Thought provoking stuff. Were Congress members threatened with martial law? Why has a military brigade been brought back to the USA?

Fake Patriotism
Original article on Huffington Post, reprinted from Carolyn Baker’s Truth to Power website, an excerpt from Naomi Wolf’s book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

What are we supposed to do to reclaim freedom? We need to understand that we are bombarded with both fake patriotism and fake democracy. Only then can we get to the real American mandate.

The key ways, the phrases and metaphors, in which we are often asked to think about America tend to make us stupid, complacent, and inert. They are also, if you go back to what the great Americans wished us to identify as love of country, just plain wrong. Today, politicians often ask us to think of ourselves as a kind of “chosen people” by birthright: “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world,” as George W. Bush asserted during the 2000 election campaign.

Over the past four decades, patriotism was often defined as uncritical support for U.S. policies–such as the Vietnam War-era bumper sticker MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG. Patriotism was also branded as support for U.S. militarism, whatever the context or conflict or cost. Sometimes patriotism was identified with “Christian America” and sometimes even as direct evangelism in the context of statecraft. Finally patriotism was rebranded as the active silencing of dissent. John McCain, for instance, whose campaign messaging in 2008 was grounded in a theme of patriotism, recently called in public for members of MoveOn.org to be kicked out of the country. But all these rebrandings of patriotism would have dismayed the great Americans who had all at various times criticized U.S. military actions, U.S. policies, the establishment of any state religion, and most of all, criticized those who would silence disagreeing voices and dissent.

How did “patriotism” become so dumbed down? There are many reasons. During the Vietnam War, the left often abandoned a claim on the notion of “patriotism.” Young antiwar leaders challenged the mythology of the stars and stripes–fair enough–but spent less energy reinvestigating and reanimating the ideals the flag was intended to represent. By disdaining America’s own most radical heritage, the left let the right “brand” patriotism. Today’s leaders on the left rarely assert that the most radical revolution in human history has already taken place– in 1776–and that it is spreading in fits and starts around the globe. Their message rarely calls on citizens to reclaim the American Revolution above any other.

And unfortunately for everyone across the political spectrum, the religious right, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, redefined patriotism in ways that would have appalled Paine, Jefferson, Washington, and Adams–not to mention the Republican president Abraham Lincoln. “Patriotism” became identified with blind loyalty and a sense that America is innately better than the rest of the world.

So today, we often believe that we as Americans are “the Elect”–a special, almost a chosen, people, who are uniquely entitled to a place in the sun. Where did that idea originally come from? For it is actually a direct heresy against the founders’ intent.

The founders did not create liberty for America, but America for liberty, which they understood as part of universal law. The notion of an America that was above other nations because we were somehow better, already “saved”–rather than an America that was continually called to become better, continually charged with saving itself–is an idea that only came into vogue about fifty years after the revolution of 1776. This idea emerged out of the religious revival movement called the Second Great Awakening. The founders and the greatest Americans of the previous generation would have been apoplectic at the conception that the U.S. is simply saved, simply special, whether or not it does good works.

Rather, our calling America to face itself is central to the task the founders and great Americans explicitly left us.

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