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The History of "My Country, Right or Wrong!"

How a Popular Phrase Became a Jingoistic War Cry

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The phrase, "My Country, Right or Wrong!" may seem like a rambling of a drunk soldier, but this phrase has an interesting history behind it.

Stephan Decatur: Was He the Original Creator of This Phrase?

The story goes back to the early 19th century when a US naval officer and commodore Stephan Decatur was gaining immense admiration and accolades for his naval expeditions and adventures. Decatur was famous for his daredevil acts of valor, especially for the burning of the frigate USS Philadelphia, which was in the hands of pirates from the Barbary states. Having captured the ship with just a handful of men, Decatur set the ship on fire and came back victorious without losing a single man in his army. British Admiral Horatio Nelson remarked that this expedition was one of the boldest and daring acts of the age. Decatur’s exploits continued further. In April 1816, after his successful mission of signing of the peace treaty with Algeria, Stephan Decatur was welcomed home as a hero. He was honored at a banquet, where he raised his glass for a toast and said:

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”

This toast went on to become one of the most famous lines in history. The sheer patriotism , the blind love for motherland, the egotist zeal of a soldier makes this line a great jingoistic punchline. While this statement has always been contested for its highly narcissistic undertones, you cannot but help the prevailing sense of patriotism that is the hallmark of a great soldier.

Edmund Burke: The Inspiration Behind the Phrase

One cannot say for sure, but perhaps Stephan Decatur was greatly influenced by Edmund Burke’s writing.

In 1790, Edmund Burke had written a book titled "Reflections on the Revolution in France", in which he said,

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

Now, we need to understand the social conditions prevailing during Edmund Burke’s time. At this point in time, the French Revolution was in full swing. The 18th-century philosopher believed that along with the fall of the French monarchy, there was also a fall of good manners. People had forgotten how to be polite, kind and compassionate, which led to depravity during the French Revolution. In this context, he lamented that the country needs to be lovable, in order for the people to love their own country.

Carl Schurz: The US Senator With a Gift of the Gab

Five decades later, in 1871 a US senator Carl Schurz used the phrase “right or wrong” in one of his famous speeches. Not in the exact same words, but the meaning conveyed was quite similar to that of Decatur’s. Senator Carl Schurz gave a fitting reply to a haranguing Senator Mathew Carpenter, who used the phrase, “My country, right or wrong” to prove his point. In reply, Senator Shurz said,

“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Carl Schurz's speech was received with a deafening applause from the gallery, and this speech established Carl Schurz as one of the foremost and distinguished orators of the Senate .

Why the Phrase "My Country Right or Wrong!" May Not Be So Right for You

The phrase, “My country right or wrong” has become one of the greatest quotes in American history . It has the ability to fill your heart with patriotic fervor. However, some linguistic experts believe that this phrase could be a bit too potent for an immature patriot. It could foster an imbalanced view of one’s own nation. Misplaced patriotic fervor could sow the seed for self-righteous rebellion or war.

In 1901, British author G. K. Chesterton wrote in his book "The Defendant":

“My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'”

He goes on to explain his view: “No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.”

Chesterton, through the analogy of the ‘drunk mother’, was pointing out to the fact that blind patriotism is not patriotism. Jingoism can only bring about the downfall of the nation, just like false pride brings us to a fall.

English novelist Patrick O'Brian wrote in his novel "Master and Commander":

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”

How to Use This Famous Quote, "My Country Right or Wrong!"

In the world we live today, with growing intolerance and terror breeding in every dark alley , one has to tread carefully before using jingoistic phrases purely for rhetoric. While patriotism is a desirable quality in every respectable citizen, we must not forget that the first duty of every global citizen is to set right what is wrong in our country.

If you choose to use this phrase to pepper your speech or talk, use it diligently. Make sure to spark the right kind of patriotic fervor in your audience and help to bring about change in your own country.

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘My Country Right or Left’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘My Country Right or Left’ is a 1940 essay by George Orwell, in which he reflects on his childhood memories of the First World War and outlines why he supports the Second World War, which had broken out the year before. However, as with many of Orwell’s essays, he makes some surprising statements in the course of his analysis of the British attitude to war.

You can read ‘My Country Right or Left’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Orwell’s essay below.

‘My Country Right or Left’: summary

Orwell begins ‘My Country Right or Left’ by recalling his childhood schooldays. A schoolboy during the First World War, Orwell confides that the sinking of the Titanic, two years before the outbreak of the war, left more of an impression on him than anything he heard about during the war itself.

He does, however, recall three vivid memories from the outbreak of the war: an irreverent cartoon of ‘Kaiser’ Wilhelm II of Germany, in late July 1914 shortly before war was declared on Germany; the army commandeering the horses in Orwell’s hometown for the war effort; and a group of young men at a railway station frantically buying newspapers containing the latest reports of the war in France.

He also remembers the appearance of the artillerymen during the war itself, and, towards the end of the war, how food shortages impacted his family and what they ate. He was largely oblivious to the mass carnage of the war happening across the English Channel.

Orwell recalls that, after the war, those young soldiers who had fought in the conflict resented their slightly younger peers who hadn’t fought, because they saw the non-combatant youths as soft. Many children of Orwell’s age had ‘one-eyed pacifism’: an opposition to war that was largely founded on ignorance and an inability to see the bigger picture. But as the years passed, Orwell’s generation came to feel that they had ‘missed’ out on something in being too young to experience the war themselves.

Indeed, he believes that this partly drove his own generation’s enthusiasm to participate in the Spanish Civil War in the second half of the 1930s – a war which was, Orwell observes, often markedly similar in its trench warfare to the Great War of 1914-18.

Orwell concludes by stating why he supports the current war against Hitler and the Axis powers. He sees resistance as the only option, drawing parallels with the Republican resistance to Franco during the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese resistance to Japan during the Sino-Japanese War (two conflicts which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War by several years).

Orwell pierces the widely held belief that patriotism is more or less synonymous with conservatism: Orwell, no conservative, and someone who had little time for Neville Chamberlain’s Tory government, states baldly that ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism.’

Conservatism applies belief in something that remains constant, but patriotism is actually, Orwell argues, ‘a devotion to something that is changing’; it is merely ‘felt to be mystically the same’, but this is merely a feeling rather than the reality.

To prove this point, Orwell asserts that his own patriotic devotion to England is bound up with his belief that ‘Only revolution can save’ it, and he believes the revolution has already started. Orwell returns to his early childhood experiences, of ‘an atmosphere tinged with militarism’ and the ‘sound of bugles’.

He would rather have such a devotion to his country than be one of the modern ‘left-wing intellectuals’ who are incapable of feeling such things.

‘My Country Right or Left’: analysis

‘My Country Right or Left’: the title is a play on the patriotic slogan ‘my country, right or wrong’, which has its origins in the United States.

The American Stephen Decatur used a slightly different version of this phrase in an after-dinner toast in the early 1800s (‘Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!’) but it later became abridged to ‘My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.’

Orwell takes this well-known expression of unthinking patriotism – jingoism, even – and plays on the double meaning of ‘right’ as both ‘morally correct’ and ‘right-wing’ or conservative, in order to argue that he will be loyal to England, his own country, regardless of political beliefs in either left- or right-wing causes.

