PUT AWAY THE FLAGS

By Howard Zinn


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, is the author of the best-
selling "A People's History of the United States" (Perennial Classics, 2003,
latest edition).