Hegemonism, the attempt (it should be acknowledged at the outset that the ambitions of the hegemonist can never be fully achieved, save upon mountains of skulls) to provide for the security of one's own nation, not by defending her by means of a military deterrent, alliances, and geopolitical balancing, but by reducing, degrading, subverting, and subordinating other nations to one's own, reducing them to a state of vassalage, is not an expression of patriotism, but its negation. The contemporary conflation of hegemonist policies with a patriotic love of place and people is but one reflection of a profound moral disorder, an ideological deformation of loyalties and obligation that, by nature, are concrete and circumscribed, ethically and geographically.
Patriotism is an almost tangible thing, a love of a man for the very soil (I dare say that he will not call it dirt.) of his homeland; it is an instinctual attachment to the very specificities of his place in the world: its rivers, hills, plains, towns, villages, and irreducibly, the customs, traditions, mores, legends, histories, memories, heroes, villains, and articulated order that make of those natural features a human environment, and not mere physical things. Patriotism, then, is above all a virtue, a mode of piety: a veneration for a certain community of memory and history, a community, moreover, which is not to be confused with those presently living, but receives its very substance from those who now rest from their labours, and hopes to transmit that substance to posterity. Patriotism is a love of neighbour expressed as a democracy of the dead and the as-yet unborn. It is thus particularistic; the nature of the thing excludes the possibility of a universalist patriotism. To combine such terms, and to attempt thereby to conjure a complex meaning from their conjunction, is a fully absurd as to posit square circles.
Something, however, follows from the essence of patriotism, and that something is seldom appreciated in this age of ideologies and clashing empires - namely, that a patriot, in order to remain true to himself, to his own affirmations and virtues, must acknowledge the presence in others - specifically, those others belonging to other nations and peoples - of analogous sentiments, loyalties, virtues. They, too, have their own communities of memory, their own heroes, their own traditions which bind ancestors to the living, and both to those yet to be born into the world. And it is in the confluence of the particularism of patriotic affection and this reciprocity that the nature of patriotism as a circumscribed phenomenon is disclosed. For a particular people to elevate its own traditions, its own way of life, its own mode of existence, to a transnational, transcultural imperative, is to negate the patriotic sentiment itself; it is to posit as a general obligation one that is particular, with the logical consequence that the original sentiment ceases to exist. If a particular set of obligations toward specifiable persons, places, institutions, and traditions is transmogrified into a set of obligations towards a multiplicity of peoples and places, with a concomitant obligation to manipulate or reconstitute the institutions and traditions of those peoples and places, the patriotic obligations toward a particular place vanish: there is no longer a particular obligation at all. Patriotism is abolished by this expansiveness, and in its place there remains only an armed doctrine, an ideology of one sort or another; worse yet, perhaps, in its place may stand an armed faction, bereft of ideology but bent upon domination: Augustine's vision of government, absent law, as banditry on a grand scale.
Stated differently, patriotism is not aggressive, but defensive. It seeks to defend, secure, and strengthen what it possesses, and this because it is acutely conscious of the contingencies of history, of its vicissitudes. Patriotism is a virtue manifest under the ontological condition of finitude. Those persons, places, and things which are its natural objects might not have existed, and there could come a time when they will cease to exist, when the entire community could vanish from under the heavens. Patriotism is fired by the awareness of mortality, and this is the reason for the commemoration of heroes, of those who have sacrificed, or risked the ultimate sacrifice, in order to preserve the community and its memories, and of those who even now sacrifice that it might be perpetuated. There is something in this of the virtues of the instinctive, unselfconscious paganism of antiquity, with immortality folded somehow into the continuation of the mortal existence of one's people and traditions, and it is for this reason that pagan warfare could easily become warfare unto the very extremities, warfare unto death: us or them, for we will not suffer ourselves to be blotted out and known no more. Christianity, however, does not so much abolish this sentiment, but as grace perfects nature, corrects it and purifies it; these loyalties and duties are not abolished or transcended in some illusory higher loyalty to humanity and some set of abstract principles of social organization, but are set in their proper place. They are proximate, and the witness of this fact is, most obviously, the hard saying of Christian ethical teaching that there are some things we must not do, even though the refusal to do them might lead to our demise. We are to affirm the created order, replete with its natural kinds, inclusive of communities, peoples, nations, and the like, but in the proper measures; that is, in their licit places, to their licit degrees, and always under God. I might asseverate, as an aside, that this accounts for that fearful asymmetry between the methods available to the follower of Mahomet and the methods available, licitly, to a soldier of a Christian nation. The latter knows that, for all of the fervor with which he loves his homeland, it is but a proximate good, relativised, in a sense, by the eschatological presentness of the Kingdom of God. His homeland is, then, a temporal and temporary analogy of the homeland that ought to be his heart's desire. The former, by contrast, while possessing a doctrine of future things, believes that the world is created afresh in each instant by the arbitrary, unbound will of Allah; in consequence, the Umma and its law are static, eternal, and unalterable. More than even the substance of that law, the Sharia, is its eternal presentness, which entails that it can never be rendered merely proximate; the Christian gazes through this world, albeit darkly, but the Mahometan gazes outwardly upon it, seeing the temporal immortality of his Umma and Sharia, and finds no method alien to him, for the possibility of ultimate defeat is the possibility of the loss of eternality itself.
