Are American patriots really dangerous?

By Donald Hank

If you enter the official web sites of mainstream denominations these days and do an on-site search for "nationalism," you will find a plethora of scholarly articles denouncing nationalism. To underscore the importance of overcoming nationalism, the authors often point to the Islamists and virulent pan-Arabism.

Even the traditionally more orthodox Baptists and Southern Baptists now denounce nationalism as something dangerous and un-Christian.

The reasoning is that if you're a Christian, you are part of an international community that knows no boundaries.

But who said you weren't? I have never heard a Christian assert otherwise.

Since the earliest times, the Poles and Hungarians, for example, who speak vastly different tongues (Hungarian is outside the Indo-European group), have had an affinity for each other, so much so that a little Polish poem starts out "Pole, Hungarian, two brothers..."

And this is precisely because they see themselves as brothers in the Catholic faith.

Religion has always been international.

What's more, it is precisely the internationalism, not the nationalism, of the Muslim world that makes Islamism so dangerous. Go to any Al Qaeda training camp in the world and you will find an array of languages spoken among the brotherhood: Farsi, Darsi, mutually unintelligible Arabic dialects from Moroccan and Egyptian to Saudi and Levantine; Pashtun, Pashto, Sindhi, Urdu; Turkish, Malaysian, French, English, and others.

No nationalism here! Terror is as international as it gets.

Yet for some reason, the church fathers and mothers in America insist that nationalism — a code word for patriotism — is dangerous. Not one of them denounces internationalism, which, considering that communism was the international workers' movement, has caused by far the most deaths worldwide, many more than nationalism. Not only that, the idea of internationalism as an evil ties in perfectly with Old Testament passages in which the prophets denounced disobedient Israelites for accepting foreign gods and foreign ways and for intermarrying with non-Jews. Something doesn't smell quite right here.

But as a former leftist internationalist, I know the game and the jargon. You can't kid the kidder.

I once set about to spread the leftist gospel of secularist enlightenment to the world. A true believer, I lived abroad for a total of 8 years in total immersion situations, eating, drinking, and speaking native, in the belief that all human beings were brothers and that the best way to make everyone aware of this was to erase cultural and religious views that interfere — namely, just about all of them.

I am ashamed to admit I was that naïve.

At the end of the 90s, just as I was snapping out of this insanity, I came back from my last trip to an America that had fallen for the same nonsense.

One of the milestones in my journey back to reality was my acquaintance with a Chinese engaged couple who were studying law at the University of Taiwan. They were probably the smartest, nicest, most dynamic and optimistic people I had met in the three years I spent in that country, which is famous for its smart, nice, dynamic and optimistic people. I will refer to them as Ben and Rhonda.

Once over dinner at our favorite vegetarian restaurant, we got on the subject of Ronald Reagan, who was in his 2nd term then. Wanting to show them how non-chauvinistic I was, I said I thought Reagan was a warmonger. They both looked amazed and asked why I thought that. I sputtered out some incoherent tripe, trying to reflect things I had heard American leftists say (I had once belonged to the Nuclear Freeze movement).

But I frankly didn't know. And with Ben and Rhonda as sounding boards, I could tell I sounded like an idiot.

Rhonda said "I think Ron Reagan has a terrific sense of humor," and she told me a really funny thing that he had said. Coming from her mouth, I realized this was really funny and witty, and that I didn't have a clue who Reagan really was, because I had never given his speeches an honest and fair audience.

Now, if any American had spoken to me of Reagan back then, I probably would have rejected their statements out of hand. But I was all ears when my foreign friends and acquaintances spoke — at least the bright ones.

And now, over 20 years later, thinking of a famous Reagan quote, I realize something important.

The quote is this unabashedly nationalistic one: "We will preserve for our children this last best hope of mankind on earth, or we will make them take the first step into a thousand years of darkness."

And the realization is this: American nationalism is unlike any nationalism I have experienced anywhere else in the world. This is because Americans are by nature — by culture — self-effacing, altruistic, thoughtful and open minded. So to be an American patriot is to love those attributes, which make us love and respect our fellow human beings everywhere on earth.

Further, when American leaders denounce nationalism, while giving internationalism a pass, it is clear that they are asking us to renounce our love for a people imbued with these outstanding traits, which according to Ronald Reagan, are the hope of the world.

Why would they do this? Clearly, they do so to support an agenda. And I believe part of that agenda is to ram supranationalism, and specifically, the stealth agenda of the North American Union and the LOST and Kyoto treaties, along with open borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants, down our throats. The agenda is to eliminate not nationalism but our nation itself.

I still believe all human beings are brothers, because we are created in the likeness of our Maker. But I now realize that no country on earth has a clearer understanding of this or a greater compassion for their fellow man than the United States of America.

Let's preserve it if we still can.

© Donald Hank