The Last Refuge

By Dan Hagen

Patriotism is, often, a societal recidivism to primitive tribal bloodlust, no more admirable than the howls of support for one’s team at a football game.

If we were to effectively demand that our nations’ governments work in the interest of justice, equality, honesty, humanity, the rule of law and democracy, patriotism would be justified but unnecessary. And if we won’t demand those things from our nations’ governments, what we get won’t justify patriotism.

When you hear the word “patriotism,” better look around for the con job the term is covering for.

For example, Opinionated Progressive wondered why is it that when mothers and fathers are asked to sacrifice their children for a war, it’s a patriotic effort for our common good, but when a millionaire is asked to contribute a dollar in extra taxes to pay for the costs of those wars, it’s called unpatriotic “class warfare?”

Why do we occupy nations halfway around the world for decades? We're there because the military-industrial complex needs us to be there to provide an excuse to suck more trillions out of the U.S. taxpayers.

In the bad joke that is 21st century America, that's what passes for "our patriotic duty."

"Patriotic warrior heroism" isn't going to get us out of any of the permanent wars we're mired in, and which are paying trillions to the profiteers of the military-industrial complex. Only intelligence, honesty and a sense of decency can get us out.

Americans spend as much on war-making as all the rest of the world combined, and the rest of the world knows what Americans are — bellicose, trigger-happy, erratic, immature, hypocritical and oh, so easily gulled.

As the Iraq invasion and occupation demonstrated, Americans will pay any price, bear any burden, to protect themselves from nonexistent weapons.

In a press conference in August 2006, when questioned, President George W. Bush finally admitted that, contrary to his administration's previous lies, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had “nothing” to do with 9/11. End of story.

The United States invaded and occupied a nation that never attacked or threatened this country at a taxpayer cost of trillions, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of its innocent people and getting thousands of U.S. troops killed, using only Bush's and Cheney's lies as justification.

I do understand that the truth hurts. But it's necessary that it hurt, so that maybe it will wake Americans up from their ignorant and extremely dangerous fake-patriotic torpor.

Here's a little rule of thumb: When you're bombing and invading another country “for their own good,” and torturing their citizens and getting a million of them killed “for their own good,” it isn't for their own good.

And it isn’t for yours, either, Mr. Patriotic American Citizen.

If you want to know what’s really going on, don’t follow the flag, my friend.

Follow the money.