction of the draft from twenty-five to five years, partial decentralization of

Washington’s style of interracial engagement has been all but forgotten, and when remembered, usually disparaged: he put a premium on finding consensus and empathizing with other groups, and by his example encouraged dominant groups to do the same,” wrote Norrell. “He cautioned that when people protest constantly about their mistreatment, they soon get a reputation as complainers, and others stop listening to their grievances. Blacks needed a reputation for being hard-working, intelligent, and patriotic, Washington taught, and not for being aggrieved.”19

Belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism. At the same time, the romantic outlook, partly because it is aristocratic, and partly because it prefers passion to calculation, has a vehement contempt for commerce and finance. It is thus led to proclaim an opposition to capitalism which is quite different from that of the socialist who represents the interest of the proletariat, since it is an opposition based on dislike of economic preoccupations, and strengthened by the suggestion that the capitalist world is governed by Jews. This point of view is expressed by Byron on the rare occasions when he condescends to notice anything so vulgar as economic power: Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign  O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal? Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?  (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.) Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain  Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all? The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring. The verse is perhaps not very musical, but the sentiment is quite of our time, and has been re-echoed by all Byron’s followers.

And whereas Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War did wrong, according to Solzhenitsyn, because they did not allow the enemy to defeat them and because they successfully defended their country and liberated the people of Europe, our enemies, in his book, were endowed with every imaginable virtue. Among them were the traitors - Vlasov and his followers - who pointed their guns at their own people. By joining the Wehrmacht they, too, allegedly 'strove to assert themselves and to tell the world about their formidable experience: that they also are a small part of Russia and want to play a role in its future' (A. Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago, Paris, 1973, pp.266)

...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...

A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford Build the nation's mausoleum, Light the people's funeral pyre, For Hibernia's sons and daughters, In genocide to expire. Romantic Ireland has no grave, It died foraging at the roadside for bites, Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World, An empire's boot on the throat for last rites. Did you know your identity all along? Or find it struggling and aghast? Old Eireann was the first expendable colony, And egregiously, not Britannia's last. Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths, Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind, Force-feed our children grapes of wrath, With liberation dead on the vine. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

An exciting sense of rodina, ‘motherland,’ was for the first time organically mingled with the comfortably creaking snow, the deep footprints across it, the red gloss of the engine stack, the birch logs piled high, under their private layer of transportable snow, on the red tender. I was not quite six, but that year abroad, a year of difficult decisions and liberal hopes, had exposed a small Russian boy to grown-up conversations. He could not help being affected in some way of his own by a mother’s nostalgia and a father’s patriotism. In result, that particular return to Russia, my first conscious return, seems to me now, sixty years later, a rehearsal – not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile.

The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality.  For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world.  They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe.  We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution.  If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world.   Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.”  Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination.  Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police.   The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism.  We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer.  This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe.  We are cheering for imperialist forces.  We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism.  Why would we do this unless we were being lied to?   The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism.  It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire.  When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire.  Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism.  When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism.  When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power).  Imperialism is everywhere.  Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.

Crane was as insistent as Rothbard and Koch about the need for a libertarian revolution against the statist world system of the twentieth century. “The Establishment” had to be overthrown—its conservative wing along with its liberal wing. Both suffered “intellectual bankruptcy,” the conservatives for their “militarism” and the liberals for their “false goals of equality.” The future belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power” altogether.47 Once Crane agreed to lead the training institute, all that was lacking was a name, which Rothbard eventually supplied: it would be called the Cato Institute. The name was a wink to insiders: while seeming to gesture toward the Cato’s Letters of the American Revolution, thus performing an appealing patriotism, it also alluded to Cato the Elder, the Roman leader famed for his declaration that “Carthage must be destroyed!” For this new Cato’s mission was also one of demolition: it sought nothing less than the annihilation of statism in America.48

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda. Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable.

Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves. ....In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work better if we recognized that all of us posses values worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledge that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

Of course the results of the election were shocking at the time, but in hindsight, they were consistent with the trends of previous elections. Trump continued to build on Republican advantages with the middle class and the non-college educated whites. Meanwhile, the power of identity liberalism to boost turnout among the minority community proved to be a mirage. African American turnout was down significantly from 2008 and 2012 without the nation's first black president on the ticket. And Trump actually increased the share of the vote received from African Americans and Hispanic over Mitt Romney. It turns out the identity liberalism even alienates members of minority groups more concerned about economic issues than niche social justice fights. Furthermore, Donald Trump was making an appeal based on identity as well -- that of being an American. His patriotic call to Make America Great Again overwhelmed explicit appeals to race, gender and sexual orientation. This universal appeal based on broad issues and common culture trumped identity liberalism.

