It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Israeli invasion of Palestine is an act of aggression of such gravity that it is almost impossible for me to speak of anything else. When the population of six cities and many villages is tortured daily in front of the whole world, and when those perpetrating these crimes are granted total immunity, then we have to stop and speak up because new standards are being established as to what is permissible internationally, which put us all in danger.
My first point, then, is that we have to oppose this aggression, these Israeli war crimes, in any way we can and there is a lot we can do since it is our money that pays for them. Without the United States Israel could not even function as an economy, much less have tanks to occupy every street in Palestine.
At the same time, we should not make the mistake of thinking that the situation in Palestine is unique. Palestine today is the image of what, in different ways, is occurring across the world.
The Israeli invasion of Palestine is a classic example of colonial conquest. In fact, the very creation of the state of Israel was part of the British colonization of the Middle East. This was acknowledged by Sharon when he told the president of France, Chirac, three weeks ago that : Palestine is our Algeria, with the difference (he added) that we are going to stay.
Over the last two decades the same colonial relations have been re-imposed by Europe and the U.S. on every part of the former colonial world, this time in the name of the debt crisis, globalization or the war on drugs” and, more recently, the war on terrorism. The slogans change but the objectives and the consequences are the same: uprooting the local populations, turning them into refugees, into cheap labor for the global market, appropriating their resources, their lands, their assets, their oil, their waters, their labor, either by the use of tanks and bombings or through trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, currency devaluations, all means of waging war on the people and the lands.
Not surprisingly, the same destructive policies that Israel is implementing in Palestine, with the use of deadly force through land expropriation, the expansion of settlements, the theft of water, and now the systematic destruction of every infrastructure (like water pipes, roads, power plants, sewers, schools, houses) are also being implemented, with the same results, in Africa, Asia, Latin America.
What in Israel is destroyed by the IDF, in many African countries is destroyed by the World Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In Palestine it is the Israeli tanks that bulldoze schools and houses. In Africa, it is structural adjustment, the defunding of the public sector, currency devaluation, but the effects are the same. In Palestine the sick, the wounded, the women giving birth cannot go to the hospitals because the Israelis shoot them. In Africa people cannot go to the hospitals, even without the Israeli bullets–although Israel has played havoc in Africa too, propping every dictator, from Mobuto to the white South African apartheid regime. In both cases, the results are populations of refugees, the transfer of lands from the local people to the new colonial powers, forwarding and protecting the interests of international capital.
Comparing the role of the Israeli government and the Israeli army with that of the World Bank, the IMF and WTO is not to underestimate what is taking place in Palestine or minimize its gravity, but it is to show the continuity between war and economic policy and between the aggression of Israel against Palestine and the many wars that are now bloodying the world.
President Bush has announced that fifty countries are on the US government list as candidates for bombings. But as a matter of fact an equal number has already experienced Americas warfare over the last two decades, to such an extent that it will take them decades to regain some degree of normalcy. Think of Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan. Many of these countries have been so devastated that they are now economically dis-functional or have been placed under the UN trusteeship.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing a new, extensive process of recolonization, with Palestine being the experimental field.
In the US as well, warfare is the rule with mass incarceration of black and Latino youth,
the use of capital punishment mostly against black people, and the attack on healthcare, housing, welfare provisions, immigrant men, and women.
Capitalism is waging a war on the people of the world, a war that deprives us of all means necessary to reproduce our lives, a war that keeps seeking new names and justifications but at the core has one purpose: stripping us from our entitlement to the wealth of the world; turning us into refugees of one sort of another, homeless people who have no claim to this earth, allows us only to work and work when it suits our employers.
This is our destiny and the destiny of our children if we do not resist and if we refuse to become settlers, guards, policemen. Today the people of Palestine are being martyred, but we delude ourselves if we think that the destruction of their communities and their expulsion from their lands will have no consequences for our lives. Palestine is the world, and the blood it sheds–caused by the weapons and financial aid provided by the United States–will fall on us as well.
Silvia Federici presented this talk at the Socialist Scholars Conference, April 2002.
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. Her most recent book is Patriarchy of The Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism. (PM Press.)
Despite the global rise of the feminist liberation movement launched decades ago to amplify the voices of women, there exists a troubling disconnect and indifference towards your pain and cries. It seems as though the movement for women’s equality and the right to self-determination or emancipation was intended to uplift a specific group of women, while excluding and overlooking others.
I often wonder if this disconnect is rooted in the hatred for women whose skin color, religion, or class doesn’t qualify them worthy of the same fight. I often wonder if this disconnect is rooted in racism towards an entire population that was meant to be erased as their lands and homes were taken under occupation.
This indifference and silence towards you and your struggle beg crucial questions about the true commitment to the universal values of feminism and the need for a more principled stance by champions of equality. But is it too late? How is it that the principles that underpin feminist ideas—equality, justice, and human rights for ALL women—seem to be conveniently set aside when it comes to specific geopolitical hotspots?
It is important to highlight that in the chilling aftermath of over 150 days of brutal warfare between Israel and Hamas, over 30,000 innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed, and millions continue to suffer in the barbaric crossfire and siege. Among the significant civilian casualties, over 25,000women and children have fallen victim as the number of bodies trapped under rubble continues to rise. The destruction has displaced more than 950,000 women and girls, with a horrifying statistic revealing that every two hours, a Palestinian mother dies, making Gaza one of the most dangerous places for a mother and her children.
Additionally, the trauma of giving birth in a war zone where the majority of women suffer from anemia and lack proper nutrition, sanitation, and simple privileges such as privacy while giving birth has created an unfathomable psychological condition. Prior to October 7, maternity hospitals in Gaza were few and far between, with the capacity for ten births per day. Now the hospitals remaining are doing eighty, or sometimes even a hundred births. Women in Gaza are delivered in the corridors, and can stay for only a few hours after a vaginal birth and Cesarean Section before they are sent out to their tent and shelters.
Do Palestinian mothers and their children receive the same protection as others under U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3318 (XXIX), the “Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict”? This resolution explicitly states that “All States shall abide fully by their obligations under the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as well as other instruments of international law relative to respect for human rights in armed conflicts, which offer important guarantees for the protection of women and children.”
