A preacher in Alabama wants any football player who doesn't properly worship the U.S. flag and national anthem to be killed. President Trump merely wants them fired. He also claims that anyone who cares about refugee families must hate the victims of any murders committed by refugees (while presumably caring compassionately for the victims of any murders committed by non-refugees). Sadism and patriotism and exceptionalism mesh nicely together, and none of them makes any sense. There's no particular reason that people should identify with other people at the level of a nation more so than at the level of a family or neighborhood or city or state or continent or planet. Belief in national exceptionalism (in U.S. superiority to other places) is -- and this is the topic of my new book Curing Exceptionalism -- no more fact-based and no less harmful than racism, sexism, or other sorts of bigotry. While poor white people could for centuries proclaim "At least I'm better than non-white people," anyone in the United States can claim "At least I'm better than non-Americans." And anyone can try to believe that, but it doesn't make sense and it does do great damage.
In Curing Exceptionalism I review ways in which the United States might be the greatest nation on earth, and I'm unable to find any. It's not by anybody's measure most free or most democratic or richest or most prosperous or best educated or healthiest or holding the longest life expectancy or the greatest happiness or the most environmental sustainability or anything else that one might want to use to provide substance to chants of "We're Number One." The United States is number one in locking people in cages, in military spending, in various measures of environmental destruction, and other sources of shame rather than pride. But basically it is a worse place to live by most quantifiable measurements than any other wealthy country, while still being a better place to live than a poor country or a country where the CIA is assisting a coup or a country being endlessly liberated by NATO.
The fact that people try to immigrate to the United States is not actually evidence of greatest nation on earth status. The United States is not the most preferred destination, does not accept the most immigrants, is not kindest to immigrants when they arrive, and does not shape its immigration policies around aiding those most in need but rather around preferences for Europeans. The fact that people need to escape danger and poverty in poor nations is just not relevant to the question of whether the United States can bring itself up to the standards of other wealthy nations. Or it's only relevant in the sense that by redirecting priorities to human and environmental needs at home and abroad, the U.S. government could catch up to the rich countries while ceasing to contribute to the suffering of many poor countries, and in fact help to make many countries places where people prefer to remain. Do we need a slightly less cruel immigration policy and a larger wall, or do we need open borders that will allow in billions of people? Neither. We need open borders combined with unimaginably enormous efforts to make people's own countries desirable places to live, and a halt to policies that help make them unlivable. And this we can do by redirecting a fraction of military spending.
But people in the United States view the United States as exceptionally great. Their patriotism, their belief in unique superiority, the prevalence of flags and national anthems outpaces those in other countries. Even the poor in the United States who have it worse than the poor in other wealthy countries are more patriotic than the poor in other countries or than the wealthy in their own country. The damage this does takes many forms. It distracts people from organizing and acting for change. It leads people to support politicians, not because they will do them any good, but because they are patriotic. (The least likely person to be elected U.S. president is not actually an atheist. It is a non-patriot.) Exceptionalism leads people to support wars and to oppose international cooperation and law. It leads people to reject proven solutions to gun control and healthcare and education because they've been proven in other countries that ought to learn from this one rather than the other way around. It leads to indifference to United Nations' reports on the cruelty of poverty in the United States. It leads to the rejection of foreign aid following so-called natural disasters in the United States.
We need to come around to the understanding that patriotism, nationalism, exceptionalism is not something to be done properly, but a nightmare from which to awaken. Peace is not patriotic. Peace is globalist. Peace depends on our identifying as humans rather than as Americans. This does not mean feeling national shame instead of national pride. It does not mean identifying with some other nation. It means diminishing one's identification with nationalism in order to identify as an individual, a member of various communities, a global citizen, part of a fragile ecosystem.
When the U.S. government raises your taxes or claims the right to part of your land or bails out Wall Street or expands the rights of corporations or any of the other things it does, people don't tend to place those actions in the first person. Few people say "We just re-gerrymandered the districts," or "We gave more war weapons to local police departments," or "We take in billions in campaign contributions." Instead, people talk about the government using the word "government." They say "the government raised my taxes," or "the state government made voter registration automatic," or "the local government built a park." But when it comes to war, even peace activists announce that "We just bombed another country." That identification needs to end. We need to remember and increase our awareness of our responsibility to change things. But we don't need to make our identity into one that looks better to us if we imagine the Pentagon must have some good reason for helping to starve the people of Yemen.