There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

However, content matters. Imperialism has a right wing and a liberal wing: where right-wing imperialism is nakedly aggressive, overtly chauvinistic, and patriotic; liberal imperialism talks about shades of gray and invokes philosophy before visiting violence on the same targets.

This isn’t the future I’d expected. Even a glowing wasteland or Mad Max desolation would have been better. No God. No family. No country or patriotism. Just a bunch of Ken dolls without Barbies. The gays and their goddamn agenda won, or should I say transsexuals, or asexuals? Liberalism has run unchecked and ruined everything. You probably don’t even have guns anymore, do you?” “Of course not, we have no weapons of any kind,” Hex replied.

Fox News portrayed itself as a full-fledged news outlet that was a corrective to the liberal press. There are some fine journalists who have worked and continue to work at Fox News. But the majority of programming is opinion rather than news, and this opinion is often in service of conservative political objectives regardless of the facts.

Quoting page 115: The Hispanic civil rights organizations were heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, whose president from the late 1960s through the 1970s was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard alumni veteran of the Kennedy White House and tower of the nation’s eastern liberal establishment. In 1968 Ford had created MALDEF, as a Latino version of the NAACP, with a $2.2 million founding grant. La Raza, given a similar birthing grant of $630,000 by Ford in 1968, received $1,953,700 two years later. Between 1970 and 1999, Ford gave MALDEF $27.9 million and La Raza $21.5 million. In 1981 Ford started funding LULAC, the oldest Hispanic association. Noted since its origins in Texas in 1929 for espousing patriotism, political moderation, self-help ethnic, support for English language mastery, and bourgeois civic boosterism, LULAC in the 1970s adopted the strident tone of Chicano nationalism common to La Raza and MALDEF. In 1983 the Ford Foundation, led by Ford’s first African-American president, Franklin A. Thomas, began funding the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella association modeled on the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, to coordinate lobbying against [immigration] restrictionist organizations such as FAIR. LULAC, although joining the racialized agenda of MALDEF and La Raza in the 1970s, retained its character as a membership-based organization rooted in the Hispanic (mainly Mexican-American) community. But the constituency represented by MALDEF and La Raza was essentially the Ford Foundation and the tightly networking community of Latino political careerists.

What we have in hand is sheer opportunism. Shenhav defends his retreat from his earlier challenge to Zionism by referring to his Jewish identity, and even to his personal condition and needs. In turn, the fight for democratization of the state is left to the Palestinians. Indeed, Azmi Bishara “can better defend his own positions [emphasis added]” because they are absolutely contradictory to those of Shenhav. The Israeli establishment persecuted Bishara precisely because he refused to be “an Israeli patriot

Liberals have no idea what they are fighting for, none of them are true patriots of their country.

One source of conservatism’s considerable power, as noted, is its airtight explanation of reality, its ability to make sense of the average person’s disgruntlement while exempting laissez-faire capitalism from any culpability. The backlash narrative lets us feel brave when we grumble about offensive TV and patriotic when we complain about liberals ruining this aspect of life or that. It brings us together—management and labor, Protestant and Catholic, black and white—in mutual outrage against a common enemy. Not only does Jack Cashill apply this framework skillfully to local circumstances; he also develops schemes for taking the offensive, plans whereby people from every walk of life can play a valiant and fulfilling part in the backlash drama.4

They interlaced Christianity and patriotism in an effort to assert Christian nationalism; they introduced Americans to the idea that Christians abhor Communism and that liberals are merely

They interlaced Christianity and patriotism in an effort to assert Christian nationalism; they introduced Americans to the idea that Christians abhor Communism and that liberals are merely Communists without the guts to say so.

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

Thus Patriot Prayer’s tactics settled into an established strategy that became a national blueprint: organizing right-wing activists primarily from rural and exurban areas to invade liberal urban centers and intimidate them with thuggish behavior. These tactics proved flexible enough to apply across a range of right-wing issues, succeeding in creating a violent Antifa/leftist bogeyman narrative that could translate readily on friendly right-wing media such as Fox News. It began showing up nationally in the context of other scenes of right-wing conflict across the nation.