Humanitarian organizations highlight a cruel and dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, calculating the number of average deaths per day for Gaza could possibly surpass any other major armed conflict, which includes Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. The very recent International Court of Justice’s ruling, which found plausible evidence of genocide, has done nothing to quell the ongoing bombardment and destruction of the largest concentration camp, which continues with no end in sight. More than half of Gaza’s population seeks shelter in overcrowded conditions near the Egyptian border of Rafah, where basic necessities such as clean water and sanitary products like pads become increasingly scarce. Israel, meanwhile, continues to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid. I have often wondered why my sisters in the West who rose up against decades of misogyny in the U.S. in 2016 after the election of Trump, who filled the streets of this nation and internationally rose up to yet again bring attention to the plight of women’s struggles, have remained so quiet. Where is the outrage of our female politicians or their calls for an immediate ceasefire?
As we celebrate Women’s International Month, bell hooks’ quote from “Ain’t I a Woman” comes to mind. Hooks says, “If women want a feminist revolution—ours is a world that is crying out for feminist revolution—then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women.” Hooks notes that American women, universally conditioned by societal norms, adopt biases of sexism, racism and classism, to certain extents. She suggests that by simply adopting the label of feminists these ingrained biases are not eliminated; rather, it demands an intentional effort to actively counteract the negative effects of socialization and work towards dismantling its enduring legacy at all cost. For the past 75 years we have not heard Western feminists question why Palestinian mothers have to witness their children’s imprisonment without due process, why they have to watch their children starve to death under the occupation, and why Palestinian mothers do not get the same sympathy, when they have to continue to bury their children as a result of war and destruction.
To my sisters in Palestine, to Rania Abu Anza, who waited for 10 years for the arrival of her twins, only to have to bury them as a result of an Israeli airstrike, to Hind’s mother Wissam Hamadah, who awaited the arrival of her little girl while holding her pink backpack and her drawing pad, to Bisan Owda, to Dr. Amira Al-Assouli, to every Palestinian grandmother displaced, mother mourning the loss of her family, to every Palestinian daughter, I am sorry, we have failed you.
Hanieh Jodat is a political consultant and former Policy Director for a 2024 Presidential candidate. She currently works as a strategist with Defuse Nuclear War (RootsAction). Jodat is also a founding member of Women’s March Los Angeles and has initiated the Progressive Democrats of America Middle East Alliances.
Alain Alameddine interviews Mohammad Zraiy, the Gaza coordinator for the One Democratic State Initiative and English teacher, about the situation in Gaza, the legitimacy of the armed resistance, the ICJ as a colonial tool and the establishment of a secular state as the solution.
AA: How are things in Gaza? We know a genocide is happening, we don’t know how that actually reflects in real life. What is the situation on the ground?
MZ: The situation in Gaza is disastrous. We can see the genocide in almost all aspects of our lives. Direct killings, deliberate starvation and mass displacement and dispopulation. The Salaheddine Road is a few hundred meters away from our house, it’s the main road between Gaza and Khan Younes, and it goes through refugee camps [of the natives ethnically cleansed during the 1948 occupation of Palestine] in the middle of the Strip. The terrorist cells occupied it for two weeks. I recorded the destruction that happened there. They destroyed everything between the Al-Maghazi refugee camp and the Breij refugee camp. I don’t mean they targeted everything, or hit everything, or destroyed a lot of things, I literally mean “they destroyed everything“. The schools, the houses, the streets (literally, the streets’ concrete so cars, like ambulances, can no longer use them), the water pipelines, the sanitation pipelines, the electricity station, the UN supply depot. I walked there to record the flattening, and I could smell the stench of the martyrs under the rubble. The Palestinian defense forces succeeded at neutralizing a number of terrorists so the cells did not manage to remain, but they made sure the place would be inhabitable before they withdrew. I’ve known the word “genocide” all of my life but only now do I really grasp what it means.
AA: This is… there are no words. You said you could see the genocide in all aspects of your life and you mentioned starvation. Does this include the closure of the Rafah crossing? Also, Israel and Egypt have been trading barbs, each accusing the other of being responsible for the siege. Who do you think is the one enforcing the siege?
MZ: The siege has obviously made things worse. It is the only way we breathe, since the colony forbids anything from reaching us by land or sea. Of course, starvation is one of the genocide’s essential weapons. 90% of Gazans depend on the UN as their main and sole provider of foodstuff. Not only meat and sugar but also rice, flour, fruits and most vegetables. And instead of offering humanitarian help, or even just allowing others to offer humanitarian help, the imperalist powers are now defunding the UNRWA. This is less graphic than bombs but it’s just as lethal, just as criminal.
AA: You mention a global colonial project—do you think the ICJ’s decision can stop the genocide?
MZ: No. The Court saw that a genocide was happening but failed to call for an immediate cessation of the aggression. And, by design, it has no power to enforce its decisions. Of course, we value the efforts of South Africa, as well as the decisions of most judges on the Court. And we know the Court’s admitting this was a genocide is a helpful tool to use in challenging Israel’s alleged legitimacy. But at the same time, we understand that the ICJ and other international institutions like the UN are colonial tools. How could they achieve justice for Palestine while they are the same institutions that caused its partition and recognized the legitimacy of the settler colony in 1947-48? These international institutions legitimize all the horrors that precede 1967 such as the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and the seizure of Palestinian houses and properties. Today they stand idle as our right to return is denied and as Israel practices apartheid and settles theland. Even rare decisions in favor of Palestine have not been applied. These institutions belong to a colonial world order that we all need to be freed from, not through.
AA: Alright. Back to Gaza: Israel first said it wanted to eliminate Hamas. Then it said it wanted to dismantle its fighting capacities. What is happening with the armed resistance? And how do Gazans feel about it, particularly those who do not support Hamas?
MZ: Let me first correct something that the media often doesn’t mention: Hamas is not the only one fighting terrorism today. All Palestinian factions, whether they’re Islamic, nationalist or leftist, are fighting together. Despite ideological differences, they are united in the field, and they launch joint military operations on a daily basis.
