I was talking with a friend about patriotism today. I maintained that there are different kinds of patriotism; there’s the jingoistic kind and the civic kind. The most succinct way I can state the difference is that civic patriots support their government by voting and paying (all) their taxes, while jingoistic patriots support the American flag industry in mainland China.

“That’s just jingoism,” countered my friend. “Patriotism is love for one’s country.” The truth is that patriotism has several definitions, positive and negative. Are patriots part of a national team, or a patriarchy? Do they love their country because they don’t know anything else, or because there is something genuinely good about it? And as James might say, what, exactly, is the use of patriotism? Much like a country, patriotism has good and bad uses. Patriotism can foster civic participation, or it can start wars.

You don’t need to be a patriot to be a civic participant. But you do need to be some kind of patriot (nationalist, jingoist, pick your term) to value your country’s citizens’ lives over another country’s.

I was thinking about this because I caught a Republican Congressman on TV defending the Iraq war on the grounds that we had gotten rid of a brutal dictator who had murdered 400,000 of his own people.

Four hundred thousand is a horrible, horrible number. But if we want to talk about numbers, we can start with our embargo of Iraq, which killed more than one million Iraqi children. I recall when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about these starvation deaths, she said it was worth it. Even when the UN tried to remedy the situation with its Oil-For-Food program, that effort turned out to be as corrupt as the contracts we’re awarding to Halliburton for the reconstruction.

It’s very difficult to buy what “patriots” say when they talk about numbers of dead, because we know those numbers are totally irrelevant to them. The truth is that, by jingo, American lives are worth infintely more to Americans than any other lives. Look, for example, at our invasion of Afghanistan–we killed slightly more civilians there in 2001 than were killed in the World Trade Center attacks, but somehow we don’t hear so much about the Operation Anaconda widows. And if we are to accept that Bush was justified in invading Afghanistan based on the number of civilian deaths, would we be able to say that Afghanistan would be equally justified in invading the U. S. on the same grounds?

The truth is that we will throw any number of foreigners under the bus to maintain our image as an impervious superpower. We will kill two brown people for every white person they kill, right? I wrote about this last year; vengeance is powerful and it doesn’t distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

It is only patriotism that can enable you to value one stranger’s life over anothers based on their nationality. Are all men really created equal? We talk so much about how we’re a democracy–the flip side is that it enables us to kill as many non-citizens as we want. They can’t vote, what are they going to do? We can go it alone if we want, because this is the greatest country on earth, etc.

The title, by the way, is from a nineteenth century song intended to rouse nationalist fervor against an under-equipped enemy; it’s where we got the term “jingoism.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?