Throughout ‘My Country Right or Left’, Orwell explores his own patriotic sense of devotion to England, while also acknowledging the complex and often conflicted nature of this patriotism. In order to save England – subtly different from the idea of preserving it as it is – revolution, even bloody revolution, may be necessary, he asserts. He feels it is almost an act of ‘sacrilege’ not to stand up when he hears the national anthem, yet acknowledges that such a patriotic impulse is ‘childish’ of him.

Such an impulse is instinctive, and Orwell’s patriotism is instinctive: it reaches beyond rational discourse. But precisely because it goes beyond the intellectual, it enables him to connect with other English people who feel a similar sense of pride in their country.

Indeed, Orwell is glad he was raised to have such a love and respect for his country, since it enables him to ‘understand the most ordinary emotions’ which other people feel. In other words, patriotism binds together a group of people who belong to that country, and the emotional power of such a connection is important, especially at such a time as 1940 when the very survival of England is under threat thanks to Hitler.

These days especially, it is so easy to equate ‘patriotic’ with ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’, but Orwell pushes against the idea that the two should be conflated. In one of many intriguing paradoxes associated with Orwell’s political beliefs, ‘My Country Right or Left’ offers a portrait of a writer who is that rare thing: both a revolutionary longing for change and a man in love with his country’s rich past.

Like the old philosophical adage that ‘nothing is permanent except change’, it may be that England can only be saved through being changed in a dramatic and significant way.

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How It Feels to Be Colored Me

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Hurston’s widely anthologized 1928 essay about her experience as a black American–and as an individual who contains multitudes.

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

1. Anne Bradstreet’s “The Prologue” (2)
2. The Author to her Book
3. A Letter to Her Husband Absent upon Public Employment
4. To my Dear and Loving Husband
6. Prologue to Preparatory Meditations
7. Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children
8. Huswifery
9. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Chapter 1)
10. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Chapter 3)
11. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Chapter 2)
12. Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage
13. Columbus’ Letter to the King and Queen of Spain
14. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
15. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Chap. 1)
16. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Chap. 2)
17. On Being Brought from Africa to America
18. To the Right Hon. William, Earl of Dartmouth
19. To the University of Cambridge, in New England
20. On The Death Of The Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770
21. To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works
23. Young Goodman Brown
24. Twice Told Tales (The Minister’s Black Veil)
26. Economy
27. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
28. Conclusion
29. A Psalm of Life
30. Song of Myself
31. When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
32. Success is counted Sweetest
33. I taste a liquor never brewed
34. Wild Nights – Wild Nights! (249)
35. I like a look of Agony
36. I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)
37. I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs (508)
38. A Bird came down the Walk (328)
40. This World is not Conclusion
41. The Soul selects her own Society (303)
42. Mine—by the Right of the White Election! (528)
43. This was a Poet—It is That
44. I died for Beauty — but was scarce
45. Because I Could Not Stop for Death
46. This is My Letter to the World
47. I heard a Fly buzz (465)
48. The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
49. Much Madness is divinest Sense
50. I Started Early - Took my Dog
51. I cannot live with You (640)
52. Pain has an element of Blank (650)
53. My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
54. Publication—is the Auction
55. A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
56. Bustle in a house
58. Apparently with no Surprise
59. The Pasture
61. Mending Wall
62. Nothing Gold Can Stay
64. The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
65. Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]
66. The Red Wheelbarrow
67. This Is Just To Say
68. A Sort of A Song
69. Landscape With the Fall of Icarus
70. Danse Russe
71. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
73. In A Station of the Metro
74. The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
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77. I sing of Olaf glad and big
78. Anyone lived in a pretty how town
79. The Harlem Dancer
80. Harlem Shadows
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82. If We Must Die
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86. How It Feels to Be Colored Me
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93. Visitors to the Black Belt
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95. Theme for English B
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> The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell
> ‘My country, right or left’: Orwell’s patriotism

Book contents

Frontmatter
1 A political writer
2 Orwell and the biographers
3 Englands His Englands
4 The truths of experience: Orwell’s nonfiction of the 1930s
5 The fictional realist: novels of the 1930s
6 Orwell’s essays as a literary experience
7 ‘My country, right or left’: Orwell’s patriotism
8 Orwell and the British Left
9 Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
10 Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War
11 Animal Farm : history as fable
12 Nineteen Eighty-Four : context and controversy
13 Orwell, the academy and the intellectuals
14 Orwell for today’s reader: an open letter
15 George Orwell: a bibliographic essay
16 Why Orwell still matters
Further reading

7 - ‘My country, right or left’: Orwell’s patriotism

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2007

11 Animal Farm: history as fable
12 Nineteen Eighty-Four: context and controversy

A Revolutionary in Love With the Past

It is a commonplace observation to say that George Orwell was something of a paradox. A product of the lower upper middle class (he was precise about such matters) who admired the working classes, he also was a socialist who savaged his fellow leftists for their inconsistencies. Most interestingly, Orwell was an internationalist while at the same time a fervent patriot.

Orwell's critical sense of patriotism sets him apart from the generation of English radicals of the 1930s and 1940s, most of whom were Marxists of various stripes. It was his patriotism that inspired Orwell in the grim early days of the Second World War when Great Britain seemed on the brink of invasion and defeat. His patriotism was instinctive, not the result of some philosophical analysis and because of that, it enabled him to reach beyond left wing circles to a wider audience.

In developing his ideas on patriotism Orwell made a major contribution to English thought. In his key writings between 1940 and 1942 'My Country, Right or Left' and especially The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell helped rescue the concept of patriotism from the ash heap of history where it had lain since the First World War.

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‘My country, right or left’: Orwell’s patriotism
By John Rossi
Edited by John Rodden , University of Texas, Austin
Book: The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell
Online publication: 28 July 2007
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521858429.007

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Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Guiding Question: To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century?

I can interpret primary sources related to Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice in the first half of the twentieth century.
I can explain how laws and policy, courts, and individuals and groups contributed to or pushed back against the quest for liberty, equality, and justice for African Americans.
I can create an argument using evidence from primary sources.
I can analyze issues in history to help find solutions to present-day challenges.

Building Context

Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated author and anthropologist who grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. After her mother’s death, Hurston moved to Jacksonville, a segregated Florida town. It was then, she writes, that “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was a little colored girl.” In 1925, Hurston received a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City. While in the city, she befriended other writers such as Langston Hughes and became an artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s work focused on Black culture and Black Americans in the South. In this essay, she explores her discovery of her identity as a Black American and celebrates her self-pride.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Source link: https://www.casa-arts.org/cms/lib/PA01925203/Centricity/Domain/50/Hurston%20How%20it%20Feels%20to%20Be%20Colored%20Me.pdf

. . . I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. . . . At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. . . . I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

What does Hurston mean by saying she is not “tragically colored”?
What is Hurston’s attitude toward race, based on her writing in this excerpt?
How does Hurston build on Hughes’ views in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”?

More from this Category

Zora Neale Hurston with Patricia Brown | Black Intellectuals Series #4

How did Zora Neale Hurston, noted African-American writer during the Harlem Renaissance, contribute to understanding the Black experience in America? In this episode of our Scholar Talk series "Black Intellectuals and the African American Experience," BRI Senior Teaching Fellow Tony Williams is joined by Patricia Brown, professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, to discuss Hurston's unique examination and celebration of Black expression, creativity, and resiliency. How did Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God" convey a message of Black women's freedom and self-discovery?

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The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell : "My country right or left", 1940-1943, [Vol.] II

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You've reached your free article limit for this month. connect to your subscription or subscribe for full access, thanks for being a subscriber, mr. twain offers a lesson on patriotism.