For me and some of the more liberal family members, patriotism seemed to have been monopolized by those with hawkish views of how to right that terrible wrong and who waved the American flag more like a weapon than a symbol of freedom, acceptance, and possibility.

The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away since any wise and patriotic Englishman has mediated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement with the constitution requires may be found within the constitution itself.

The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away since any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement which the constitution requires may be found within the constitution itself.

how the patriotic defence of one’s nation can also function as a defence of liberal notions—it all depends on which values does one’s “nation” contain.

It is this Germanic Norwegian blood that we must build on. Our culture in all its forms must find its way back to the original Norwegian, must again gain a foothold in the Norwegian folk soul. The Norwegian people must understand that liberal capitalism does not work for Norwegian farmers. Our goal is for the free Norwegian peasantry to sit safely on their farms, free from the stranglehold of capitalism. We want free Norwegian workers, who each in their profession make an effort for Norway, for the country and the people, workers who are valued according to what they provide, who are not a commodity, but a living part of the Norwegian people, workers who have regained his patriotism and sense of nationalism.

Liberals are missing a great opportunity here to reenfranchise the working class by acknowledging the inequitable impact of so many of the pandemic policies that Donald Trump and leading Democrats fast-tracked and green-lit with patriotic fervor.

American academia, though, is reaping what it has sowed. From places designed expressly for the free exchange of ideas, today’s colleges and universities have become straitjackets of collectivist thought. The individual means nothing. Remember all those protesters and bumper stickers proclaiming during the George W. Bush administration that “Dissent Is Patriotic”? Turns out it’s only patriotic if it’s liberals dissenting against a conservative in power. The other way around? Racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and general stupidity.

TIME FOR MORE TEA He does not keep the wicked alive but gives the afflicted their rights. Job 36:6 We the people. That’s what so many Americans have rallied around since the unstoppable Tea Party grassroots movement emerged. It resonates deeply with our Founders’ vision for an America created by the people and for the people, while it fights to ensure our lives are not ruled by the elites in Washington. And where do these convictions originate? We believe we’re created in God’s image and thus have God-given rights that we must protect from the destructive forces of the federal government. Even as the liberal media mock our ideals and our leaders, and even dare to mock our God, we have continued to stand for what is right. We stand because our hope comes from above, not from our TV screens and from Washington. Liberal elites put patriots down and mock them because they’re scared of conscientious, independent citizens. They look around and realize there are more of us than there are of them. They’re scared, because they see how people flock to a message of truth and hope. Patriots will keep winning because when the true biblical hope that the Founders enshrined in our Constitution is held up next to the façade of hope that this world offers, hope rooted in Christ always wins. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, support those in your community who are truly fighting to uphold our one nation under God! Get involved in a local campaign for a candidate who stands for these principles.

As our shared civil life is diminished, a Christian seeks the common good. He criticizes America, but with a spirit of loyalty, resisting the post-patriotic mentality. We mustn’t seek the social weightlessness that liberates the rich and powerful while atomizing and disempowering most citizens. To love our neighbor we need to love our neighborhood.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares that he is a nationalist but not a patriot, a distinction with profound implications. Patriots revere the ideas, institutions, and traditions of a particular country and its government. The watchwords for nationalists are "blood", "soil", "race", "Volk", and so forth. As a revolutionary nationalist, Hitler believed the entire bourgeois edifice of modern German culture was hollowed out by political or spiritual corruption. As a result, he believed Germany needed to rediscover its pre-Christian authenticity. This was the logical extension of identity politics--the idea that experience of a personal quest for meaning in racial conceptions of authenticity could be applied to the entire community.

The 1960s was motivated by repudiation of the old way and the quest for a new way. “Liberation” now came to mean liberation from old values—from the spirit of 1776. This took many shapes and forms—drugs, religious experimentation, sexual promiscuity, even bra-burning, as well as protesting, looting, and rioting. Perhaps most repulsive was the heartless ingratitude and even meanness that young people showed their parents. When frugal, hardworking, patriotic parents saw their teenage children giving them and all they held dear the finger, they saw, with a deep sadness, all that their hard work and savings had wrought. In the late 1960s, from the point of view of parents, America became a foreign country.

