#patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

[sohannabarberaesque]

Scenes from extremist political rallies targeting the Lower Classes we'd love to see

Some misguided "patriot" organisation hires a sound engineer who turns out to be so incompetent, he drives the mostly "poor white trash" audience (more than likely bussed in from rural areas with Walmart or Dollar General gift cards as inducement) into utter confusion when, for some reason, he winds up playing "The Tra-La-La Song" (otherwise familiar to many of you as The Banana Splits' theme) on the tannoy rather than some strident patriotic ballad aimed at stoking latent hatreds in service to God and Country on a par with the Horst Wessel back in Nazi Germany or "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika" in apartheid South Africa.

[fieriframes]

[I mean, all the cool little areas, the neighborhoods, the districts. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel to check out a joint that started in the '30s as an Italian restaurant in a garage.]

[makeuphall]

[dougielombax]

Can people stop equating national pride and blind caveman jingoism with queer pride!

It’s an insultingly stupid comparison!

Again!

For fuckness’ sake!

[mariacallous]

Call that pussy patriotism the way it’s the last refuge of a scoundrel.

[clove-pinks]

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." — Samuel Johnson.

[flesh-is-the-fever]

This is so cowardly lmao. If the last refuge of a scoundrel is patriotism, the second-to-last is psychoanalysis. "Tsk tsk. You little anti-imperialists. Why not go listen to your k-pop?" Also "internet peace activism" is such a telling phrase. You're gonna talk to teenagers & young adults like this and expect them to listen to you? Get the fuck out of here. I should eat something lol.

[nerianasims]

Me normally: Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Tyler Perry, about helping Meghan and Harry: “They wanted to be free to love and be happy.”

Me:

[brawley1492]

PATRIOTISM!

The last refuge of the scoundrel ... Samuel Johnson poet

[anisioluiz]

Britain doesn’t need ‘reform’. It just needs to rejoin the EU | William Keegan

Well-intentioned moves are afoot to ‘overhaul the machinery of government’. But it’s the policies that are the problemIt was Dr Johnson, not Boris Johnson, who declared “patriotism is a last refuge of the scoundrel”. Some years have passed since Johnson, Shirley Williams and I were guests of an institute outside Moscow. We were there to…Britain doesn’t need ‘reform’. It just needs to rejoin the…

[lightdancer1]

Secession earned forever its reputation as the last refuge of the scoundrel when patriotism will no longer suffice in US terms in 1860:

The result of Brown's Raid and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency was the outbreak of the secession of 1860, the one major time this applied in US history, and the formation of a twisted mirror of the United States that aspired to be a kind of anti-USSR. A deliberately defiant of the courses of time in its own era agrarian paradise for a land owning aristocracy who viewed its stance on power and prestige as written in the letters of blood that undergirded slavery itself. Six states seceded in 1860, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Five more would secede after the opening shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter.

A key element in all of this is that in the 1860s the Secessionists wanted to have it both ways just like their modern counterpart. All the murderous elements of the legal apparatus for them, all the anarchistic lawless terrorism for them if the law did not give them exactly what they wanted down to all the is dotted and the ts crossed in the precise sequence they demanded when they last demanded it. Equally like other people who started wars they had no idea what they were getting into, what it would cost them, or what the outcome of these wars would be for them.

[mariacallous]

How often our usage manages to accomplish, for a name or an expression, the precise negation of its originally intended meaning. To satirize the sycophants among his courtiers, King Canute sarcastically commanded the waves to keep their distance and allowed his own majesty to be wetted by the tides: now we give the name Canute to anyone in authority who foolishly attempts to ward off the inevitable. For the young scion of the Veronese house of Montague, only one girl in the whole world could possibly possess meaning, or be worth possessing: accordingly, we use the word Romeo to designate a tireless philanderer. In 18th-century England, John Wilkes was the leader of a radical political faction known as the Patriots. In Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Tory view, affiliation with that subversive party was “the last refuge of a scoundrel”: this now is construed as an attack on all those—most often Tories themselves—who take shelter in a too-effusive love of country.

The life and sayings of Johnson were so replete with ironies that perhaps it is no surprise to find literalness exacting its effect over the course of time.

Christopher Hitchens

[st-just]

Hey, Cuba-anon again with a slightly different question. Less about Cuba, more about foreign policy and ethics in general. I am interested to know what you think about Nationalism and it’s place in the modern world. How should one view their relationship to their country versus their relationship to the global community?

To give my point of view, I think I am a pragmatic nationalist? I am not gung-ho about America because “it is the best nation ever and the president is never wrong, uwu”, but rather because I live here, my parents and grandparents live here, and if something in the world negatively impacts America it will by extension negatively impact me. I don’t think other countries are beneath me or anything, but I also know that the feeling is not always reciprocal. So, to me, putting the well being of Americans first and everything else second is similar to putting on your air mask first before helping others in the event of a plane crash.

Either way, would love to hear your point of view and see how others tackle the question.

(sorry for the delay in response, got halfway through writing this then saved it to drafts and completely blanked on it)

But okay, interesting question, and worth breaking down.

