The Poison Called Nationalism

By Sheldon Richman

FEBRUARY 6, 2015

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred

“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The reason for the venom directed at those of us who question American sniper Chris Kyle’s status as a hero can be put into one word: nationalism.

Nationalism is a poison. It attacks the mind, short-circuits thinking, and makes self-destruction look appealing. Nationalism sows the seeds of hate and war. It makes the title warrior an honorific instead of the pejorative it ought to be.

We see naked ugly nationalism in many defenses of Kyle. Defenders appear to have but one operating principle: If Kyle was an American military man and the people he killed were not Americans, then he was a hero. Full stop. No other facts are relevant. It matters not that Kyle was a cog in an imperial military machine that waged a war of aggression on behalf of the ruling elite’s geopolitical and economic interests, that he did his killing on foreign soil, and that no Iraqi had come to the United States seeking to harm him or other Americans. (Contrary to what Kyle defenders seem to believe, not one Iraqi was among the 19 hijackers on 9/11, although had that been otherwise, the murder of millions of other Iraqis and the displacement of millions more would not have been justified.) All that apparently matters to many Kyle fans is that this man was born in America, joined the American military, and faithfully obeyed orders to kill people he called he called savages.

That is what nationalism does to a human being.

Read the rest at the original source: The Future of Freedom Foundation

Translated serbo-croatian version is available here