It was March 16, 1901. A lanky man with elegant and flowing white hair and a prominent moustache strode to the podium. He hardly needed an introduction: the audience would immediately have recognized what was arguably the best-known face in America. The event was a meeting of the Male Teachers Association of the City of New York. It was a convivial gathering for dinner at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village, at the corner of University Place and Eleventh Street.

The first speaker, Charles H. Skinner, the New York Superintendent of Education, had offered up some words on “Patriotism for the Young,” the need for a better civics curriculum. The need was for children “who are citizens.” “We do not care to own Cuba, Porto-Rico or the Philippines, but we do want to keep them from the dark rule of a barbarian people,” Mr. Skinner offered, reflecting the views so closely associated with President William McKinley. The “barbarian people” were, of course, the Filipinos themselves. Only a few weeks earlier, McKinley had said, of the Philippines: “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” In fact, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” published in McClure’s little more than a year earlier, bore the subtitle: “The United States and the Philippines.” America had assumed a new mission, as a policeman to the whole world, but as a missionary for Christianity and democracy in its own special corner. The notion of Manifest Destiny stretched at last beyond the Americas, into the lands over which the European powers had contended for the last century or so.

The talk of the day focused on a part of the Philippines where Christianity had not taken root. It was of the Moro insurgency in the southern stretch of the archipelago. The insurrection was dragging on longer than America’s military leaders had envisioned. And the first reports had reached America of the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, by American officers. Unlike the situation that the country would face a century later, however, America’s leaders—prominently including Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, who would assume the presidency in only a few months– condemned these practices and insisted on sharp punishment for those involved. Several officers found themselves facing a court-martial in proceedings which would clearly establish waterboarding as a serious crime.

Perhaps when he took the podium Mark Twain had these stories in mind. He put down his cigar.

Yes, patriotism. We cannot all agree. That is most fortunate. If we could all agree life would be too dull. I believe if we did all agree, I would take my departure before my appointed time, that is if I had the courage to do so. I do agree in fact with what Mr. Skinner has said. In fact, more than I usually agree with other people. I believe that there are no private citizens in a republic. Every man is an official. Above all, he is a policeman. He does not need to wear a helmet and brass buttons, but his duty is to look after the enforcement of the laws. If patriotism had been taught in the schools years ago, the country would not be in the position it is in to-day. Mr. Skinner is better satisfied with the present conditions than I am. I would teach patriotism in the schools, and teach it this way: I would throw out the old maxim, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ etc., and instead I would say, ‘My country when she is right.’ Because patriotism is supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it. So I would not take my patriotism from my neighbor or from Congress. I should teach the children in the schools that there are certain ideals, and one of them is that all men are created free and equal. Another that the proper government is that which exists by the consent of the governed. If Mr. Skinner and I had to take care of the public schools, I would raise up a lot of patriots who would get into trouble with his. I should also teach the rising patriot that if he ever became the Government of the United States and made a promise that he should keep it. I will not go any further into politics as I would get excited, and I don’t like to get excited. I prefer to remain calm. I have been a teacher all my life, and never got a cent for teaching.

Reconstructed from New York City newspaper accounts.

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Rationally Speaking: an archived blog about science & philosophy, by Massimo Pigliucci

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About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license .

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

My country, right or wrong, 6 comments:.

Back in 1907 Mark Twain wrote, in "True Patriotism at the Children's Theater": "This chief point of importance relates to citizenship. Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy I heard repeated and repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.... "Yet to-day in the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor -- to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable. And we should forever forget that old phrase -- 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' "It may be that we must learn our lessons of citizenship on the East Side in the Children's Theater. There the true principles of true life which mean true citizenship are being taught to those boys and girls who are to be the future citizens of America. First of all they are taught self-respect and confidence. They are taught that the true motives of life are to reach for the highest ideals. The dramas that they play have morals that tend toward this aim. And best of all, they are taught to act for themselves and to think for themselves. It is this self-thinking that goes to make up the true public opinion. We say we have public opinion in America. We have none. We only think second hand. How many of us are there to-day who know whether it is better for the country to have a tariff or free trade? The only opinions most of us have on this subject are the opinions derived second hand from certain men who seek to influence us to their way of thinking, and their way of thinking is generally in a direction that will subserve their own private ends or the ends of the party which they represent. So, you see, we have no citizenship, and our so-called patriotism is a patriotism that is employed for the benefit of political parties and is made a party cry."

Odd, I always thought the line sounded better as "my country, right and wrong." Glad to see others agree with the sentiment.

Reminds me of Stephen Decatur.. "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong"

The poster above is correct, the quotations "Most Famous" and first usage was by Stephen Decatur back in 1820. the Idea is not to love the flaws of one's home nation, but to love it DESPITE it's flaws, a trait that those who hold the phrase in such disdain often clearly lack.

A true understanding of our country's history, and the meaning of Decatur's words are correctly stated by an "anonymous" = his/her History teacher did a fine job in it's explanation...I 'd bet it was in a public school too! About 30 years ago......not today.. MGI/MA, USA

Get it straight. The original quote by Stephen Decatur included may she always be right. Obviously, anything done by man can be in error. The wisdom of the original quote recognizes that man can make mistakes. The beauty of the American system is that mistakes can be recognized and corrected. America is not a bad country. We are the most envied country in the world. Nobody risks death to get out, but they do risk death to get in. So, we must be doing something right in the eyes of the people of the world. JAG

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( continued in Part I ) -->

Notes 1. It is estimated that the number of victims who fell in this war, by pestilence and the sword, were eighty thousand. Of these, thirty thousand were Americans, and fifty thousand Mexicans. - back 2. [2] The Seminole War. See Volume VIII, Chapter VI Source: - back Further Reading Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States . New York: Harper, 2003/2010. (pp. 149-69). Ethan Allen Hitchcock (author), William Augustus Croffut (ed.). Fifty Years in Camp and Field: Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1909. (See Chs. 15, 27-29f.) Home · Psychology and Religion · Peace · [My Country, Right or Wrong] Last updated: 10 Mar 2011 This edition copyright � 2011 John S. Uebersax - May be used freely for noncommercial purposes.

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My Country Right or Left

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

But if you were alive during that war, and if you disentangle your real memories from their later accretions, you find that it was not usually the big events that stirred you at the time. I don’t believe that the Battle of the Marne , for instance, had for the general public the melodramatic quality that it was afterwards given. I do not ever remember hearing the phrase ‘Battle of the Marne’ till years later. It was merely that the Germans were twenty-two miles from Paris — and certainly that was terrifying enough, after the Belgian atrocity stories — and then for some reason they had turned back. I was eleven when the war started. If I honestly sort out my memories and disregard what I have learned since, I must admit that nothing in the whole war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier. This comparatively petty disaster shocked the whole world, and the shock has not quite died away even yet. I remember the terrible, detailed accounts read out at the breakfast table (in those days it was a common habit to read the newspaper aloud), and I remember that in all the long list of horrors the one that most impressed me was that at the last the Titanic suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the war ever gave me quite that sensation.

Of the outbreak of war I have three vivid memories which, being petty and irrelevant, are uninfluenced by anything that has come later. One is of the cartoon of the ‘German Emperor’ (I believe the hated name ‘Kaiser’ was not popularized till a little later) that appeared in the last days of July. People were mildly shocked by this guying of royalty (‘But he’s such a handsome man, really!’) although we were on the edge of war. Another is of the time when the army commandeered all the horses in our little country town, and a cabman burst into tears in the market-place when his horse, which had worked for him for years, was taken away from him. And another is of a mob of young men at the railway station, scrambling for the evening papers that had just arrived on the London train. And I remember the pile of peagreen papers (some of them were still green in those days), the high collars, the tightish trousers and the bowler hats, far better than I can remember the names of the terrific battles that were already raging on the French frontier.