Blaming Goldwater’s retreat on his effort to win over the majority of voters (and recoiling, too, from the senator’s military adventurism), Crane went on to join the Libertarian Party, which had been summoned into being in a Denver living room in December 1971. Its founders sought a world in which liberty was preserved by the total absence of government coercion in any form. That entailed the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution—and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.46 And those were just the marquee targets. Crane was as insistent as Rothbard and Koch about the need for a libertarian revolution against the statist world system of the twentieth century. “The Establishment” had to be overthrown—its conservative wing along with its liberal wing. Both suffered “intellectual bankruptcy,” the conservatives for their “militarism” and the liberals for their “false goals of equality.” The future belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power” altogether.47 Once Crane agreed to lead the training institute, all that was lacking was a name, which Rothbard eventually supplied: it would be called the Cato Institute. The name was a wink to insiders: while seeming to gesture toward the Cato’s Letters of the American Revolution, thus performing an appealing patriotism, it also alluded to Cato the Elder, the Roman leader famed for his declaration that “Carthage must be destroyed!” For this new Cato’s mission was also one of demolition: it sought nothing less than the annihilation of statism in America.48

They charged that liberal relativism, permissiveness (= moral laxity), affirmative action, and secularism were softening the national will, mocking ideals of loyalty and patriotism, and in the process undermining national unity in the global struggle with Soviet communism.

Beneath a common banner of classically liberal ideals, countless tastes and traditions may mingle and mutate into ever new and exciting flavors. Thus would be born a homeland where the Sufi dances with the Breslover round the neon jungle of Times Square, where the Baptist of Alabama nods along to the merry melodies of Klezmer, where the secular humanist combs the Christian gospels and poems of Rumi for their many pearls of wisdom, where the Guatemalan college student learns to read Marx and Luxemburg in their original German, where the Russian refugee freely markets her own art painted in the style of Van Gogh and Monet, where the Italian chef tosses up a Lambi stew for his Haitian wife’s birthday while the operas of Verdi and Puccini play on his radio, where two brothers in exile share the wine of the Galilee and Golan while listening to the oud music of Nablus and Nazareth, where the Buddhist and the stoner hike through redwood trails and swap thoughts of life and death beneath a star-spangled sky. In this America, only the polyglot sets the lingua franca, the bully pulpit yields to the poets café, decent discourse finds favor over any cocksure shouting match, no library is so uniform as to betray to a tee its owner’s beliefs, no citizen is so selfish as to live for only themself nor so weak of will as to live only for others, and such a land—as yet a dream deferred, but still a dream we may seize—such a land would truly be worthy of you and me.

Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class. The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.

We’ve driven wedges between parents and children, between liberals and conservatives, between whites and ethnic groups, and between the religious and non religious. We’ve all but destroyed feelings of patriotism and blocked all attempts to stop illegal immigration, improve border control, and establish a national language. And with our nationwide campaign of law suits, we’ve stretched your Constitution almost beyond recognition."       Rulon paused to study O’Brien’s face. "Don’t see it yet? The tremendous influx of Hispanics will ultimately result in large portions of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Florida being dominated by people speaking English only as a second language or not at all. Add the immigration—legal and illegal—of Muslims from Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, with all their cultural baggage, and you’ve got real diversity.

Carter delivered his diagnosis of America’s malaise, Reagan responded, “I find no national malaise. I find nothing wrong with the American people.” He even had the daring to tell voters they should reelect Carter “if he instills in you pride for your country and a sense of optimism about our future”—a brilliant parry that just reminded people how much they wanted to feel patriotic again.

patriotism, virtue, and wisdom, in

By liberally using biblical rhetoric, Henry drew on his Christian heritage and evangelical style to place the Virginians’ struggle in a providential frame. Fighting against Britain required more than pragmatic justifications. Moderation at such a time would be an offense not just to the people of Virginia but also to God. Henry

You could detect their emotional undertone: These uneducated people and their dangerously simplistic patriotism and outdated moral values can’t possibly represent a “mainstream” or a majority! In their Michael Moore mind meld, the liberal “majority” is being unjustly subjected to the elected “fringe” running the government. The inmates are in charge.