Now, regarding Hamas in particular, since you asked me about them: I have deep disagreements with them and with Islamists in general. I am secular and I am convinced that the establishment of a secular state in Palestine is the fundamental antithesis, and solution, to the existence of the settler colonial state that defines itself as “exclusive to Jews”. This said, Hamas is not the terrorist faction as Israel and its allies claim it to be, neither do Palestinians view it as such. It is a national liberation movement. Its program explicitly states that its fight is not against Judaism but against Zionism. A number of its leaders have actually endorsed the establishment of a state for all of its citizens as the only solution. Hamas also represents a large section of Palestinian society, and its formidable resistance has increased its popularity. Israel can kill Hamas members (which it is doing as part of its campaign to kill everything that moves in Gaza), but as even the US, the UK and France haved admitted, there is no way Israel can eliminate Hamas. We Palestinians know that Hamas is a response to the occupation and persecution, not its cause. On the contrary, we know that the resistance is what is protecting us.
Israel knows this very well, and makes it a point to respond to our counterterrorist operations by killing civilians. Sometimes, when the Internet is cut, we know the resistance dealt the occupation a blow because of the enemy’s increased bombing of civilians. As if Israel was saying, “for each of our soldiers that die, dozens of your children will pay the price”. For example, a short while ago, the bombing became madder than ever. We didn’t know why because there was no Internet, but we knew that something major had happened. We eagerly waited for the Internet to be back so we could learn about what had happened. It turned out that our defense forces had succeeded at neutralizing a cell of 21 terrorists by booby traping a house they had led them to.
How do we feel about it? We are proud, defiant, and hopeful. No colonized people were ever freed from their colonizers without force. Force is the only language that Israel in particular understands. The resistance is what made it withdraw from Lebanese and Palestinian lands. And the resistance’s continued existence against all ods shows that Zionism’s plan to achieve peace by eradicating the natives has failed. At the same time, resistance is a tool, not an objective in itself. For it to achieve anything lasting and substantial, it needs to be attached to a political project that proposes an actual solution.
AA: A political project that proposes an actual solution—How so?
MZ: Well, the immediate need is obviously for this aggression to stop. But then what? The past 75 years have shown that creating a state exclusive to Jews has been a nightmare for all, succeeding at killing Palestinians and failing to keep the Jews it has used to settle our land safe. I want the Zionist nightmare to end so that both its primary victims (Palestinians) and its secondary victims (Jews) can finally be safe. We need to discuss the day after Zionism: The day where we can finally replace it with a secular Palestine. The world today is still talking about the “two-state solution”, which is just a euphemism for “the occupation of 80% of Palestine and the exclusion of 60% of Palestinians”. I hope this genocide can at least help our allies stop talking about the two-state non-solution and start talking about the historical Palestinian vision for liberation: One inclusive, secular, democratic Palestinian state, from the river to the sea. And me and my comrades at the One Democratic State Initiative are working for this to happen.
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How Washington Killed the Nuclear Arms Control System
During the Cold War, world populations faced the ongoing nightmare of a nuclear attack coming out of the blue. All it would have taken was one miscalculation by either side. Such a trigger could even have taken the form of a false alert. We know that at least one such incident nearly led to catastrophe.
In 1983, the Soviet Union’s alert system indicated that there were incoming missiles on their way. Fortunately, the alert commander ordered a double check to be sure the indications of a missile launch from NATO were genuine. That check confirmed that the alert was erroneous. Given the dire state of East/West tensions, World War III would have at the time been almost certain if the commander had not been extra cautious.
The end of the Cold War ended the prospect of such a nightmare scenario. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton’s administration “found new causes to promote using American power, a fixation that would lead to serial campaigns of intervention and social engineering.” U.S. leaders, especially Secretary of State Madeline Albright, went out of their way to demonstrate Russia’s impotence publicly. In particular, they humiliated Russia’s Serbian clients both in Bosnia and in Serbia itself. Washington’s treatment of the Serbs caused renewed East/West tensions and began to generate a second Cold War.
Even more directly, the United States and its principal European allies provoked Russia with multiple rounds of NATO expansion. In April 1998, NATO admitted Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary over Russia’s vehement objections. Expansion continued under both George W. Bush and Barrack Obama. The result was a steady increase in military tensions. In addition to provoking Russia by mistreating its Serbian clients, Washington expanded NATO eastward, creating a threat within Russia’s core security zone.
There were multiple rounds of eastward expansion involving Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barrack Obama. The mythology has also developed that Donald Trump was soft on policy toward Russia, if not an outright traitor. The reality was the opposite. U.S. policy towards Russia hardened significantly under Trump. That point was most obvious with regard to Trump’s attitude towards crucial arms control agreements.
Under Trump, the United States had adopted several measures that again raised the extent of tension. An especially unhelpful action took place during Trump’s administration when hawkish U.S. officials decided that the United States should withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in August 2019. Such intermediate range missiles had always been Russia’s Achilles’ heel and Russian leaders were hypersensitive about their country being at a disadvantage with respect to such weapons. Threatening to withdraw from that agreement was extremely unhelpful. The situation worsened when Washington followed up by deciding to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty in November 2020.
As Western-Russian relations deteriorated further, Russian President Vladimir Putin put Russia’s nuclear forces on higher alert in February 2022 following the advance of Russian forces deeper into Ukraine. Later in the year, relations became even more confrontational. The “architecture of disarmament and nonproliferation is now gradually being dismantled. On [November, 2023] President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law revoking Russia’s ratification of the global treaty banning nuclear testing. In pushing through the de-ratification, Putin said that he wanted to “mirror” the American position. Although the United States signed the treaty in 1996, it has never been ratified.Since the United States has never ratified the treaty, Russia’s move was more symbolic than practical. But it leaves only one significant nuclear weapons pact between Russia and the United States in place: the New START treaty.” If Russia further weakens its commitment to the test ban, that will create yet another arena for instability.
It is sobering to consider the state of global nuclear arms control today to what it was at the end of the Cold War. It is alarming that Moscow and Washington have returned to the state of nuclear rivalry and confrontation in less than a quarter century. An unparalleled opportunity for peace has been wasted.
Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,200 articles on international affairs. Dr. Carpenter held various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato institute. His latest book isUnreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism
Part I
What Is The Relationship Between Nationalism and Religion?
by Bruce Lerro / March 12th, 2024
LONG READ
Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replaceeach other? Do they amplifyeach other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, secular ideology that replaces religious systems. According to Kedourie, nationalism is a new doctrine of political change first argued for by Immanuel Kant and carried out by German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. In this early work, nationalism was the spiritual child of the Enlightenment, and by this I mean that nationalism and religion are conceived of as opposites. While religion supports hierarchy, otherworldliness, and divine control, nationalism, according to Kedourie, emphasizes more horizontal relationships, worldliness, and human self-emancipation. Where religion supports superstition, nationalism supports reason. Where religion thrives among the ignorant, nationalism supports education. For Enlightenment notions of nationalism, nationalism draws no sustenance from religion at all.
Modern theorists of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm and John Breuilly (1993), share much of this position. For these scholars, secular institutions and concepts such as the state or social classes occupy center stage, while ethnicity and religious tradition are accorded secondary status. For Liah Greenfeld (1992), religion served as a lubricator of English national consciousness until national consciousness replaced it.
Conor Cruise O’Brien (1999), Adrian Hastings (1997), and George Mosse (1975) have added sacred texts, prophets, and priests to the list of commonalities between nationalism and religion. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) argues that just as sacrifice is important to religion, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the equivalent translation for the nation. Just as religion has its rituals of religious conversion, nations have citizenship rites in which immigrants sing a national anthem rather than religious hymns. Just as members of a religious community are encouraged to love the stranger, members of a nation will never know, meet, or even hear about most of their fellow members.
Anthony Smith (1998) argues that nationalism used and secularized the myths, liturgies, and doctrines of sacred traditions and was able to command the identities of individualists not only over ethnic, regional, and class loyalties, but even over religion itself. What Smith wants to do is conceive of the nation as a sacred communion, one that focuses on the cultural resources of ethnic symbolism, memory, myth, values, and their expression in texts, artifacts, scriptures, chronicles, epics, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and crafts. Smith’s greatest source of inspiration was George Mosse (1975), who discussed civic religion of the masses in Germany.
My article will help us understand not only which social institutions command people’s loyalty, but how they accomplished this. It is not enough for states to promise to intervene in disputes and coordinate the distribution and production of goods, although this is important. Individualists must also bond emotionally with each other through symbols, songs, initiations, and rituals in support of nationalism. In this effort, the state does not have to reinvent the wheel. There was one social institution which, prior to the emergence of absolutist states, was also trans-local and trans-regional. Interestingly, this institution also required its members to give up their kin, ethnic identity, and regional identity in order to become full members. That institution was religion.
Understood from a secular view, the state was seen as a sole and absolute sovereign, directing and advancing the process of secularization by limitingecclesiastical power. Religion was totally subordinate to the state. A new national community was to be based on reason and nature without reference to the customs of the past. It did not appeal to ethnic or linguistic commonalities, but to a centralized education. The nation was envisaged politically as calling for unity as well as liberty and equality. The idea of democracy was strong, coming from the working classes. These classes wanted to push for popular sovereignty, not national representation.
On the surface, French nationalism was secular, political, scientific, and anti-clerical. The beheading of the king during the French Revolution deprived France of its divine protector. This left an increasingly autonomous sphere for humanity to construct an earthlier protector: the nation-state. Reinforced by the horrors of religious wars, patriotism was seen as a counter to religious strife and appealed to an increasing number of people, both educated and uneducated. Patriotism was the sacred communion of the people in arms. If the nation simply replaced religion with a more enlightened view, there would be no need for religion’s rituals and techniques. But this was not what happened.
If we examine the process of how the state commands loyalty, we find the state uses many of the same devices as religion. After the revolution in France, the calendar was changed to undermine the Catholic church. The state tried to regulate and dramatize the key events in the life of individual—birth, baptism, marriage and death. French revolutionaries invented the symbols that formed the tricolor flags and invented a national anthem, La Marseillaise. The paintings of Delacroix and Vermeer supported the revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a new belief system, a kind of national catechism. By 1791 the French constitution had become a promise of faith. The tablets of the Declaration of Rights were carried around in procession as if they were commandments. Another symbol was the patriotic altar that was erected spontaneously in many villages and communes. Civic festivities included resistance to the king in the form of the famous “Tennis Court Oath,” (Serment du Jeu de Paume) along with revolutionary theater. The revolution, through its clubs, festivals, and newspapers, was indirectly responsible for the spread of a national language. Abstract concepts such as fatherland, reason, and liberty became deified and worshipped as goddesses. All the paraphernalia of the new religion appeared: dogmas, festivals, rituals, mythology, saints, and shrines. Nationalism has become the secular religion of the modern world, where the nation is now God.
In his book, Nationalism: a Religion (1960), Carlton Hayes says that:
Nationalism, like any religion, calls into play not simply the will of the intellect, but the imagination, the emotions. The intellect constructs a speculative theology or mythology of nationalism. The imagination builds an unseen world around the eternal past and the everlasting future of one’s nationality. The emotions arouse a joy and an ecstasy in the contemplation of the national god who is all good and all protecting. (pages 143–144)
For Hayes, nationalism is large-scale tribalism. Modern national identity appears in Western Europe at a time when all intermediate bonds of society were collapsing due to the industrial revolution and religion was losing its grip on its populations. What occurs is a reorganizing of religious elements to create a social emulsifier that pulverizes what is left of intermediate organization while creating a false unity. This unity papers over the economic instabilities of capitalism as well as the class and race conflicts that it ushers in.
How Monotheism Differs From Animism and Polytheism
Anthony Smith is not simply saying that religion itself is the foundation of nationalism. He claims that the monotheism of Jews and Christians forms a bedrock for European nationalism. However, Smith does not account for why animistic and polytheistic religious traditions are not instrumental in producing nationalism. What are the sacred differences between magical traditions of tribal people and monotheists—the high magical traditions of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, and Incas on one side, and Jews and Christians on the other? We need to understand these religious differences so we can make a tighter connection between monotheism and nationalism.
The five parts to a monotheistic covenant vs polytheism and animism
The following discussion draws from my book, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, along with the work of Anthony Smith. According to Smith (2003), the foundation for the relationship between a monotheistic people and its God is a covenant. A covenant is a perceived voluntary, contractual sacred relationship between a culture and its sacred presences. This contractual relationship is one of the many differences that separates monotheism from polytheism and animism. Polytheistic and animistic cultures perceive a necessary, organic connection between themselves and the rest of the biophysical world, and this connection extends to invisible entities. The monotheistic Jews were the first people to imagine their spiritual relationships as a voluntary contract.