Of the middle years of the war, I remember chiefly the square shoulders, bulging calves and jingling spurs of the artillerymen, whose uniform I much preferred to that of the infantry. As for the final period, if you ask me to say truthfully what is my chief memory, I must answer simply — margarine . It is an instance of the horrible selfishness of children that by 1917 the war had almost ceased to affect us, except through our stomachs. In the school library a huge map of the Western Front was pinned on an easel, with a red silk thread running across on a zig-zag of drawing-pins. Occasionally the thread moved half an inch this way or that, each movement meaning a pyramid of corpses. I paid no attention. I was at school among boys who were above the average level of intelligence, and yet I do not remember that a single major event of the time appeared to us in its true significance. The Russian Revolution , for instance, made no impression, except on the few whose parents happened to have money invested in Russia. Among the very young the pacifist reaction had set in long before the war ended. To be as slack as you dared on O.T.C. parades , and to take no interest in the war was considered a mark of enlightenment. The young officers who had come back, hardened by their terrible experience and disgusted by the attitude of the younger generation to whom this experience meant just nothing, used to lecture us for our softness. Of course they could produce no argument that we were capable of understanding. They could only bark at you that war was ‘a good thing’, it ‘made you tough’, ‘kept you fit’, etc. etc. We merely sniggered at them. Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies. For years after the war, to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened’ circles. 1914-18 was written off as a meaningless slaughter, and even the men who had been slaughtered were held to be in some way to blame. I have often laughed to think of that recruiting poster, ‘What did you do in the Great War, daddy?’ (a child is asking this question of its shame-stricken father), and of all the men who must have been lured into the army by just that poster and afterwards despised by their children for not being Conscientious Objectors.

But the dead men had their revenge after all. As the war fell back into the past, my particular generation, those who had been ‘just too young’, became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed. You felt yourself a little less than a man, because you had missed it. I spent the years 1922-7 mostly among men a little older than myself who had been through the war. They talked about it unceasingly, with horror, of course, but also with a steadily growing nostalgia. You can see this nostalgia perfectly clearly in the English war-books. Besides, the pacifist reaction was only a phase, and even the ‘just too young’ had all been trained for war. Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards, not technically but morally. The earliest political slogan I can remember is ‘We want eight (eight dreadnoughts) and we won’t wait’ . At seven years old I was a member of the Navy League and wore a sailor suit with ‘H.M.S. Invincible ’ on my cap. Even before my public-school O.T.C. I had been in a private-school cadet corps. On and off, I have been toting a rifle ever since I was ten, in preparation not only for war but for a particular kind of war, a war in which the guns rise to a frantic orgasm of sound, and at the appointed moment you clamber out of the trench, breaking your nails on the sandbags, and stumble across mud and wire into the machine-gun barrage. I am convinced that part of the reason for the fascination that the Spanish Civil War had for people of about my age was that it was so like the Great War. At certain moments Franco was able to scrape together enough aeroplanes to raise the war to a modern level, and these were the turning-points. But for the rest it was a bad copy of 1914-18, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and stagnation. In early 1937 the bit of the Aragon front that I was on must have been very like a quiet sector in France in 1915. It was only the artillery that was lacking. Even on the rare occasions when all the guns in Huesca and outside it were firing simultaneously, there were only enough of them to make a fitful unimpressive noise like the ending of a thunderstorm. The shells from Franco’s six-inch guns crashed loudly enough, but there were never more than a dozen of them at a time. I know that what I felt when I first heard artillery fired ‘in anger’, as they say, was at least partly disappointment. It was so different from the tremendous, unbroken roar that my senses had been waiting for for twenty years.

I don’t quite know in what year I first knew for certain that the present war was coming. After 1936, of course, the thing was obvious to anyone except an idiot. For several years the coming war was a nightmare to me, and at times I even made speeches and wrote pamphlets against it. But the night before the Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had started. It was one of those dreams which, whatever Freudian inner meaning they may have, do sometimes reveal to you the real state of your feelings. It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible. I came downstairs to find the newspaper announcing Ribbentrop’s flight to Moscow. [1] So war was coming, and the Government, even the Chamberlain Government, was assured of my loyalty. Needless to say this loyalty was and remains merely a gesture. As with almost everyone I know, the Government has flatly refused to employ me in any capacity whatever, even as a clerk or a private soldier. But that does not alter one’s feelings. Besides, they will be forced to make use of us sooner or later.

If I had to defend my reasons for supporting the war, I believe I could do so. There is no real alternative between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him, and from a Socialist point of view I should say that it is better to resist; in any case I can see no argument for surrender that does not make nonsense of the Republican resistance in Spain, the Chinese resistance to Japan, etc. etc. But I don’t pretend that that is the emotional basis of my actions. What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage. But let no one mistake the meaning of this. Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon. Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting.

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes. Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed ( ‘Before the Storming of Huesca’ ) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight’ . Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.

Folios of New Writing , Autumn 1940

On 21 August 1939 Ribbentrop was invited to Moscow and on 23 August he and Molotov signed the Russo-German Pact.

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Conversable Economist

"My Country, Right or Wrong": No Patriot Would Say It

In the 21st century, I\’m not sure how many Americans would ever actually say \”my country, right or wrong.\” After all, it\’s not \”countries\” that are right or wrong, but actions of governments and people, and it seems ingrained in the American character (and thankfully so!) that criticizing one\’s government is not only acceptable, but often expected.

But perhaps the ultimate put-down for that point of view came from G.K. Chesterton, In a 1901 collection of essays, The Defendant , he includes an essay called \”A Defense of Patriotism.\” Chesterton writes:

\’My country, right or wrong,\’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, \’My mother, drunk or sober.\’ No doubt if a decent man\’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

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Interminable Rambling

Rhetorically examining zora neale hurston’s “how it feels to be colored me”.

November 20, 2018 / 2 Comments

A few posts ago, I wrote about W.E.B. Du Bois and double consciousness. As part of this discussion, I looked at the ways that some artists, such as Charles Chesnutt and Frank Yerby navigated the literary landscape in relation to what readers expected from their works and how readers responded. Today, I want to briefly take a look at Zora Neale Hurston’s “ How It Feels to be Colored Me! ” Specifically, I want to explore some of the ways that she approaches double consciousness.

Before diving into Hurston’s essay, we need to take a look at the construction of the title and the first line of the essay. Syntactically, Hurston creates ambiguity with the word “colored” in the title and in the first sentence. If we break “How it feels to be colored me” down, we see that “colored” can serve as an adjective describing “me,” the direct object of the prepositional phrase “to be colored me.” However, this is not the only way to read the phrase. We can also read “colored” as part of the verb “to be colored.” In this manner, Hurston does not color herself. Instead, someone else does the coloring.

Likewise, the first sentence of the essay creates the same confusion. Hurston begins, “I am colored . . . ” Here, we encounter the same issue that we do with the title. We can read “colored” as a predicate adjective describing the subject, “I.” This is not the only way to read the sentence. Instead of being a predicate adjective, “colored” can serve as a verb with “am” as the helping verb, thus making it passive voice. In this manner, someone, again, colors Hurston.