So, you know how through the '90s and early 2000's there was this just utterly overpowering narrative where the last chapter of every history textbook ended with a chapter about how national borders were less and less important and how through the magic of The Internet young people were more connected and cosmopolitan than ever, with the strong implication that the weight of history was pulling us inevitably towards a post-national utopia of frictionless exchange and understanding. Call it the Star Trek ideal.

Hasn't exactly worked out, of course. And to a large degree was bullshit even at the time (or the optimism of academics expecting all of humanity to think like they do, being charitable). But in my heart of hearts, that's still how I think things should work.

But okay, to get a bit less abstract, a bunch of barely connected thoughts-

- Nation-states (and states generally) are, at best, convenient administrative divisions of humanity. They have no value outside the services they provide to their residents, and certainly no rights or moral worth outside that. America doesn't deserve your loyalty or life anymore than the state of Ohio or city of Baltimore do (replace with wherever you live.)

-If you accept the basic idea of humans having equal moral worth (or anywhere close to it), then the entire idea that someone's entire life should be defined by what side of an imaginary line on a map they were born on seems obviously absurd as soon as you start thinking about it?

-Nations - in terms of borders, whose included, what characteristics are 'national', etc - are also both contingent and a great extent artificial, defined by state and cultural elites via a standardized language, a mythologized national history, patriotic holidays, nationalizing and creating traditions and rituals, national education and entertainment, etc, etc. There's nothing primordial or inherent there.

-Unfortunately, people really, really like having teams to identify with, and like excluding people from those teams and/or treating them like shit for not belonging to them even more. (People talk a lot about x or y horrible thing being fundamental to human nature, but I really think this is one of the places where human nature really lets us down.)

-Nationalism is an extremely easy and powerful way of dividing the world between us and them, and across the world there has been massive success using it as a locus for identity formation and to organize populations around basically every sort of project imaginable, from funding public education and welfare to genocide.

-Nationalism is, as mentioned, inherently exclusive - and no matter what it's proponents say, in practice there's always someone within the borders of the nation who doesn't quite fit (in the European context, Romani and Jewish people are the most obvious examples). Cases where the nationalist imagination doesn't perfectly overlap with state borders, or with the identity of some subset of the 'national' population also tends to go, uh, badly.

-However, within the national population, appeals to national solidarity or theoretically shared ideals can often be (to a limited degree) useful in transcending or working to ameliorate regional, ethnic, class, etc divides.

-While it's true that large chunks of the American (Canadian, British, French, Japanese, etc) populace benefit quite a bit from their position in the current international system, it's almost universally the case that what foreign policy elites consider 'the national interest' extends far, far, far beyond anything that provides concrete benefits to the average citizen - I'll just gesture vaguely towards Afghanistan, here. Or World War 1 - and quite a lot of death and misery is inflicted for the sake of a narrow slice of the elite's material interests and entirely meaningless concerns around national glory and prestige.

-To be frank, in specifically America's case, putting the interests of co-nationals first and everyone else second is less putting your own air mask on first and more launching a life boat at half capacity to make sure you have leg room.

-But, again, the fruits of pursuing the national interest really, really aren't evenly spread. Does the US government's tireless and vicious championing of stringent IP laws, regardless of how many needless deaths result from the constraints on the drug supply they create, really do much for the average American?

-Which, to go back to the air mask analogy, brings up the awkward point that very often it's not so much putting your own mask on first as tearing the masks off people around you so you have extras, just in case. How much less is the life of someone on the wrong side of the border worth? Half as much? A tenth? A thousandth? The pursuit of America's national security and national interests has a death toll well into the millions.

-Honestly, even if you don't care at all about foreigners, in terms of domestic policy it's just a useful heuristic to instinctively distrust anyone who relies too much on nationalist rhetoric to justify themselves. I mean, the music's almost always bad and anyone who actually gets invested in the symbolism of their flag is reliably a complete killjoy, but even beyond that - they're just very reliably the worst people. This is admittedly unkind and not always true. But, well, see that quote about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel, which applies wonderfully to both people and organizations. If someone's trying to sell something by wrapping it in the flag, that usually means they don't want you looking too closely.

-Viewing the world through a nationalist framework and caring about zero-sum issues of national prestige also make it incredibly hard to coordinate around issues that don't care about national borders, or are going to disproportionately hurt people without rich and powerful nation-states defending their interests. Like, I don't know, global pandemics. Or climate change.

-Anyway, in conclusion, borders bad, nationalism bad, and also any officially codified 'Patriotic' culture is instantly cringe. Hopefully some of this makes sense.

[cthulhulovesewe]

Bobby needs to take a history class before he babbles 'no true Scotsman' bullshit. Patriotism isn't just the last refuge of the scoundrel, it's the first ingredient for nationalism which inevitably leads to fascism.

[bagdyernoke]

Aznap is eltehetett ötmillió forint kenőpénzt, amikor felesküdött Magyarország szolgálatára

On the evening of 7 April 1775, he made a famous statement: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." 

A magyarkodás, buzizás, hazafiság, migrácsozás,.kereszténység minden gazember utolsó menedéke

[macrolit]

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Samuel Johnson (b. 18 September 1709)