If I've not already allowed myself an excess of discursive liberties, it must be reiterated that patriotism is a conditioned and circumscribed sentiment and obligation; one can no more claim its sacred mantle and advocate hegemonism than one can assert the sacredness of life, yet exclude certain lives, which can be disposed of on selective utilitarian grounds. To admit of the latter is to proclaim that life's sacredness is contingent upon circumstance and will; and to advocate hegemonism is to proclaim that the specific loyalties of patriotism are also contingent upon circumstance and will, that one can dispense with them altogether in the name of something "higher" and "nobler". The antipatriot who arrogates to himself the right of hegemony, as much as the utilitarian, negates his own claims to rights and goods; as the utilitarian, by establishing the principle that life is valued only in accordance with a volitional, circumstantial judgment, logically renders himself vulnerable, so also the hegemonist renders himself vulnerable. If he can dispense with his particular obligations and pursue the subjugation of others, so also can his adversaries, likewise, dispense with their obligations, and seek to dominate him. Those who do not understand the love of others for what is their own do not truly love what is their own.
What has occasioned these thoughts? The following, from a (subscription-only) Stratfor analysis of United States/Russia relations and geopolitical grappling:
The problem with the first option (In context, the renegotiation of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty to reflect the eastward expansion of NATO since ratification.) is that it assumes the Americans are somewhat sympathetic to Russian concerns. They are not.
Recall that the dominant concern in the post-Cold War Kremlin is that the United States will nibble along the Russian periphery until Moscow itself falls. The fear is as deeply held as it is accurate. Only three states have ever threatened the United States: The first, the United Kingdom, was lashed into U.S. global defense policy; the second, Mexico, was conquered outright; and the third was defeated in the Cold War. The addition of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states to NATO, the basing of operations in Central Asia and, most important, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine have made it clear to Moscow that the United States plays for keeps.
The Americans see it as in their best interest to slowly grind Russia into dust.
This is not in any objective interest of the United States, as Russia neither threatens the conquest of the United States nor her subversion, let alone her annihilation. This is what hegemonism looks like. It is not patriotic, save in the sense of being a 'last refuge' for a certain type of person.
Comments (11)
"the Orange Revolution in Ukraine have made it clear to Moscow that the United States plays for keeps."
Without Ukraine Russia's future as a Slavic White Christian nation is in some doubt.
But USA didn't create Orange Revolution, even if Russkies think so. And US had little choice but support choice of Ukrainians in a relatively clean elections.
One would think that US diplomats, under Russian "specialist" Rice, would make it clear to Russkies. Obviously it is way beyound abilitites of Jorge the Moron Boosh administration.
Posted by mik_infidelos | October 18, 2007 2:45 PM
Feh. The United States and her Western European allies may not have created the Orange coalition, but they certainly - and curiously, given the devil-principle status that Soros, the instrumentality of some of this funding, (rightly) enjoys in contemporary right-wing folklore - lavished funds upon it, and bore it up with a fusillade of positive media coverage, this latter even going to the absurd length of denying the presence in that coalition of antisemitic paramilitary groups, and its use of incendiary imagery (which, having visited the Ukraine just this past summer, I can attest to having seen in poster, pamphlet, and TV commercial forms).
