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Title: Happy Flag Day Author: Kevin Carson Date: June 14, 2005 Language: en Topics: United States of America, nationalism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/06/happy-flag-day.html
Since this is the High Holy Day of American Fatherland-worship, I
thought I’d say something about how utterly unAmerican the Pledge of
Allegiance is.
Not only is America one of a very few countries in the world where
swearing a loyalty oath to the State is a regular quasi-religious
ceremony in the government schools, but the Pledge is a radical
departure from America’s previous political culture. Until the
mid-19^(th) century, the U.S. flag figured on a relatively minor level
compared to other patriotic symbols, like Columbia and the goddess of
Liberty. Even the Gadsden Flag, for that matter. The first few
generations after the Revolution saw “liberty and justice for all,” not
as something granted by a benevolent government, but something to be
safeguarded against it. Captain Shays and the Whiskey rebels were a lot
closer to the mainstream of American patriotism than a bunch of
school-kids stiff arming the Roman imperial salute to a flag.
Like the American Legion and the rest of the religion of “100%
Americanism,” the cult of Old Glory came about at a time when plutocrats
like J.D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould were terrified of losing power over
the State that guaranteed their profits. The 1890s, the decade of the
worst depression the country had yet seen, had produced the Pullman
Strike, Coxey’s Army, the Western Federation of Miners, and a farm
populist movement that came dangerously close to victory. Gould, an
unofficial spokesman for the plutocracy, at one point issued panicky
warnings of a capital strike and lockout in the event the People’s Party
won the election of 1896. A religion of artificial “national unity” was
just the ticket for getting people’s minds right.
The very concept of “Americanism,” as synonymous with “loyalty” (to the
State, of course), is fundamentally ANTI-American. For that matter, it’s
hard to understand why fundamentalists quibble about whether “under God”
is included in a loyalty oath to Caesar, instead of getting mad as hell
about the Caesar-worship in the first place.
For a better idea of what real Americanism is all about, read Voltairine
de Cleyre’s brilliant essay “Anarchism and American Traditions.” Among
the high points:
To the average American of today, the Revolution means the series of
battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The
millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to
draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the
general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners
of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date
when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to
“Remember Paoli,” to repeat “Molly Stark’s a widow,” to call General
Wayne “Mad Anthony Wayne,” and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know
that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July,
1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have
learned the Revolution--blessed be George Washington! They have no idea
why it should have been called a “revolution” instead of the “English
War,” or any similar title: it’s the name of it, that’s all. And
name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them,
that the name “American Revolution” is held sacred, though it means to
them nothing more than successful force, while the name “Revolution”
applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred....
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their
governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up today any
common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find
therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but
the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most
unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of
rest, security, confidence--the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong, a
Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the
general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless
falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the
right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union,
power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to
maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist
law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and
Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the
point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our
All-Seeing Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he
knows about Shays’ rebellion, and he will answer, “Oh, some of the
farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the
court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when
Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught ‘em a good
lesson”-“And what was the result of it?” “The result? Why--why--the
result was--Oh yes, I remember--the result was they saw the need of a
strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts.” Ask
if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he
knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their
strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into
prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the
old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal
possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and
the child will answer “No.”....
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of
republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our
early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that
they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to
compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be “a
necessary evil,” and the moment the compromise was made, the whole
misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments
which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the
free are struck.