The first part of a covenant agreement is that God has chosen a group of people over all other groups for a particular purpose. This implies that God is a teleological architect with a plan for the world and simply needs executioners. Polytheistic and animistic people imagine their sacred presence as a plurality of powers that cooperate, compete, and negotiate a cosmic outcome having some combination of rhythm and novelty rather than a guiding plan. Like Jews and Christians, pagan people saw themselves as superior to other cultures (ethnocentrism), but this is not usually connected up to any sense of them having been elected for a particular purpose by those sacred presences.
Still another side of this contract is that people have to consent to join in the agreement. There has to be choice. This choice implies that the elected culture could get along well enough even if they refused God’s offer. For polytheistic and animistic people, spiritual presences are the life blood of their communities. There are no debates, negotiations, qualifications, or haggling with sacred presences as to whether or what kind of a relationship will exist. There relations are already and always the case.
The second part of a covenant is the announcement of a promise of prosperity and power for the chosen peopleas part of the bargain if they behave themselves.In polytheistic and animistic societies, the gods make no promises. Some people are born into ecological settings that are bountiful while others are born into austere conditions. Why this has happened has more to do with the success or failure of magical practices than it has to do with spiritual kindness or cruelty on the part of the gods.
The third part of a covenant is the prospect of spreading good fortune to other lands. This is part of a wider missionary ideal of bringing light to other societies so that the blind can see. It is a small and natural step to affirm that the possession of might—the second part of the covenant (economic prosperity and military power)—is evidence that one is morally right. We know that the ancient Judaists sought to convert the Edomites though conquest. On the other hand, while it is certainly true that animistic and polytheistic people fight wars over land or resources, these are not religious wars waged by proselytizers.
The fourth part of a covenant is a sacred law. This is given to people in the form of commandments about how to live, implying that the natural way people live needs improvement. In polytheistic societies, how people act was not subject to any sort of a plan for great reform on the part of the deity. In polytheistic states, the gods and goddesses engaged in the same behavior as human beings, but on a larger scale. There was no obedience expected based on a sacred text.
The fifth part of a covenant is the importance of human history. Whatever privileges the chosen people have received from God can be revoked if they fail to fulfill their part of the bargain. The arena in which “tests” take place is human history, in the chosen people’s relationship with other groups. For the animistic and polytheistic, cultural history is enmeshed with the evolutionary movement of the rocks, rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. There is no separate human history. Please see Table 1 which summarizes these differences.
Animistic and polytheism rituals vs monotheistic ceremonies
Lastly, in polytheistic societies, sacred dramas enacted in magical circles and temples were rituals. This means they were understood as not just symbolic, representational gestures of a reality that people wished to see in the future. Rather, they were dramatic actions believed to be real embodiments of that reality in the present. In the elite phase of monotheism, rituals were looked upon with suspicion because people became superstitiously attached to the ritual and thought their rituals could compel God to act. In From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, I coined the word ceremony to describe sacred dramas that were more passive and less likely to create altered states of consciousness, intended to show deference and worship to a deity who was not subject to magical incantations. In contrast, a religious ceremony, at least among middle and upper-middle class, is more passive. The priest or pastor does most of the work while the congregation supports what the priest or pastor is doing.
Table 1 Monotheism vs Animism and Polytheism
Judeo-Christian Monotheism
Type of Sacred System
Animism, polytheism
Contract between two free parties (covenant)
Type of connection between a culture and sacred powers
Organic bond between two interdependent powers
A culture is chosen. Ethnocentrism with a spiritual justification.
Is a culture “elected?”
Ethnocentrism without any spiritual justification
Yes. Promise and deliverance of land, prosperity, and power
Is there a promise of abundance?
No. What abundance exists comes from magical rituals upon ecological settings
Missionary ideal to bring light to others (religious wars and proselytizers)
Expansion or provincial?
Fight wars and expand for land or sexual and material resources, but they do not fight over spiritual beliefs.
Obedience to a law, typically written texts, for purposes of reforming humanity
Expectations of humanity
Altered states using imagination and the senses, transmitted orally with no purpose for reforming humanity
Holy and all good —qualitatively different from humanity
Qualities of sacred beings
Gods and goddesses are the same as humanity, except on a larger scale
Human history is important as the arena in which people will be blessed or punished
Place of history
Human history is less important. More important is an extension of the ecological relationship with plants and animals
Ceremony—symbolic, representational gestures that show deference
Dramatization
Ritual—real attempts to compel the spirits
Common Elements Found In Monotheism And Nationalism
Elite monotheism vs. popular monotheism
Just as we saw in my previous article Nationalism as the Religion of Modernity that there was elite nationalism and mass nationalism, there was also an elite monotheism and popular monotheism. In the early Iron Age, (1000 BCE to 200 CE) elite monotheism was an intellectual reaction of the prophets and upper classes to what they perceived as the degenerate superstition of polytheism and animism among their fellow Jews as well as of the agricultural states of West and East Asia. These qualities included a close identification of people with animals and plants, particularly through the use of the arts—music, dance, mask making—to create altered states of consciousness using imagination, sensory saturation, and trance states.
In some cultures, this pagan magic was used by state officials, such as priests and priestesses such as the Canaanites and the Babylonians. The first monotheists were reformers and outsiders to pagan magic. In societieswhere monotheism acquired state power, as when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity had toappeal to the lower classes. It had to bring back some of the magical ways that it had first rejected. To overcome the huge gap between the transcendental power of a God who had no human qualities and human beings, intermediaries such as saints, the Virgin Mary, and angels were brought in. Something similar also occurred in India when the Buddhism of the merchants acquired more influence among the lower classes.
Loyalty to one God; loyalty to one nation requires pulverizing intermediaries
All sacred systems have to answer the question of whether the sacred source of all they know is singular or plural. Monotheistic religions break with the pluralistic polytheism and animism in pagan societies and assert that there is one God. It is not a matter of having a single God who subordinates other gods. This is not good enough. The very existence of other gods is intolerable. Any conflicting loyalties are viewed as pagan idolatry.