Pakistani officers consider the most regressive clerics patriotic because, after all, they would never make common cause with Pakistan’s external enemies—the Indians and whoever else Pakistani intelligence might know or imagine as conspiring against the country at any given moment. Liberal and secular thinkers, on the other hand, are permanently suspect. If they speak up for any ethnic group, they must want Pakistan’s disintegration; if they ask for a secular state, they could be asking for eliminating Pakistan’s identity and a virtual reincorporation into India; and if they question the army’s political role or its budget, they must be in league with ‘the enemy’.

In 1925, Gerardo Machado defeated the conservative Mario García Menocal by an overwhelming majority, becoming Cuba's 5th president. A colleague of Alfredo Zayas, he was also a popular Liberal Party member, and a General during the Cuban War of Independence. General Machado was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army’s livestock herd, with the good intention of feeding the poor during the revolution. This brazen act of kindness won him a great deal of support among the people. As President, he undertook many popular public projects, including the construction of a highway running the entire length of Cuba. During the beginning of his career as president, he had the National Capitol, as well as other government buildings, constructed in Havana. At first, he did much to modernize and industrialize the mostly agrarian nation. Benito Mussolini and his march on Rome impressed Machado. He admired Mussolini for demanding that liberal King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy elevate the Fascists to power, instead of the Socialists. Although Mussolini originally started his political career as a Socialist, with power and wealth he became a staunch anti-communist. When he was elected as the 27th Prime Minister, he turned Italy into a Totalitarian State. Machado’s ambitions and admiration of Mussolini caused him to emulate the dictator and to misread the importance of his own office. Becoming a “legend in his own mind,” he overreached and started down a slope that led to his administration’s failure and earned him the hatred of the Cuban people. From the very beginning, he fought with the labor leaders and anarchists for control of the labor unions, which represented the workers in the sugar industry. This brought him into a serious conflict with the plantation owners who were mostly wealthy Cuban families and Americans. Keeping the cost of labor down became a priority for the Sugar Barons, and Machado used patriotism as a tool to keep the workers in line. His dictatorial, arrogant ways created unrest within the labor force, as well as with the politically active university students.

Liberals selling the Liberty for money, patriots buy the liberty with the blood

By eschewing shared belonging, and the benign patriotism that it can support, liberals have abandoned the only force capable of uniting our societies behind remedies. Inadvertently, recklessly, they have handed it to the charlatan extremes, which are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes.

It does not require much wisdom to trace every war back to a similar cause. Let us take our own Spanish-American war, supposedly a great and patriotic event in the history of the United States. How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards! True, our indignation did not flare up spontaneously. It was nurtured by months of newspaper agitation, and long after Butcher Weyler had killed off many noble Cubans and outraged many Cuban women. Still, in justice to the American Nation be it said, it did grow indignant and was willing to fight, and that it fought bravely. But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent—that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree—it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists, which were threatened by the Spanish government. That this is not an exaggeration, but is based on absolute facts and figures, is best proven by the attitude of the American government to Cuban labor. When Cuba was firmly in the clutches of the United States, the very soldiers sent to liberate Cuba were ordered to shoot Cuban workingmen during the great cigarmakers' strike, which took place shortly after the war.

Each human must become the insignia of their dream, only then will there be hope for a brave, liberated and enlightened society.

You are your own freedom - you are your own peace - you are your own salvation.

The first step to self-realization is the realization of the fact that no one can give you freedom.

Who cares if I myself am liberal? If you are a principled conservative, do you think you’ve really been well served by BUMMER? My evangelical Christian conservative friends suddenly find themselves wedged into social media communities that support an obscene, cruel philanderer and abuser who made fortunes from gambling and bankruptcies and who has stated, on the record, that he doesn’t need or seek forgiveness from God. 12 Meanwhile my patriotic, hawkish conservative friends now find themselves aligned with a leader who would almost certainly not be in office were it not for cynical, illegal interventions by a hostile foreign power. Look what BUMMER has done to your conservatism.

The fact that the most vulnerable populations of colonial America opposed revolution and eventually sided with the British most certainly challenges the triumphalist, egalitarian patriot narrative. Indeed, on the issues of slavery and native relations, the British appeared far more liberal than the colonists who were, themselves, seeking their own — in Jefferson’s phrase — “empire of liberty.” That empire would prove far more tyrannical for slaves and natives than what King George had offered.