At the start of the second paragraph, we see the same ambiguity. Hurston starts the paragraph by writing, “I remember the very day that I became colored.” Just as in the previous examples, we can read “colored” as a predicate adjective describing “I,” the subject of the “that clause.” However, we can, again, read “colored” as a verb that states that someone else “colored.”

Reading these sentences as passive voice, where we do not know who colored Hurston, means that we need to think about the essay in relation to Du Bois and double consciousness. Hurston presents, in these sentence constructions, seeing herself “through the eyes of others” and the ways in which the others construct her identity. Just as she accomplishes this with her sentence structure, she provides more direct examples, specifically in the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the essay when she describes performing for white tourists and when she moves from Eatonville to Jacksonville.

Describing how she would perform for white tourists who traveled through Eatonville, Hurston writes, “They liked to hear me ‘speak pieces’ and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop.” Through her performance of speaking pieces and singing, Hurston, to a certain extent, plays into the white travelers’ expectations, reinforcing their views of Hurston and the Eatonville community. While white tourists paid Hurston for her performances, “the colored people gave no dimes” because it appears they understood how Hurston’s performances played into white perceptions. Nevertheless, she still belonged to the community because she was “everybody’s Zora.” Her identity remains intact.

Moving from Eatonville to Jacksonville, though, creates the “two warring ideals” within Hurston. Within this paragraph, she linguistically details the ways that her identity changed as she left the all Black community of Eatonville for the white town of Jacksonville. She writes, “When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more.” The sentence “she was no more,” points to the ways that the eyes of whites in Jacksonville, like the white tourists in Eatonville, constructed Hurston to fit their perceptions of who she should be.

She continues by stating, “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.” Hurston’s construction in this sentence shows the shift in her identity. She moves from “Zora of Orange County,” a definitive name, to “a little colored girl,” a person stripped of name, geographic space, and ultimately her identity. Thinking about the previous sentence constructions discussed above, these sentences should cause us to question who strips Hurston of her identity making her nothing more than “a little colored girl.” We see the same structure in these sentences like the ones at the start of the essay: subject, linking verb, predicate nominative or predicate adjective or direct object.

Even though “the eyes of others” try to forge Hurston’s identity to fit within their own preconceived conceptions, she maintains her own identity and vociferously proclaims in the next paragraph, “I am not tragically colored.” Again, this sentence can be taken in two ways, but that is not what I want to focus on at this point. Rather, I want to note that Hurston refuses to buy into the ideals that others project onto her. She, like Bita Plant and Janie Crawford, does “not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood” that have bought into the master’s brainwashing. Instead, she knows who she is and nothing can change that because, as she says, “I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” to worry about what others say.

Just as she shows Du Boisian double consciousness in the essay, she moves away from it at the end when she writes, “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.” Instead of worrying about how others construct her, she sees herself, as we all should, as part of “the Great Soul,” an image that reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

She concludes by pointing out that we are all bags of miscellany, filled with stuff, that makes us human. Dump the bags out, jumble the contents together, and place the contents back into the bags. If this occurred, would this alter “the content of any greatly”? No, “a bit of colored glass more or less would not matter” because “the Great Stuffer of Bags” filled each of them. We are all beautiful. We are all human. We are all part of the Great Soul. The colored glass in our bags does not matter. What matters is how we treat one another, not as different but as humans!

What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham .

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My Country, Right Or Wrong

As defenses of patriotism go, I tend to incline more toward Daniel Larison's rejoinder to George Kateb's essay than toward the response to Kateb offered by Walter Berns. Berns takes the view that "the decisive issue in an appropriate analysis of patriotism" is the sort of government that a patriot is asked to love. But I'm with Larison : It's a mistake to conflate a country and its regime, and a patriot who ceases to love his country because it happens to be governed by a despot is no patriot at all. This doesn't mean that the patriot has to love the despot, or follow his commands. Love of country does not require absolute obedience to its government (indeed, it often requires the opposite ), any more than love of family requires absolute obedience to one's parents, or absolute support for whatever one's children or siblings decide to do with themselves. This is what Chesterton meant with his famous dictum that "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" (Though I would add that if you read them slightly differently - as statements of abiding love in bad times, rather than blanket endorsements of bad conduct - "my country, right or wrong" and "my mother, drunk or sober" are potentially admirable sentiments.) And it's a distinction that's missing from both Kateb's and Berns's essays, both of which seem to assume that the regime is the country, and vice versa, and that to love one is to love the other. The only complicating factor occurs in a case like the United States, where the character of the regime and the character of the people are bound together so tightly that it's hard to imagine one without the other. The government-country distinction is easier to make in countries where regimes change willy-nilly, and while obviously our regime isn't identical to the one founded in 1789, our democratic temper - both institutional and cultural - has endured through the transition from a decentralized republic to a mass democracy with a sizable administrative state. So whereas France would still be France if the current Republic were dissolved and a monarchy or a dictatorship took its place, there's a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.

About the Author

In defense of a reasonable patriotism

Subscribe to governance weekly, william a. galston william a. galston ezra k. zilkha chair and senior fellow - governance studies.

July 23, 2018

22 min read

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered by William Galston at the Estoril Political Forum on June 25, 2018. Galston was invited to deliver the forum’s Dahrendorf Memorial Lecture on the topic of “Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy.”

Introduction

In this essay, adapted from a lecture I recently delivered on the topic of “Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy,” I will defend what I term a “reasonable patriotism,” and I will argue that separate and distinct political communities are the only sites in which decent and—especially—democratic politics can be enacted.

I begin with some conceptual clarifications.

Cosmopolitanism is a creed that gives primary allegiance to the community of human beings as such, without regard to distinctions of birth, belief, or political boundaries. The antithesis of cosmopolitanism is particularism , in which one’s primary allegiance is to a group or subset of human beings with shared characteristics. There are different forms of particularism reflecting the varying objects of primary allegiance—communities of co-religionists (the Muslim ummah ), ethnicity, and shared citizenship, among others.

Patriotism denotes a special attachment to a particular political community, although not necessary to its existing form of government. Nationalism , with which patriotism is often confused, stands for a very different phenomenon—the fusion, actual or aspirational, between shared ethnicity and state sovereignty. The nation-state, then, is a community is which an ethnic group is politically dominant and sets the terms of communal life.

Nationalism, with which patriotism is often confused, stands for a very different phenomenon—the fusion, actual or aspirational, between shared ethnicity and state sovereignty.

Now to our topic. We gather today under a cloud. Throughout the West, nationalist forces—many tinged with xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, and religious bigotry—are on the rise. The recent Hungarian election featured nakedly anti-Semitic rhetoric not heard in Europe since the 1940s. Citizens are being invited to discard unifying civic principles in favor of divisive and exclusionary particularism.

It is tempting to respond by rejecting particularism root and branch and pinning our hopes on purely civic principles—to embrace, that is, what Jurgen Habermas has called “constitutional patriotism.” But matters are not, and cannot be, so simple.

The United States is often seen as the birthplace and exemplar of a civic order. You are or become an American, it is said, not because of religion or ethnicity but because you affirm, and are prepared to defend, the community’s basic principles and institutions. “All men are created equal.” “We the People.” What could be clearer?

And yet, the very document that famously holds certain truths to be self-evident begins by invoking a concept that is far from self-evident—namely, a distinct people may dissolve the political bands that have connected it to another people and to assume a “separate and equal standing” among the nations of the earth to which it is entitled by nothing less than “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The equality and independence of peoples is grounded in the same sources as the rights of individuals.

