US Diary: celebrating the 4th of July

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 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 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 last year 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). Email to: pmproj@progressive.org)


2. What We Love About America -- by James Carroll

It is better to be a half-formed and rough idea than a brilliant cliché. Such preference for the imperfect new defines America. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, can we put words on the reason we love it? Let me try.

Because Europeans measured what they found here against what they had left behind, newness was the main note of the settled land. In the beginning, religiously enflamed politics had made life intolerable in the old country, a story that achieved its master form with the coming to Virginia and Massachusetts of the English dissidents. But even the mythic 1492 had carried an implication of the New World's liberating significance, for in addition to sponsoring Christopher Columbus, monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella chose that year to expel Jews and Muslims from Spain, establishing the totalitarian principle in Europe. Even as Spaniards then wreaked purposeful and accidental havoc in the New World, they opened an unforeseen escape route from the old.

America, for all of its nascent idealism, began as an instance of brutal European imperialism, with the exterminating of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans as essential elements. But because that nascent idealism found articulation in the solemn compacts of the early generations -- culminating first in the Declaration of Independence that we commemorate tomorrow, then in the US Constitution, then in the Bill of Rights -- American imperialism contained principles of its own self-criticism. Slavery came to be seen as an abomination less in contrast to the practice of other nations than to the establishing theory of this one. America began, that is, as a half-formed and rough idea, but that idea became the meaning against which all life in this country has been measured ever since. That idea has been a perpetual source of newness, even as it has become more fully formed and clearly articulated.

And what is that idea? It comes to us by now as the brilliant cliché of the Fourth of July, but with stark simplicity it still defines the ground of our being: ``All men are created equal." That the idea is dynamic, propelling a permanent social transformation, is evident even in the way that word ``men" strikes the ear as anachronistic now. That Jefferson and the others were not thinking of women matters less than the fact that they established a principle that made the full inclusion of women inevitable. And so with those who owned no property, and those who were themselves owned property.

How new is this idea today? Its transforming work continues all around us. Last week, the US Supreme Court faulted the Bush administration for its treatment of detainees in Guantanamo, implicitly affirming that one need not be a citizen of this nation to claim basic rights. The foundational principle extends to enemy combatants. They, too, are created equal. And so in other areas. US politics is obsessed with the question of the place of immigrants, legal and illegal. The mainstream argument takes for granted that even here liberalizing change is underway. Confronted with an ``illegal" person, the law must still give primacy to personhood. And, on another front, is it an accident that American Episcopalians are the ones challenging the world Anglican body on the question of equality for gays and lesbians?

America is by definition unfinished, because it forever falls short of itself. Not that this nation is more moral than others, but its half-formed foundational ideal required a moral purpose at the start -- and a moral purpose to the end. That is both creative and creatively undermining. Born in a challenge to authority, American authority continually inhibits its own exercise (what the Supreme Court did last week in challenging the executive and legislative branches over Guantanamo). Recognitions of personal alienation inevitably open into demands for the reform of alienating systems -- and in America that is the work of politics. It never stops.

Contention is essential to such a social dynamic. Much as the polarized character of national life is bemoaned, the red state/blue state acrimony reveals the genius of what the founders began, for the structures of this public order evolve within a framework that continually transforms conflict into energy for change. The irony, of course, is that those who declare their loyalty to the brilliant cliché of an unchanging past are themselves at the service of the imperfect new. After all, to be an American traditionalist -- and isn't this what we universally celebrate tomorrow? -- is to affirm the revolution.

(James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.)