Just as monotheism insists on loyalty to one God, so nationalism insists on loyalty to one nation. Claiming national citizenship in more than one country is looked upon with suspicion. Additionally, within the nation, loyalty to the nation-state must come before other collective identities such as class, ethnic, kinship, or regional groupings. To be charged with disloyalty to the nation is a far more serious offence than disloyalty to things such as a working-class heritage, an Italian background, or having come from the East Coast. In the case of both monotheism and nationalism, intermediaries between the individual and the centralized authorities must be destroyed or marginalized.
Loyalty to strangers in the brotherhood of man; loyalty to strangers as fellow citizens
The earth-spirits, totems, and gods of polytheistic cultures are sensuous and earthy. In tribal societies, they are part of a network among kin groups in which everyone knows everyone else. The monotheistic God is, on the contrary, abstract, and the community He supervises is an expansive non-kin group of strangers. Just as monotheism insists that people give up their ties to local kin groups and their regional loyalties, so the nation-state insists that people imagine that their loyalty should be to strangers, most of whom they will never meet. The universal brotherhood of man in religion becomes the loyalty of citizens to other citizens within the state. In monotheism, the only way an individual can be free is to belong to a religion (pagans or atheists are barely tolerated). In the case of a nation-state, to be free the individual must belong to a nation. One cannot tolerate individuals with no national loyalty.
Many inventions and historical institutions facilitate one’s identifying with a nation. The invention of the printing press and the birth of reading and writing helped build relationships among strangers beyond the village. Newspapers and journals gave people a more abstract sense of national news, and they were able to receive this news on a regular basis. The invention of the railroad, electricity, and the telegraph expanded and concentrated transportation and communication.
The problem for nationalists is that all these inventions can also be used to cross borders and create competing loyalties outside the nation-state. Increasing overseas trade brought in goods from foreign lands and built invisible, unconscious relations with outside producers. In the 19th century, another connection between strangers began with the international division of labor between workers of a colonial power and workers exploited on the periphery.
Religious contract of equality before God; constitutional contract of equal citizenship
In polytheistic high magical societies, it was only the upper classes who were thought to have a religious afterlife. If a slave were to have an afterlife at all, it was to be as a servant to the elite. Monotheism democratized the afterlife, claiming that every individual, as part of God’s covenant agreement, had to be judged before God equally. So too, nationalism in the 18th century imagined national life as a social contract among free citizens, all of whom were equal in the eyes of the law and the courts of the nation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, popular nationalism included the right to vote in elections.
Monotheistic and nationalist history as mythology
According to Anthony Smith, the history that religions construct is not the same as what the professional historians aspire to do. For example, historians ask open-ended questions for which they do not have answers. They accept the unknown as part of the discipline and accept that an unknown question may never be answered. In contrast, accounts of religious history are not welcoming to open-ended questions. Rather, they ask rhetorical questions for which they have predictable answers. Those believers or non-believers who ask open-ended questions are taught that the question is a mystery that will only be revealed through some mystical experience or in the afterlife. Further insistence in asking open-ended questions is viewed as blasphemy or a sign of heresy.
So too, nationalist renditions of history most often share a mythological conception of history as well. The history books of any nation generally try to paper over actual struggle between classes, enslavement, colonization, and torture that litters its history. Members of a culture that have built nationalist histories like to present themselves as being in complete agreement about the where and when of their myths. But, in fact, myths compete with each other and are often stimulated by class differences within the nation. Smith (2003) gives the following examples:
The Celtic pagan vs. Christian antiquity in Ireland
The Gallic vs. Frankish origins and culture in France
The Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman origins of Arthurian cultures in England
The Classical Hellenic vs. Byzantine origins in Greece
The Islamic-Ottoman vs. Turkic origins in Turkey
The Davidic-Solomonic vs. Rabbinic Talmudic traditions of the Golden Age of Israel
Nationalist history is sanitized, polished, and presented as the deeds of noble heroes. This mythology is intensified by the way the founders of religion and the nation are treated. It is rare that Moses, Christ, or Mohammad, in addition to their good qualities, are treated as flesh and blood individuals with weaknesses, pettiness, and oversights. So too, in the United States, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are treated like Moses or Christ, having charismatic powers (Zelinsky, 1998). Just as religion attacks open-ended, critical questions of heresy, so nationalists tar and feather citizens as unpatriotic when they question national stories and try to present a revisionist history.
Written records and artifacts comprise the building materials for historians. Myths are often treated as untrustworthy and are interpreted sociologically or psychologically for their “real meaning”. Historians might say that myths tend to oversimplify, exaggerate, and act as comforting devices rather than describe events that actually occurred. Collective memories are treated by historians as untrustworthy because, just as individuals have selective memory, so can whole cultures. However, for both monotheism and nationalist histories, the search for records and artifacts tends to be used to support the memories and myths that cultures already believe.
Further, what makes nationalist histories and monotheism different from the work of professional historians is the direction of history. All national histories have a cyclical shape. They begin with a golden age and are followed by a period of disaster or degradation and, after much struggle, a period of redemption. First, there is a selection of a communal age that is deemed to be heroic or creative. There is praise for famous kings, warriors, holy men, revolutionaries, or poets. Second, there is a fall from grace, whether it be a natural disaster, a fall into materialism, or external conquest. Third, there is a yearning to restore the lost communal dignity and nobility. In order to return to the golden age, they must emulate the deeds and morals of its past epoch. For Christianity, the golden age consists of the story of Adam and Eve. For the Hebrews, it is the Old Testament with Moses in the wilderness. In the United States, it is the time of pioneers, frontiersman, cowboys, and Western expansion. These are mythic archetypes that are endlessly recycled today in the names of banks, television commercials, television programs, and movies.
Contrary to both nationalism and monotheism renditions, among professional historians, whether there is a shape to human history is controversial. Some 18th and 19th century historians also saw history as having a linear time direction. The movement from beginning to end was categorized as progress. This means that things are gradually getting better for human beings as we progress through history in the areas of technology, economics, political institutions, and morals. However, after two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, this position has fallen into disfavor among most historians.