But what is a people, and what separates it from others? As it happens, John Jay, the least known of the three authors of the Federalist, went the farthest toward answering this question. In Federalist 2, he wrote that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.”

This description of the American people was only partly true at the time. It did not apply to African Americans, not to mention Catholics and those many denizens of the colonies for whom German was the language of daily life. It is much less true today. Nonetheless, it calls for reflection.

We can read Jay to be suggesting that certain commonalities foster the identity and unity of a people and that the absence of these commonalities complicates this task. Religious differences can be divisive, especially when they are linked to controversial ideas about government, as Catholicism was until the middle of the past century and Islam is today. The absence of a shared language makes it more likely that linguistic sub-communities will think of themselves as separate peoples, as was the case throughout much of Canada’s history and remains the case in Belgium today. Conversely, participation in shared struggle can forge popular unity and foster civic equality.

It is no accident, I suggest, that the strands of universality and particularity are braided through the history of American peoplehood, as they are I suspect, for political communities throughout the West. Nor is it an accident that during periods of stress—security threats and demographic change, for example—the latent tension between these strands often reemerges. A reasonable patriotism gives particularity its due without allowing the passions of particularism to drown out the voice of broader civic principles.

There is a difference between cosmopolitanism and universalism. We speak of some principles as universal, meaning that they apply everywhere. But the enjoyment of these principles requires institutions of enforcement, most often situated within particular political communities. In this vein, the U.S. Declaration of Independence attributes certain rights to all human beings but adds immediately that securing these rights requires the establishment of government s . Note the plural: not only will there be a multiplicity of governments, but they may assume a variety of forms, all legitimate as long as they defend rights and rest on the consent of the governed.

As you can see, there is no contradiction, at least at the level of principle, between universal principles of right and patriotic attachment to particular communities. For many Americans and Europeans, in fact, their country’s willingness to defend universal principles intensifies their patriotic pride. Universality denotes the range in which our principles apply; it has nothing to do with the scope of our primary allegiance.

By contrast, there is a contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. You cannot be simultaneously a citizen of the world and of a particular country, at least in the sense that we must often choose between giving pride of place to humanity as a whole as opposed to some subset of humanity.

There is a contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. You cannot be simultaneously a citizen of the world and of a particular country, at least in the sense that we must often choose between giving pride of place to humanity as a whole as opposed to some subset of humanity.

This formulation assumes what some would contest—that the phrase “citizen of the world” has a discernible meaning. In a much-discussed speech, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared that “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” On the surface, this is obviously true, because there is no global entity to be a citizen of . But if we dig a bit deeper, the matter becomes more complicated.

For example, we can observe many kinds of cosmopolitan groups—scientists and mathematicians, for example, whose quest for truth depends on principles of evidence and reason that take no account of political boundaries. As the son of a scientist, I have vivid memories of conferences in which hundreds of colleagues (the term itself is revealing) gathered—it didn’t really matter where—to discuss their latest experiments, wherever they were conducted, on fully common ground. Similarly, I suspect we have all heard of the organization “Doctors without Borders,” which rests on the principle that neither human need nor medical responsibility respects national boundaries.

There is a form of cosmopolitanism, finally, that may be observed among some government officials—the belief that it is their duty to maximize human wellbeing, regardless of the nationality of those who stand to benefit. This global utilitarianism, defended by philosophers such as Peter Singer, shaped the thinking of some officials who successfully urged then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to throw open Britain’s immigration gates after the EU expansion of 2004, without availing himself of the extended phase-in period that the terms of accession permitted. As subsequent events showed, there is a tension between global utilitarianism and the expectation that leaders will give priority to the interests of their own citizens. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a political community in which the belief in the legitimacy of collective self-preference does not hold sway—which is not to say that most citizens attach a weight of zero to the interests of human beings beyond the borders of their community, or that they should do so. Self-preference is one thing, moral obtuseness another.

There is a distinction, on which I need not dwell at length, between liberal and populist democracy. Of late, we have heard much about a “democracy deficit” in the European Union and throughout the West. Unelected bureaucrats and experts, it is alleged, are making decisions over the head and against the will of the people. Populist democrats endorse this complaint, at least in principle, because they believe that all decisions should ultimately be subject to the people’s judgment. The referendum is the purest expression of this conception of democracy.

Liberal democracy, by contrast, distinguishes between decisions that the popular majorities should make, either directly or through their elected representatives, and issues involving rights, which should not be subject to majority will. The defense of fundamental rights and liberties is not evidence of a democracy deficit no matter how intensely popular majorities may resent it. Along with independent civil society, institutions such as constitutional courts give life to democracy, so understood. It is this conception of democracy on which I rely in the remainder of my remarks.

How patriotism can be reasonable

The philosopher Simon Keller argues at length against the proposition that patriotism is “a character trait that the ideal person would possess,” at least if one’s conception of the good or virtuous human being includes a propensity to form and act upon justified belief rather than distorted judgments and illusions. The core of Keller’s thesis is that patriotic attachment leads patriots to deny unflattering truths about their country’s conduct, hence to maintain their attachment in “bad faith.” Patriotism should yield to truth, in short, but it doesn’t.

Keller has put his finger on a dangerous tendency, one that I suspect most of us can feel within ourselves. It is often hard to acknowledge that one’s country has erred, perhaps even committed hideous crimes. Sometimes monsters masquerade as patriots and manipulate patriotic sentiments to serve their own ends.

Just as patriots can go astray, they can also acknowledge their mistakes and do their best to make reparations for them. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism, but he was the president who formally apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the country for their unjust internment during World War II.

But just as patriots can go astray, they can also acknowledge their mistakes and do their best to make reparations for them. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism, but he was the president who formally apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the country for their unjust internment during World War II.

In classic Aristotelian fashion, patriotism can be seen as a mean between two extremes—blinding zeal for one’s country at one end of the continuum, culpable indifference or outright hostility at the other. Or, if you prefer, we can see patriotism as a sentiment that needs principled regulation. Carl Schurz, who left Germany for the United States after the failed 1848 revolution, became a Union general during the Civil War and then a U.S. senator. Attacked on the Senate floor as too willing to criticize his adopted country, Schurz replied, “My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.” This is the voice of the reasonable patriot.

Patriotism does not mean blind fidelity, no matter what. It means, rather, caring enough about one’s country to try to correct it when it goes astray and, when that is not possible, making a difficult choice. A number of non-Jewish German patriots left their country in the 1930s because they could not stand what Hitler was doing to their Jewish fellow-citizens, did not want to be complicit, and hoped to ally themselves with external forces that might eventually bring down Hitler’s evil regime.

In sum: I can believe that my country has made serious mistakes that must be acknowledged and corrected without ceasing to be a patriot. I can believe that my country’s political institutions are evil and need wholesale replacement without ceasing to be a patriot. I can believe that other objects of regard (my conscience, or God) on occasion outrank my country without ceasing to be a patriot. The fact that zealous patriotism can have terrible consequences does not mean that reasonable and moderate patriotism does so.

The fact that zealous patriotism can have terrible consequences does not mean that reasonable and moderate patriotism does so.

Despite these arguments, it is understandable that morally serious people may continue harbor doubts about the intrinsic value of a sentiment that can yield evil. Even so, it is possible to endorse patriotism as an instrumental good—as necessary to the preservation of political communities whose existence makes the human good possible.

