Thanas wrote:The US does not have a similar history. The worst war experience Americans ever had was very much a self-inflicted wound, and nationalism had little to do with making it happen. Most of our other major wars were fought on other people's soil, and for the major wars the US cannot trace the conflict to its own nationalism.
Really now? The Spanish-American War, Vietnam etc. had nothing to do with nationalism? Nor did Iraq II?
Those are colonial wars and you know it. To the US, by a reasonable standard of "major," those were no more "major" than the Boer War was to the British. It was all in the papers at the time, it had some impact on the course of British history, but it didn't require a true mass mobilization, and it didn't cause enough casualties on the British side to engrave itself in the national psyche the way that World War One did a decade later.
From the point of view of American history, the indisputable major wars are the Revolution, the Civil War, and the World Wars. The Mexican-American War probably qualifies and that
should have been your counter-argument. The Spanish-American War, Korea, Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... none of those were nearly as large in scale.
And ultimately, it's a rhetorical argument anyway because "oh, didn't America fight all these bullshit evil wars?" is
not the point. The point is that in the American national consciousness, expressions of patriotism simply aren't tied to bad things happening. Most of the bad things in American history happened for reasons that had little to do with nationalism, or that are so easily shrugged off by the average citizen as "no one's fault" or "someone else's fault" that they do not make an impact on the collective sense of history.
So Americans don't remember "oh, yeah, we gave political power to the Flagwaverists and the next thing we knew half the East Coast was on fire and the secret police had killed fifty thousand people in "purges of unreliable elements." There are scars from American jingoism, but they mostly aren't located on America, and so they are not remembered in the same way because it's harder to go look at the bomb craters.
To the casual eye, history looks different in the eyes of someone whose most recent memory of a flag-waving political party
didn't end in six years of grinding, annihilating warfare. This affects the way people behave. The US does not have any experience in its own past which makes it look at its own history with anything like the critical eye Germany (or most of the other nations of Europe) apply to themselves.
Is that because the US is uncritical and heedless? Partly. I'd argue it's also because the US has
different history than Europe, being on an entirely different continent. This results in even basically similar historical events (like a war of imperialism that killed thousands of people, mostly innocent foreigners) getting interpreted differently.
One model does not explain all.
Thus, for most Americans there is no perceived "dark side" to waving the American flag.
Then Americans are ignorant of their own history in the
Phillippines, most of Middle
America, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and a lot of other people who lost relatives to US forces.
Do you disagree with
me, or are you taking the opportunity to repeat the litany of American crimes?
I get that it's a long litany and should be repeated at every opportunity just in case there's one of the real jingoists lurking around where they might read it. But I want to be clear: are you arguing with me, or with someone else?
Does this turn Americans into fascists? There are two answers to this, depending on who you ask. One is "not necessarily." The other is "obviously." Me, I think it's "not necessarily."
Of course, you also think the USA never started a major war out of nationalism.
Check my list of major wars. The US started the Revolution because it didn't like British government. The US started its own civil war because its people couldn't agree on slavery- the war started largely because of a secessionist movement that you really have to contort yourself to call "nationalist." Hint: YES, SLAVERY IS WRONG. It is a terrible thing. It was terrible that the southern states wanted to perpetuate it. It speaks ill of southern society that even postwar they tried to keep African-Americans down and revise the history of the Civil War to whitewash their ancestors' role. It speaks ill of northern society that the rest of the country often cooperated, and actively cooperated in the oppression of African-Americans. Do you see the pattern in what I'm saying?
Anyway, to finish the interrupted list: the US
didn't start either of the World Wars, it entered them well after someone else had already started shooting.
Revolution, Civil War, World Wars. The indisputable major wars America participated in that demanded a maximum-effort mobilization and left major, indelible marks on the American view of war. World War One might be a "minor" by the standard I'm using here. The Mexican-American War, yes, could arguably join the list.
With the possible exception of the Mexican-American War, no other war in American history had anything like the same scope relative to the size of the country at the time. I'll admit that the Mexican-American War is a counterexample to "major American wars weren't triggered by American nationalism." But you didn't think to use it- you shot straight to the wars of imperialism that I had tried to exclude in the first place by using the word "major." Because I was actually trying to analyze American culture instead of launching off into the hundredth repetition of the litany of American crimes.
Yes the US has fought horrific wars of imperialism that were not justified by any reasonable standard, caused huge numbers of unnecessary, horrible deaths, and which the American people do not choose to remember the way I wish they would. I don't deny that they happened; the ones that have happened while I was alive I was even against at the time.
Does that mean I can't even
talk about American culture in a neutral tone without getting yelled at on behalf of my birth nation? Do I have to insert an extra side-order of contemptuous adjectives into every sentence in which I use the word "United States," just so people don't forget my opinion of the Spanish-American War while I'm trying to figure out why the hell Americans wave flags in ways that Britons apparently don't?
This is getting ridiculous.
A pretty stupid statement considering our day of national mourning remembers the dead from all our wars. 