Moreover, as my own dear wife has patiently explained to her husband (and he has long understood as much about the FSU), the Ukrainian elections are never anything more than thieves' auctions, determining little more than who will steal, what they will steal, from whom, and for the benefit of whom. Fraud is widespread on all sides; Yanukovich operatives stuff ballots in Eastern Ukraine, while Yushchenko and Timoshenko operatives perform the same feats in Western and central Ukraine. Not so curiously, the Western media only have eyes to see what they wish to see:
No, those elections were about as clean as elections in Louisiana or Chicago, though Ukrainians have yet to master the subtler arts practiced by the learned sages of American politics; their techniques are crude, on the order of Democratic voter-suppression efforts in Philadelphia: intimidation, arbitrary closures and changes of polling stations, etc.
Beyond that, Ukrainian political wrangling, and America's interest therein, has nothing to do with democracy, as a perusal of the following paragraphs from a (subscription-only) Stratfor analysis should demonstrate:
There is scarcely any need to dilate upon the details; the reality is that these struggles have everything to do with the exertion of geopolitical influence and power, particularly against Russia - this is the American "interest" - and nothing to do with "democracy", the "freedom agenda", or any other related monkeyshine terminology. The object is to secure a pliant government, and a favourable distribution of critical economic and natural assets, so that the Russian bear can be baited - because it has the temerity, after everything that has transpired in the past century, to still be there. This is not merely unpatriotic generally, but is actually, you know, inimical to genuine American interests, such as countering the disparate forces of the jihad, and a rising China, and so forth. But as Strafor's analysts have written, and I've paraphrased, this won't end for the United States until our boot is on the neck of the Russian bear. As far as I'm concerned, that's a patriotism for scoundrels.
Posted by Maximos | October 18, 2007 4:42 PM
"Feh."
In unforgetable reply of Steve Sailor to Podhoretz, The Lesser:
Such wit, such eloquence, such insight!
Beyond that I'm not sure what is your point.
It is clear you hate people whom I lovingly call neo-conmen, fine by me.
Ukr is far from Swiss Federation in Democracy aspect, but it is not Stalin's USSR either.
I don't believe that CIA, State Dept and the rest of US gov is so clear minded and goal oriented, so efficient and discreet that they could manipulate a sizable country in doing their bidding.
Did West + Soros pour resources before Or Revol? Sure. Was it crucial factor? No.
Should we try to calm down Russia while trying to limit their mischief?
It is not responsible not to do that.
Beyond that our strategic and cultural threats are from 3 sources:
China, Mexico and Islam.
That's where we have to focus, mainly by strengthening fortress America.
Our wordly elites should satisfy they hunger for meddling by visiting Paris and Italy as often as they wish.
Posted by mik_infidelos | October 18, 2007 6:00 PM
Well, the general point is that hegemonist policies, of which United States policy towards Russia is incontrovertibly an example, are illicit; policies of that type - policies the object of which is to subvert a foreign nation and subordinate it to one's strategy - can only be justified when criteria analogous to those of Just War doctrine are fulfilled. No such justification has been attempted in the present instance, and none will be, both because the political establishment perceives no need to justify policies of this type, and because no credible justification could be contrived. The reality is that American global strategy assumes that the United States is not merely the preeminent power of the Western hemisphere, but also the dominant power in the Near East and Asia, and that it is impermissible for any nation or bloc of nations to present even a hypothetical challenge to American supremacy. Benevolent global hegemony is presupposed as the norm of international relations, and policies such as those implemented against Russia are preemptive measures, intended to forestall the possibility that Russia could re-emerge as a Eurasian power; multipolarity is anathema, because the "natural" place in the global order of nations such as Russia is a subordinate one. Americans are wont to confuse the affirmation of such machinations with patriotism, but these policies cannot be patriotic, because they negate the conditions of patriotism. One may denote such policies by any term one likes, be it ideology, nationalism (in the invidious sense), or armed hubris; but, as they are void of that recognition of the other which is integral with patriotism properly so called, it is imperative that they not be conflated with the genuine article. I should say that it would be an injustice to the mentally afflicted to deem these policies a species of madness; they are instances of the powerful exulting in their power over the weak, not even from necessity, but as its own object.
Of course the CIA, the State Department, and various non-governmental organizations - which is to say, private arms of political power - devoted considerable resources to the Orange factions; we will never know the extent of the influence absent the disclosure of information pertaining to those efforts and their effects upon public opinion in the Ukraine. However, the point is that, in the absence of such an American interest in the outcome of Ukrainian elections, those elections would be nothing more than localized thieves' auctions, certainly nothing worth the attention of American strategists.