Another well-known philosopher, George Kateb, hesitates to take even this step. Patriotism, he argues, is an intellectual mistake because its object, one’s country, is an “abstraction”—that is, a “figment of the imagination.” Patriotism is a moral mistake because it requires (and tends to create) enemies, exalts a collective form of self-love, and stands opposed to the only justified morality, which is universalist. Individuals and their rights are fundamental; one’s country, he says, is at most a “temporary and contingent stopping point on the way to a federated humanity.”

Intellectuals, especially philosophers, should know better, Kateb insists. Their only ultimate commitment should be to Enlightenment-style independence of mind, not just for themselves, but as an inspiration to all. In this context, “A defense of patriotism is an attack on the Enlightenment.” From this standpoint, it is hard to see how civic virtue can be instrumentally good if the end it serves—the maintenance of one’s particular political community—is intellectually and morally dubious.

But Kateb is too honest an observer of the human condition to go that far. While the existence of multiple political communities guarantees immoral behavior, government is, he acknowledges, not just a regrettable fact but a moral necessity: “By providing security, government makes possible treating other persons morally (and for their own sake).” It would seem to follow that the beliefs and traits of character that conduce to government’s security-providing function are ipso facto instrumentally justified, as civic virtues. That is the basis on which a reasonable patriotism may be defined and defended. Yes, the individual community that makes moral conduct possible is embedded in an international system of multiple competing communities that invites, even requires, immoral behavior. But as Kateb rightly says, rather than positing and acting on a non-existent global community, “One must learn to live with the paradox.” As long as we must, there will be a place for patriotism.

Isn’t it better to spread, hence mitigate, the threat of tyranny with multiple independent states so that if some go bad, others remain to defend the cause of freedom?

One more step, and I reach the end of this strand of my argument. The existence of multiple political communities is not just a fact that moral argument must take into account; it is preferable to the only non-anarchic alternative—a single global state. Dani Rodrik, a politically astute economist, spells out this case. There are many institutional arrangements, none obviously superior to others, for carrying out essential economic, social, and political functions. But some may be better suited than others to particular local circumstances. Groups will strike varying balances between equality and opportunity, stability and dynamism, security and innovation. In the face of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of capitalist markets as “creative destructive,” some groups will embrace the creativity while others shrink from the destruction. All this before we reach divisions of language, history, and religion. Individual countries struggle to contain these differences without repressing them. How likely is it that a single world government could preserve itself without autocracy or worse? Isn’t it better to spread, hence mitigate, the threat of tyranny with multiple independent states so that if some go bad, others remain to defend the cause of freedom?

These questions answer themselves. If the human species best organizes and governs itself in multiple communities, and if each community requires devoted citizens to survive and thrive, then patriotism is not the way-station to the universal state. It is a permanent requirement for the realization of goods that human beings can know only in stable and decent polities.

Why impartiality is not always right

One familiar line of objection to patriotism rests on the premise that partiality is always morally suspect because it violates, or at least abridges, universal norms. By treating equals unequally for morally arbitrary reasons, goes the argument, we give too much weight to some claims and too little to others.

Critics note that patriots are devoted to a particular political order because it is their own and “not only” because it is legitimate. That’s true, but so what? My son happens to be a fine young man; I cherish him for his warm, caring heart, among many other virtues. I also cherish him above other children because he is my own. Am I committing a moral mistake? I would be if my love for my son led me to regard other children with indifference—for example, if I voted against local property taxes because he is no longer of school age. But it is perfectly possible to love one’s own without becoming morally narrow, or unreasonable, let alone irrational.

It is perfectly possible to love one’s own without becoming morally narrow, or unreasonable, let alone irrational. This is so because a certain degree of partiality is both permissible and justified.

This is so because a certain degree of partiality is both permissible and justified. Two philosophers’ examples will make my point. If I’m sunbathing on a beach and hear two young swimmers—my son and someone else—crying out for help, I should want to rescue both if I can. But suppose I can’t. Does anyone really think that I’m obligated to flip a coin to decide which one? On what theory of human existence would that be the right or obligatory thing to do?

But now the second example. As I’m walking my son to school, I see a boy in danger of drowning in the local swimming-hole, where he is unwisely playing hooky. Although I’m pretty sure I can rescue him, it will take time to pull him out, dry him off, calm him down, and return him to his parents. In the process, my son will be late for school and miss an exam he has worked hard to prepare for. Does anyone think that this harm would justify me in turning my back on the drowning boy?

These considerations apply not only to individual agents, but also to governments. There are situations in which one country can prevent a great evil in another, and do so at modest cost to itself. In such circumstances, the good that can be done for distant strangers outweighs the burden of doing it. In this vein, Bill Clinton has said that his failure to intervene against the genocide in Rwanda was the biggest mistake of his presidency.

What’s going on is obvious, I think: in ordinary moral consciousness, both partial and impartial claims have weight, the proper balance between which is determined by facts and circumstances. While it is hard (some would say impossible) to reduce this balance to rules, there is at least a shared framework—based on the urgency and importance of conflicting interests—to guide our reflections. As a rule of thumb, we can presume that because human beings tend too much toward partiality, we should be careful to give non-partial claims their due. But that doesn’t mean that they should always prevail.

Why patriotism is not so different from other loyalties

Sensing the danger of proving too much, the critics of patriotism draw back from the root-and-branch rejection of partiality. Instead, they try to drive a wedge between patriotism and other forms of attachment.

George Kateb does not offer a generalized critique of partial attachments. Instead, he argues, patriotism represents the wrong kind of partiality, because its object—one’s country—is an abstraction, and a misleading one at that. Individuals are real; countries aren’t. Individuals are worthy of special attachments in a way that countries are not. That is why he works so hard to drive a wedge between love of parents and love of country.

A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one’s “mother tongue”), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out. One can love these things reasonably, and many do.

I disagree. While love of parents and of country are not the same, it does not follow that one’s country cannot be a legitimate object of affection. To be sure, a country is not a person, but it begs the question to say that love is properly directed only to persons. It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it. (I have had such an experience.) A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one’s “mother tongue”), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out. One can love these things reasonably, and many do.

Consider immigrants who arrive legally in the U.S. from impoverished and violent lands. Their lives in their new country often are arduous, but they at least enjoy the protection of the laws, the opportunity to advance economically, and the right to participate in choosing their elected officials. Is it unreasonable for them to experience gratitude, affection, and the desire to perform reciprocal service for the country that has given them refuge?

Kateb is clearly right to insist that citizens don’t owe their “coming into being” to their country in the way that children owe their existence to their parents. But here again, his conclusion does not follow from his premise. Surely we can love people who are not responsible for our existence: parents love their children, husbands their wives. Besides, refugees may literally owe their continuing existence to countries that offer them sanctuary from violence. Is it less reasonable and proper to love the institutions that save our life than the individuals who give us life?

As another philosopher, Eamonn Callan, has suggested, if patriotism is love of country, then the general features of love are likely to illuminate this instance of it. Among his key points: “love can be admirable when directed to objects whose value is severely compromised and admirable then not despite but because of the compromised value.” An example of this is the love of parents for an adult child who has committed a serious crime, a bond that demonstrates the virtues of constancy and loyalty. This does not mean that parents are free to deny the reality of their child’s deeds or to make up bogus excuses for them. To do that would be to surrender both intellectual and moral integrity. But to say that parental love risks crossing the line in these ways is not to say that parents are required to turn their backs on criminals who happen to be their children, or to cease all efforts to reform them. (Nor is it to fault parents who have wrenchingly concluded that they must cut these ties.)