The Function of the golden ages
Smith identifies four functions of the golden ages. The first is to provide a sense of continuity between the present and past. Golden ages do this either through the presentation of a cyclic mythical story or through an archaeologist’s geological discovery of a long-lost vernacular language, a sacred book, or artifact. Second, the golden age grounds nationalist culture with an identity in the flux of historical change. Third, a golden age provides a community with temporal roots, a time for beginnings and endings. Lastly, golden ages give expression and sanction to a quest for authenticity. It provides models for the nation’s true identity, stripped of cultural mixing, corruption, and decline.
Creating altered states of consciousness
Everyday life is composed of small conflicts and problems that most often require neither a sense of adventure nor a great deal of social solidarity to resolve. But extraordinary life circumstances require both risk-taking and group support. Whether the sacred tradition is magical, religious, or nationalistic, it appeals to the big picture and requires the adventure and support that goes with it.
In tribal societies, rituals before war or harsh rites of passage induce altered states of consciousness, which are memorable because they require both courage and dependability. Popular monotheistic states of consciousness invite speaking in tongues, devotional emotional appeal, and the promise of being taken care of in exchange for obedience. In nationalistic settings such as recruiting offices, prospective soldiers are promised they will be taken care of by a strict military discipline while having great adventures in other parts of the world. Like monotheism, nationalism appeals to the petty side of humanity. Participants are told they are an elite group, superior to other nations. Once inside the military, boot camp becomes the arena in which individual will is broken. New recruits are taught to be dependent on authority and to not question things.
Altered states can be created by either sensory saturation or sensory deprivation. A great example of sensory saturation to create an altered state is the Catholic mass. Here we have the bombardment of vision (stained glass windows), sound (loud organ music), smell (strong incense), taste (the holy communion), and touch (gesturing with the sign of the cross). Sensory deprivation in a monotheistic setting includes fasting, prayer, or meditation. Sensory deprivation in nationalistic settings is at boot camp and on the battlefield of war itself.
Sensory saturation occurs in nationalistic settings at addresses by prominent politicians, such as the presidential state of the union addresses, in congressional meetings, at political rallies, and during primaries. Presidential debates and elections are actually throwbacks to rituals and ceremonies. Those diehards of electoral politics who attend these rituals are at least as taken away by the props as were participants in a tribal magical ceremony. In Yankeedom, the setting includes the Great Seal of the United States hanging above the event, along with the American flag, a solemn pledge of allegiance, a rendition of “God Bless America,” and a military parade.
Attachment vs. detachment to land
As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) and others have pointed out, tribal societies’ sense of physical setting contains a psychic element, where rocks and rivers are not physical things separated from our psychological states, but rather they have a psychic field before we even interact with them. When we interact with them, they deepen our own memories, dreams, and emotional life. This sense of attachment was not attachment to a nation, but a kind of group loyalty to the ecological setting of trees, mountains, and rivers. Tuan refers to this as attachment to “places.”
With the rise of monotheism, and later commerce in city-states, physical nature as a psychic, sacred place is undermined by a geographical conception of “space” as being purely physical and secular. Correspondingly, outside of churches, much of Christianity saw natural geography either as a temptress—a lush and tropical jungle—or as a wasteland.
The relationship between monotheism and territorial attachment is conflicted. On the one hand, elite monotheists depreciate the importance of territorial attachment as an expression of pagans whom Christians feel are enslaved to the land. The prophets promote a kind of cosmopolitanism. Yet on the other hand, the more fundamentalist sects in popular monotheism insist on locating the actual birthplace of the religion and making it the scene of pilgrimages—Muslims go to Mecca, Christians to Bethlehem—or even a permanent occupation as with Zionist Jews in Palestine. In a way, on a more complex level, the rise of a nation’s sense of loyalty based on geography is a kind of return to pagan attachments to place.
Promised lands of the past: the Swiss Alps
We need to make a distinction between the promised land as an ancestral homeland (the past) and the promised land as a land of destination (the future). During the late Renaissance, the Alps were becoming a source of interest for artists like Dürer, Bruegel, and da Vinci as a vortex of the great powers of nature (Tuan, 1977). Naturalist Conrad Gessner climbed Mount Pilatus in 1555 to lay to rest stories about evil spirits in the mountains, and he raved about the clarity of mountain water. But the link between the Alps and the national identity of the Swiss was made only by 18th-century Enlighteners. They championed the primitive virtue of simple Alpine rustics. A century ago, Ernest Bovet, professor at Zurich University, wrote that Swiss independence was born in the mountains:
A mysterious force has kept us together for 600 years and has given us our democratic institutions. A good spirit watches our liberty. A spirit fills our souls, directs our actions and creates a hymn on the one ideal out of our different languages. It is the spirit that blows from the summits, the genius of the Alps and glaciers. (Tuan, 1977, page 161)
In his play William Tell, Friedrich Schiller links the origins of the Swiss confederation to the purity of the Alpine landscape.
Promised lands of the past: Anglo-Saxons
For the Anglo-Saxons who had traveled across the waters to Britain, the analogy with Israel’s election was established by the time of King Alfred and his successors before the 10th century. The parallel between the Exodus of the Israelites and the journey of the Saxons across the seas from Denmark and Germany to Britain was already present, according to Anthony Smith, in Bede’s work as long ago as 730 CE.
It was the Anglican Church that, supported by the monarchy, advanced providential interpretations of Anglo-Saxon history. England was imagined, in biblical terms, an island nation under God in the manner of ancient Israel. The Germanic invasions of Britain were understood as divine punishment. The invasions of Anglo-Saxon land were compared to the assaults of the Assyrians upon the Jews.
According to Adrian Hastings (1997), the Norman Conquest did little to diminish the sense of English nationhood, except that the French language replaces Anglo-Saxon languages among the elites for almost two hundred years. It was only towards the end of the 13th century and into the 14th century that a more aggressive and widespread English national sentiment appeared in a series of wars conducted by Edward I against Wales, Scotland, and later France. Nationalism was also fueled by the rise of English literature in the age of Chaucer and the use of English in the administration and the courts.
During the 17th century, Cromwell’s New Model Army and the English Civil War against Catholic influence deepened the connection between the English people and their feeling of being chosen. In fact, men going into battle for Cromwell’s New Model Army were inspired by hymns and songs from the Old Testament. Myths of the English Protestant election was carried over into the constitutional settlement after 1689. Hans Kohn (2005) also claims that the Puritan myth of missionary election became deeply entrenched in subsequent English nationalism. Christopher Hill (1964) points out that Milton’s writings contain frequent assertion of the English having been chosen. This is carried over into colonial attitudes of cultural superiority and paternalism overseas.