At this stage, it is not so much a matter of limiting the mischief caused by Russian maneuvering, as of limiting our own mischief:
Those knowledgeable in foreign affairs certainly believe, with reason, that the American foreign-policy establishment is capable of marshaling resources towards the realization of long-term strategic goals. It is the nature of those goals that remains dubious; judging by the absence of an articulated rationale for the policies (apart from what is said in the higher echelons of the FP establishment, and by intelligence and policy analysts) I would have to conclude that the justification is even less substantial than that provided for the Iraq war. As regards the three strategic threats you identify, quite aside from the fact that the establishment is delusional with regards to both China and Islam, and does not regard the Mexican demographic conquest as problematic, how, precisely, does marginalizing Russia augment America's ability to confront these threats?
The manifest answer is that it does not; it is not only morally dubious, it is counterproductive. But attempt to explain that to a neoconservative, or one of our misnamed "realists", such as old Kissenger.
Posted by Maximos | October 18, 2007 10:54 PM
"As regards the three strategic threats you identify, quite aside from the fact that the establishment is delusional with regards to both China and Islam, and does not regard the Mexican demographic conquest as problematic,"
It is clear the current elites do not understand strategic threats. Even more important to focus on real threats in blogosphere instead of paying attention to a minor, perhaps temporary so, problem of relations with Russia.
Our idiotic establishment still fights the last war, that would be Cold War, where Russia is most important. We don't have to follow those nincompoops.
Posted by mik_infidelos | October 19, 2007 1:06 AM
I can't speak to the Russia question, but your arguments on the nature of patriotism are extremely well said.
Posted by Paul J Cella | October 19, 2007 9:25 AM
It is important to discuss these things, every now and then, for two reasons, the first moral, the second geopolitical. First, it is utterly unworthy of us, as a people, to become and be the sort of nation that undermines, subverts, and obviates the substantive goods of other peoples - their rights of self-government, their inherited traditions, and so forth - not because the criteria of Just War indicate that such actions are prudentially warranted, but for low, utilitarian and pecuniary reasons (or do I speak in redundancies?). Russia does not pose a grave and lasting threat to the security and existence of the United States. Russia, by circumscribing the involvement of Western multinationals in its energy sector, has not so grievously violated a moral precept that subversion has become a licit response. Russia's continued existence as a sovereign, near-great-power state does not pose a risk lasting, grave, and certain. And so forth. Any arguments to the effect that it does are monkeyshines, which is why no one actually articulates them; all of the arguments invoke the dark specter of the Cold War and nascent authoritarianism, when the reality is that Russia's policies are direct responses to the unjustified intrusions upon her geopolitical space.
The Cold War language is inapposite in another sense, as well: Russia is engaged in traditional great-power balancing, not the global and imperial campaigning of an ideological power, such as the Soviet Union, which renders the ideological American strategy doubly inappropriate.
The second reason for discussing these matters is more pragmatic. The failures or American policy vis-a-vis Russia are identical (excepting the obvious calamities of the Iraq War) with the failures of American policy vis-a-vis Islam. In both instances, the causes of international instability - illusory in the case of Russia, and all too real in the case of Islam - are considered to arise from the fact that neither Russia nor the Islamic world have been incorporated into an international political and economic architecture dominated by Western, preeminently American institutions. Hence, the mania for the installation of democracies in the Islamic world, with the stated assumption being that democratic capitalism will so enthrall Muslims with the allurements of consumerism and mass prosperity, that they will jettison their radicalism (traditionalism, really, but the establishment cannot grant this much), this radicalism being a sublimation of economic and political discontent. Hence, as well, the association in American rhetoric and policy of Russian democracy with the great barbecue of the 90s, in which oligarchs (little better than mafiya dons) primitively accumulated the assets of the Russian people and state, and then allowed Western interests cut-rate access, on terms ludicrously unfavourable to the Russian people themselves: because that simply is democratic capitalism in action. Hence, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, which merely exchanged one group of corrupt officials and oligarchs for another, but allowed America to exert geopolitical leverage, and Western companies to acquire Georgian assets (let's just state that those power utilities' rates rent up, but the quality of service did not). Similarly for the Ukraine (wherefore, my quotation of long sections of a Stratfor analysis of the disposition of critical assets in the Ukraine, and the designs of the Orange coalition upon them.)
