The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
Our nation will only be built by our level of patriotism. The day we distinguish patriotism from patronage is the day this nation will rise. Our efforts to restore a wrecked Zimbabwe are futile as long as our love for this nation is far from ticking an ounce.
As you read this passage, ask yourself, how many people have you seen doing wrong today and you said nothing to correct them? How much trash did you see in the street and you never bothered to pick it up, right now as you read do you think you love your country as much as you love reading this column? We love many things, but our country is not part of that list.
Why?
Maybe it’s what we know patriotism to be. We have been brought up around the worst definition of what loving our country is. The mistake was sustained by unhealthy politics, nourished by poverty and flourished at the expense of a growing poor and a slimming rich. The prosperity of the 1 percent which one Ben Moyo called parasitic bourgeoisie last week at Leaders for Africa Network Election Dialogue Series made the wrong definition right, and it is our patriotic duty to find the true definition and meaning of patriotism. With some bit of reading during the week, I became obsessed with patriotism as the only solution to the mountain of woes we intend to fix as a nation. Of note, I interacted with MacIntyre (1968), Gorge Orwell’s (1947) writings, Ben Johnson (1961), George Bernard Shaw (1856), Oscar Wilde (1854) and Albert Einstein (1949). The dissenting conversations of these men convinced me that patriotism is the love of one’s country regardless of politics. Patriotism has nothing to do with power but everything to do with selflessness in upholding the social contract that should bring sanity to a society.
Two of the world’s greatest literary philosophers wrote persuasively about patriotism. I intend to use their thoughts to speak to many who have been influenced by the only work they know from one of them, Eric Blair aka George Orwell. Let me first refer to MacIntyre who in his Marxism and Christianity (1968), advocates patriotism as “a politics of self-defence for all those local societies that aspire to achieve some relatively self-sufficient and independent form of participatory practice-based community”. MacIntyre’s posit shows that from the particularistic moral perspective, true patriotism is and should be a fundamental virtue. Eric Blair aka. George Orwell in his 1947 essay “Notes on Nationalism” also did not find fault with patriotism, as long as a clear distinction is made between the concepts of nationalism and patriotism, a trait characterised by military and cultural devotion to a particular place, without any intention to impede the rights of other people. To him, a nationalistic movement was one which brought the nation together. The economy of the nation was a large force in the merging of the nation, and the Government took considerable actions to piece it together.
From the two men, two lessons are drawn, the first being politics of self-defence, meaning collective defence of the country from external ridicule, choosing to not participate in denigrating discussions about our nation with “them”. The second is the respect of other people’s rights within the setting to be patriotically protected. These fundamentals should be a benchmark in the progress of the New Dispensation whose success will be guided and guarded by patriotism. Recognising the existence of difference of opinions and the legitimacy of the freedom of expression in a democracy, in many occasions some have been “sell-outs” to least describe them. Our suffering has been at the hands of the few who do not love our nation, bent on discussion us with “them” and giving a bad, extremely and exaggerated bad about us. The effects are evident in the streets, bridges, mshikashikas and prisons. Those are the off-springs of unpatriotic behaviour.
To develop my submission, a major question among many reading right now is how do we develop patriotism in a broken nation where no one loves another? You are probably asking, how do we make patriotism favourable when there is no incentive for being so? As I argued earlier, the remedy to Zimbabwe’s woes is simple, we need to be patriotic. The answer is, you can’t develop patriotism through a “patriotism development plan.” You can’t force somebody to be proud of their country to such a degree that they would be willing to fight and die for that country, to ensure that the ideals on which it was founded will endure.
What you can do is build a country worthy of the patriotism of its people. You can build a system of government that people will look to and will want to continue. You can build a system whereby each man is guaranteed the freedom to live his life in the way in which he sees fit. You can build in the guarantee that basic, natural rights will never be violated by the government. You can make a system which has the capability to change if everyone agrees, but is strong enough to be the timeless foundation on which the rest of the nation can be built.
Once you’ve done that, then you live out the example. You fight and die for that country. You believe so strongly that your nation should endure that you become willing to give your own life in defence of that way of life. That heritage of sacrifice shows future generations that there are enough people who believe that the experiment in your nation should continue that they would sacrifice themselves to see it happen. And they begin to feel the same.
And patriotism develops all on its own. You can’t just develop a love of country. It develops on its own when you have a country worthy of such love. I want to disambiguate something before the trolls come along looking for treats. Patriotism is different from nationalism.
Patriotism is fundamental to liberty because pride in one’s nation-state, and a willingness to defend it if necessary, is the basis of national independence. Patriotism is the courage of national self-determination.
Looking at the philosophical aspects of patriotism, I would say that patriotism arises from feeling part of the society and the culture that you are in. To use a slang term, patriotism comes from having “some skin in the game”. If you feel isolated or cut off from society or if you feel that what you do does not matter in your society, then the bond between yourself and your social group is most likely not strong enough to evoke those feelings of patriotism. That makes the service and sacrifices of Black-Americans and Japanese-Americans in WW2 even more notable. Imagine the Black soldier or sailor segregated and looked down upon by a majority of White Americans, yet they volunteered for military service and many served with distinction. The Tuskegee airmen, the 761st Tank Battalion, the 452nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery are three notable all black combat units that served with distinction and valour. Their performance in WW2 directly led to the desegregation of the UU Armed Forces.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was an infantry regiment comprised of Japanese-American soldiers, it was the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. Imagine these two separate groups having both been poorly treated by their country yet they still felt so strongly a part of the American society that they volunteered to fight and die for their country. That is patriotism, to have a strong enough bond that even when poorly treated you are willing to serve and sacrifice for your country.
To engage the other side of discourse some leading Western literary and historical figures of the ilk of the Jamaican-Canadian Ben Johnson (1961), Henry David Thoreau a transcendentalist, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) a Nobel Prize winner for Literature, the Irish comedist Oscar Wilde (1854) who wrote “The Importance of Being Ernest”, and Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Bertrand Russel (1872-1970), have all condemned patriotism in no uncertain terms. Even the non-Western Leo Tolstoy (1865-1869) has joined in the fray. Their “gripe” about patriotism was there was little concern for our land and neighbours: that is what is missing which is true patriotism.
If we don’t love our country then we don’t deserve its offerings. In the meantime . . .
Yikho khona lokhu!