Conclusion: the last full measure of devotion

There is one more objection to my conception of reasonable patriotism: it is irrational to choose a life that puts you at heightened risk of dying for your country. The objector may say that there is nothing worth dying for, a proposition I reject. More often, the suggestion is that even if there are things that warrant the sacrifice of one’s life (one’s children, for example), one’s country is not in this category. Children are concrete and innocent, while countries are abstract (“imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s phrase) and problematic.

Must a political community be morally unblemished to be worth killing or dying for? The United States was a deeply flawed nation when it went to war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The servicemen on the Normandy beaches harbored none of the dulce et decorum est illusions that led young Englishmen to welcome the outbreak of the first world war; the GIs fought against pure evil in the name of a partial good. They were neither wrong nor deceived to do so, or so I believe.

Suppose one’s country is attacked and thousands of fellow-citizens die. Is everything done in response an expression of delusion? Not at all: some reactions are necessary and justified; others are excessive and illegitimate. I favored retaliation against the Taliban, which asked some Americans to kill and die for their country. Most Americans agreed, and I think we were right. Attacking those who did not attack us was—and is—another matter altogether.

As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

Lurking behind the critique of patriotism is the longing for an unattainable moral purity in politics. I take my stand with Max Weber, with the ethic of responsibility that embraces the necessary moral costs of maintaining our collective existence—all the more so when our government rests on the consent of the governed. It is only within decent political communities that citizens can hope to practice the ordinary morality we rightly cherish. As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

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My Country Right or Left
My Country Right or Left" is an essay published in 1940 by the English author George Orwell. In it Orwell seeks to reconcile his intense feeling of patriotism and his left-wing views. Background. The essay was written after the outbreak of the Second World War at a time when many of Orwell's circle had to reconsider their pacifist views.
"My Country, Right or Wrong" Quote Origin and Meaning
In reply, Senator Shurz said, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.". Carl Schurz's speech was received with a deafening applause from the gallery, and this speech established Carl Schurz as one of the foremost and distinguished orators of the Senate. Why the Phrase "My Country Right or Wrong!"
George Orwell: My Country Right or Left
My Country Right or Left, the essay of George Orwell. First published: autumn 1940 by/in Folios of New Writing, GB, London. Index > Library > Articles > My_Country > English > E-text. George Orwell My Country Right or Left. Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look ...
A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell's 'My Country Right or Left'
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'My Country Right or Left' is a 1940 essay by George Orwell, in which he reflects on his childhood memories of the First World War and outlines why he supports the Second World War, which had broken out the year before. However, as with many of Orwell's essays, he makes some surprising ...
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's widely anthologized 1928 essay about her experience as a black American-and as an individual who contains multitudes. ... My country, right or wrong. Sometimes, I feel discriminated ...
My Country, Right or Wrong: If the Cause Is Just, Is Anything Allowed?
While retaining the traditional moral dividing lines is a position robustly defended by many people (e.g., Bergeron, Fisher, and Skerker in Ellner, Robinson, and Whetham 2014b), "my country, right or wrong" no longer sounds quite as convincing to many people in the military in the context of contemporary decisions about resort to armed force.
7
Book contents. Frontmatter; 1 A political writer; 2 Orwell and the biographers; 3 Englands His Englands; 4 The truths of experience: Orwell's nonfiction of the 1930s; 5 The fictional realist: novels of the 1930s; 6 Orwell's essays as a literary experience; 7 'My country, right or left': Orwell's patriotism; 8 Orwell and the British Left; 9 Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
My Country Right or Left
George Orwell. My Country Right or Left, 1940 [L.m./F.s.: 2019-12-29 / 0.15 KiB] 'Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin ...
My Country Right or Wrong
QUESTION: I am looking for the origin of or Chesterton reference to the idea that someone saying "My Country, right or wrong," is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." ANSWER: The line is from Chesterton's first book of essays, The Defendant (1901) from the chapter, "A Defence of Patriotism": "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying.
Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to be Colored Me," 1928
In this essay, she explores her discovery of her identity as a Black American and celebrates her self-pride. Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to be Colored Me," 1928 ... My country, right or wrong. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my ...
The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell : "My
The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell : "My country right or left", 1940-1943, [Vol.] II ... "My country right or left", 1940-1943, [Vol.] II by Orwell, George, 1903-1950. Publication date 1968 Publisher New York : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Collection trent_university; internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled ...
Mr. Twain Offers a Lesson on Patriotism
Adjust. by Scott Horton. July 4, 2008. It was March 16, 1901. A lanky man with elegant and flowing white hair and a prominent moustache strode to the podium. He hardly needed an introduction: the audience would immediately have recognized what was arguably the best-known face in America. The event was a meeting of the Male Teachers Association ...
Carl Schurz
Schurz is famous for saying: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." ... (1865), a two-volume biography of Henry Clay (1887), essays on Abraham Lincoln (1899) and Charles Sumner (posthumous, 1951), and his Reminiscences (posthumous, 1907-09).
Rationally Speaking: My country, right or wrong?
The complete sentence is: "My country, right or wrong. In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.". Schurz' biographer reports that the Senator's comment was greeted by a "deafening" applause, which clearly ...
Schurz, Carl (1829-1906)
Historical Essay. Schurz, Carl (1829-1906) ... His dictum, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right," has been often quoted during controversial times. Schurz moved to New York in 1881 where he edited the New York Evening Post. During the 1890s he was a regular contributor to Harpers Weekly.
My Country, Right or Wrong
MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG. 1. DEBATE ON THE MEXICAN WAR, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MAY 13-19, 1846 MR. GIDDINGS.—The President in his message, as a pretext for sending our army to invade and conquer the country upon the Rio Grande, says: "Texas, by its act of December 19, 1836, had declared the Rio del Norte to be the boundary of that republic.". This mere declaration on paper by the ...
My Country Right or Left
My Country Right or Left. This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate.The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity - please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.
"My Country, Right or Wrong": No Patriot Would Say It
But perhaps the ultimate put-down for that point of view came from G.K. Chesterton, In a 1901 collection of essays, The Defendant, he includes an essay called \"A Defense of Patriotism.\" Chesterton writes: \'My country, right or wrong,\' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case.
Rhetorically Examining Zora Neale Hurston's ...
Before diving into Hurston's essay, we need to take a look at the construction of the title and the first line of the essay. Syntactically, Hurston creates ambiguity with the word "colored" in the title and in the first sentence. ... My country, right or wrong." Instead of worrying about how others construct her, she sees herself, as we ...
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
My country, right or wrong. This much anthologized essay celebrates the joys Hurston finds in being a black woman. The sole black student at Barnard College and the women's counterpart to Columbia ...
My Country, Right Or Wrong
My Country, Right Or Wrong. By Ross Douthat. March 15, 2008. As defenses of patriotism go, I tend to incline more toward Daniel Larison's rejoinder to George Kateb's essay than toward the response ...
In defense of a reasonable patriotism
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered by William Galston at the Estoril Political Forum on June 25, 2018. ... Schurz replied, "My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if ...

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My Country, Right Or Wrong

About the Author

In defense of a reasonable patriotism

Introduction

How patriotism can be reasonable

Why impartiality is not always right

Why patriotism is not so different from other loyalties

Conclusion: the last full measure of devotion

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