Hence, the bottom line: American strategy is predicated upon the extension of democratic capitalism as the solely legitimate expression of global order, where that order is defined as having America and her institutions in the authoritative roles. This is the strategy that we must abandon if we wish to deal effectively with Islam and, again, justly with nations such as Russia. And then, there is the China problem - American policy is, again, predicated upon the assumption that commerce will beget democracy in China, and that the increasing economic integration of America and China will redound to the benefit of the former. The policy is delusional on both counts.
The American foreign-policy establishment does possess a more or less integrated vision, and unfortunately, that vision is impaired - the strategy of "openness"
Posted by Maximos | October 19, 2007 11:40 AM
I can't help feeling the analogy here is a bit odd and strained. Surely if by your own acct., Maximos, the threat from Russia is illusory and the threat from Islam very real, this makes the two situations more different than they are similar. For one thing, it at least raises the probability that somewhere, at some time, we _will_ have to abandon isolationism and fight a foreign war against an Islamic power. I want to make it clear that I haven't got a specific one in mind. I'm just speaking in terms of what "the threat from Islam is real" might mean in the long run. And it may well be that one major failure in the rhetoric and policy of America is the failure to realize that the threat from Islam is real, whereas on your account, the failure w.r.t. Russia is in overestimating the threat.
And while I agree that the democratization project w.r.t. Islam is a mistake, this is--perhaps most importantly for us--because jihad is all too popular in Islamic countries, whereas there is no parallel to this reason in your whole list of sins we have supposedly committed against the Russians. In fact, in your account we have _suppressed_ Russian and other former Russian satellite states' self-government.
And one thing I'm _not_ willing to grant is that we should avoid trying to promote democracy in Islamic countries because their cultural ways of being are things for which we should have such a deep respect and things we should treat with such care and delicacy. I think that to an important extent their cultural norms and traditions stink, and ours are a lot better. If that calls my own American patriotism into question, big deal.
Posted by Lydia | October 19, 2007 1:05 PM
My argument may read like an analogy, though it was not intended as one; it was intended, rather, to establish that the respective sets of policy failures originate in the same architectonic geopolitical strategy. The specific situations I mention are really applications of that strategy, and not really analogies between the Islamic world and the FSU. In point of fact, one and the same strategy of global openness, aiming toward the universalization of democratic capitalism, has at once meddled in the political affairs of the FSU, bending outcomes beyond what they would have been otherwise, while actually liberating the impulses of traditional Islam in the Muslim world. Citizens of the FSU have had their options placed under a set of constraints other than those that would have arisen indigenously, while Muslims in numerous countries have had constraints removed, with unhappy consequences for us.
This, incidentally, is the principal reason to eschew democracy promotion, namely, that it has empowered the sharia-peddlers and jihadists. Islamic culture offers little that would, or ought to, appeal to any Westerner, and we ought not regard their civilization as equivalent in worth and attainments to our own; but this discrimination in judgment does not, of itself, justify attempts to refashion the Islamic world.
We may, at some stage, have to fight another war in the Islamic world, but not on the terms established by either the Muslims or the fetishists of benevolent global hegemony.
Posted by Maximos | October 19, 2007 1:24 PM
"it at least raises the probability that somewhere, at some time, we _will_ have to abandon isolationism and fight a foreign war against an Islamic power."
Why do you want to jump before we try to walk?
Why not try Separationism, a simple, humane and clearly workable world arrangement developed in some detail by Lawrence Auster and a few others.
In fact Separationism is a modified version of Containment that worked so well against Russkies.
But you keep missing the big picture.
There are China, Mexico and Islam.
I don't really know what is the most dangerous, but I incline towards China.
There is Chinese fifth column, much smarter and more efficient than Islamic counterpart.
PRC Army capabilities are growing like a mushroom after rain.
Elites are totally penetrated by PRC, witness Chinese spies as friends of Clintons, transfer super-secret missile technology, Labor Secretary in Jorge Boosh admin whose father is a major finacier of PRC, etc.
Imagine son of Krupp in war-time Roosevelt cabinet. How times have changed.
There is relatively wide recoqnition in US populace of Mexican invasion and Islam evil.
There is little recoqnition of China menace.
Posted by mik_infidelos | October 19, 2007 2:34 PM
I wasn't trying to run before walking Mik. I'm all in favor of a lot of things that you probably would call separationism. I was just making a general point about the diff. between the Islam situation and the Russian situation (as Maximos himself portrays it). That was all. Evidently he agrees with me about that difference.
Posted by Lydia | October 19, 2007 2:48 PM