In Curing Exceptionalism I look at various techniques for curing exceptionalism, including role reversal. Let me just quote one paragraph:
Let's imagine that for whatever reasons, beginning some seventy years ago North Korea drew a line through the United States, from sea to shining sea, and divided it, and educated and trained and armed a brutal dictator in the South United States, and destroyed 80 percent of the cities in the North United States, and killed millions of North USians. Then North Korea refused to allow any U.S. reunification or official end to the war, maintained wartime control of the South United States military, built major North Korean military bases in the South United States, placed missiles just south of the U.S. demilitarized zone that ran through the middle of the country, and imposed brutal economic sanctions on the North United States for decades. As a resident of the North United States, what might you think when the president of North Korea threatened your country with "fire and fury"? Your own government might have gazillions of current and historical crimes and shortcomings to its credit, but what would you think of threats coming from the country that killed your grandparents and walled you off from your cousins? Or would you be too scared to think rationally? This experiment is possible in hundreds of variations, and I recommend trying it repeatedly in your own mind and in groups, so that people's creativity can feed into the imagination of others.
What is my point in suggesting that we underestimate military spending, altruism, and sadism? Well, mainly to come up with an accurate understanding. Then we can try to draw lessons for how to act. One lesson might be this: in undoing sadism, we need interventions that recognize the possibility of altruism. Members of the Ku Klux Klan have been converted into advocates for racial justice. People have joined across racial lines for economic justice in poor people's campaigns, old and new. Those who identify with imagined U.S. greatness often fantasize about levels of U.S. generosity and goodness which, if made real, would transform the world for the better. Learning a little bit about another culture or language is not hard, and may not meet as much resistance as a peace demonstration, but can make all the difference. Studies have found that willingness to bomb a country is inversely proportional to ability to accurately locate it on a map. What if super-patriots could somehow be tricked into learning the geography of the globe that they seek to rule?
And ultimately, what would happen if people could be made aware of the size of the U.S. military budget, and the fact that it reduces jobs rather than creating them, endangers Americans rather than protecting them, destroys the natural environment rather than preserving it, erodes liberties rather than creating freedom, shortens our lives, reduces our health, and threatens our security. What if those who want the United States to be generous could join forces with those who pretend it is generous and act on the basis of facts to make it into the sort of government that not only doesn't remove children from their living parents, but also doesn't create millions of orphans by killing their parents with wars?
People do care about cruelty they find out about. But cruelty in foreign policy is the least found out about, because no major political party wants it known, because the corporate media wants it unknown, because school boards consider such knowledge treasonous, and because people do not want to know. George Orwell said that nationalists will not just excuse atrocities committed by their nation, but they will show a remarkable ability never to find out about them. Yet, we know that if people could be compelled to find out about them, they would care. And if they found out about them through a communications system that made them aware that others were finding out as well, they would act.
As things stand, with our very limited awareness, we are not powerless. Preventing the 2013 bombing of Syria, upholding for a few years the 2015 Iran agreement, halting the threats of fire and fury, stopping the removal of children from families -- these are all partial victories that point to far greater potential.
I've written a children's book called Tube World that tries to give children a non-exceptionalist, kind, and constructive perspective on things. I've also written and brought with me today a book called War Is Never Just which I wrote in preparing for a debate and which is a critique of so-called just war theory. In it I make a case that many criteria of just war theory can never be met, but that if they could then a miraculous just war would still -- in order to be morally justified -- need to outweigh the damage done by keeping the institution of war around and dumping a trillion dollars a year into it. Such a feat is impossible, given the alternatives we have developed in non-violent action, unarmed peace keeping, truth and reconciliation, diplomacy, aid, and the rule of law.
This perspective of taking on the entire institution of war is that of an organization I work for called World BEYOND War. We have a very short pledge that people have signed in 158 countries, and which I'll pass around on a clipboard in just a moment in case you'd like to sign it too, and put down your email address if you'd like to be more involved, and put it down really super legibly if you'd like us to not accidentally email somebody else. I'll read you the pledge so you don't have to read it off the clipboard:
"I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources from life-affirming activities. I commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace."
We work on educational and activist efforts to advance this goal and steps in its direction. We seek the closure of bases, divestment from weapons, accountability for crimes, shifts in budgets, etc. And sometimes we plan big days of actions. One that's coming up on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly 100 years since the ending of World War I, is Armistice Day, which was a holiday for peace up until its conversion into Veterans Day during the destruction of North Korea in the 1950s. Now it's a holiday on which Veterans For Peace groups in various cities are forbidden to participate in parades. We need to turn it back into Armistice Day, and in particular we need to overwhelm with our celebration of Armistice Day the celebration of weaponry of war (and the implicit threat to the world) that Donald Trump has planned for the day in Washington, D.C. Go to worldbeyondwar.org/armisticeday to learn more.
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