Promised lands of the future: Yankeedom and the Dutch
For the Puritan settlers in America, who fled the Restoration and experienced a perilous exodus in crossing the seas, it was easy to create in their imaginations an “American Israel,” or a “New American Jerusalem.” Though conditions were difficult at first, the scale and abundance of the continent held promise for many immigrants. American Puritans’ ideal of the “City on the Hill” was originally confined to small settlements and towns. From the early 19th century on, the promised-land concept came to include expansion across the United States. As the Western frontier expanded and indigenous populations dwindled from disease or conquest, the belief in a providential and manifest destiny was extended. This is exemplified in the epic paintings of Thomas Cole, Edwin Church, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Sanford Gifford that glorify the majesty of the West. Anthony Smith (2003) points out that the relationship of sublime landscape to nationalism was not unique to the United States.
Even more than the British, the Dutch returned to the Old Testament—the idea of themselves as the chosen people and the children of Israel—to build their national and colonial identity. At first the Dutch strove for their rights to their land in their struggle with Spain. But then it was used later in the story of the Dutch Afrikaners who colonized South Africa.
The Great Trek of Dutch-speaking farmers from the British-ruled Cape Colony occurred 1834–1838. The wandering of the Boers from British oppression to freedom in a promised land was interpreted as deliverance of Israelites from Egypt. The Dutch saw themselves as a later-day version of the Puritans—the prototypical Israelites, fleeing a British pharaoh. But the Dutch were also taking the land of the Zulus. In the Battle of Blood River, the badly outnumbered Boer farmers linked ox wagons in a circle and held off an army of three thousand Zulus. A few had taken a vow that if God would deliver them from their enemies, they would honor Him on that date, and so the Battle of Blood River was celebrated annually.
The covenant and the Great Trek amplified later Boer drives for purity through separation from all other peoples:
The genealogy of Ham…legitimated the servitude of non-white heathen to the Judaeo Christian children of Shem. Just as the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua had commanded the Israelites to drive out the idolatrous peoples of Canaan… their descendants believed they were destined to take the lands of heathen natives and expel or rule over them. (Smith, Chosen Peoples, page 81)
To be “the elect” was to justify land conquest.
Using the theme of the promised land as both a past and a future for the nation is powerfully described at the hundred-year anniversary commemoration of the Afrikaner Great Trek. Daniel Malan, a chief instigator in the Dutch Reformed Church, said the following in his speech:
You stand here upon the boundary of two centuries. Behind you, rest your eyes upon the year 1838 as upon a high, outstanding mountain top, dominating everything in the blue distance. Before you, upon the yet untrodden Path of South Africa, lies the year 2038, equally far off and hazy. Behind you, lie the tracks of the Voortrekker wagons, deeply and ineradicably etched upon the wide outstretched plains, and across the grinning dragon-tooth mountain ranges of our country’s history. Over those unknown regions which stretch broadly before you there will also be treks of the Ox Wagon. They will be your Ox Wagons. You and your children will make history. (Smith, 2003)
Smith concludes, from these and many other examples, that no amount of manipulation by elites of myths and biblical texts could have mobilized and transplanted such large numbers unless these myths and texts were rooted in sacred beliefs of ethnic election. He shows that these beliefs were deeply rooted in the history of everyone in the ethnic group, not just the elite. Modern theorists of the nation separate nature from the history of cultures and separate the human psyche—emotion, memory, inspiration—from the landscape, but, according to Smith, they simply cannot explain this kind of attraction to nationalism.
From mission of the chosen people to Manifest Destiny
Earlier we said that what separates monotheism from polytheism is the expansionary, missionary zeal of monotheism. This tendency was also characteristic of many nation-building projects throughout history. Both monotheism and nationalism wish to expand. There is an exclusive commitment to either one religion or one nation; yet once that exclusive commitment is made, the religion or nation sometimes advocates for expansion around the world. Table 2 below shows a summary of the commonalities between monotheism and nationalism.
Table 2 Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism: Beliefs and Dramatization
Monotheism Judeo-Christian
Category of Comparison
Nationalism (United States)
A sacred system prevalent stratified state societies with possible developing empires in which a single, abstract and transcendental deity presides over “chosen people” via a contract or covenant
Definition
A secular system which exists in capitalist societies in which a single nation claims territory regulated by a state. It is an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity, and identity
Destroys gods and goddesses, ancestors, spirits, totems, and earth spirits
Destruction of intermediaries
Destroys loyalty to kin groups, regions, religion, and social class
Singular: “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me” (Idolatry)
Sacred Source
Singular: One nation— “Thou shalt not have other nations before me”
Covenant: contract of equality of participants before God as opposed to class or status differences in access to God.
Type of binding to source
Constitutional: contract of equality as citizens as opposed to class and status differences
Chosen people
Status in relation to other groups
Chosen people (American Exceptionalism)
Lighting up the world; opening a blind eye (missionary work)
Expansion
Manifest destiny, making the world safe for democracy, and flooding colonized countries with commodities
Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.
Importance of history
Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.
Golden ages: Adam and Eve, Old Testament and wilderness
Importance of origins
Golden ages: Founding of Jamestown, taming the western wilderness with pioneers, frontiersman, and cowboys
Strangers united in the brotherhood of man
Composition of community
Strangers united as citizens of the nation.
Moses, Christ
Founders mythologized
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin
Ceremonies: going to mass, speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles, blessing one’s self, crucifix
Ceremonies; symbolic reality; giving thanks
Presidential elections, rallies, Great Seal of the United States, military parades, pledging allegiance, flag
Sensory deprivation: prayer, fasting, meditation Sensory saturation: Catholic Mass (stain glass windows, organ music, incense, Holy communion)
Methods of altering states of consciousness
Sensory deprivation: boot camp, fighting in a war. Sensory saturation: singing the national anthem, flag waving, hot dogs, apple pie
Religious paintings: Gothic Cathedrals, Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (Da Vinci)
Paintings
Patriotic paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, redemptive Western landscapes (Remington, Moran)
Liturgical hymn books: “Amazing Grace,” Christmas music
Music
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” “Battle Hymn of Republic
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.
