“Meneer De Villiers, van ’n linksgesinde, kleurblind voorheen bevoordeelde: u het verlede week op legendariese skaal aangejaag.”
Gister se wedstryd, só het dit gevoel, is so hittete in die kleedkamer verloor. In elk geval: die kans is verbrou om Britse rugby vir die volgende seisoen of drie te traumatiseer.
Louis de Villiers, Rapport
So, dÃs hoekom hulle Morné Steyn volstruis noem: dié voëls lê yslike eiers en Steyn was die bynaam waardig toe hy, ná die toeter hier, die reeks teen die Leeus beklink het met ’n yslike strafdoel van 53 meter om die Bokke met 28-25 te laat wen.
Dit was ’n Calvinistiese oorwinning hierdie – genade en nie verdienste nie: Die Leeus het dié ene met mening verdien en het eers in die laaste kwartier uitgesak toe die lugdruk ’n faktor geraak het.
Watter sportwetenskaplikes ook al die Leeu-bestuur vertel het jy kom verkieslik ’n dag voor die tyd Hoëveld toe, verdien ’n goue horlosie van Saru – óf dis Suid-Afrikaners, óf hulle was ’n ewe groot charlatans as twee derdes van dié relatief nuwe beroep.
En die toetrede van Steyn, saam met die ewe deurslaggewende Bok-plaasvervangers Jaque Fourie en Heinrich Brüssow, het hier ’n bitter swaar wa deur ’n bitter diep drif gesleep.
Fourie, Brüssow en Steyn draf hopelik almal Saterdag op Ellispark in die begin-vyftiental uit.
Glurende fout
Die weglating van veral Brüssow, ná wie se voortydige vertrek in Durban dit eweneens geknor het vir Bok se kind, was ’n glurende fout deur die Bok-wyses en die oomblik dat die jong Vrystater terug op die veld was, het dit weer gelyk of Suid-Afrika kan wen.
Want op al die slimstories wat ons weer verlede week moes aanhoor oor wit en swart werktuigkundiges en Bybel-hoofstukke, het die uwe net één vraag vir die Bok-breier, Peter de Villiers – het u nie dalk die nommer van ’n géél werktuigkundige nie?
Ewenwel, dit was nogmaals – selfs op Loftus – ’n tuisskare vir die Leeus, danksy die kaartjiepryse. Saru se algemene bestuurder, Andy Marinos, het hom dié week op die wêreldwye kredietknars beroep vir dié toedrag van sake. Niemand het dit glo sien kom nie, aldus Marinos.
O ja? Wel, dalk verwag ons net te veel van ’n man wie se loopbaan as speler ’n hoogtepunt bereik het met ’n staking vir meer geld.
Daar is oorgenoeg getuienis dat dié g’n besondere Britse en Ierse Leeus-rugbyspan is nie – die eerste 50 minute van die eerste toets ’n week vroeër was klaar genoegsaam om te weet dat die Springbokke nie werklik probleme moes ondervind om hulle te klop nie.
En gister was dit ook aanvanklik Suid-Afrika. Maar dié keer net vir ongeveer 30 sekondes.
Bittere Bok-simfonie
Die Leeus het nogmaals ’n sterk Bok-losgemaal grond toe getrek toe Schalk Burger dalk die domste ding van sy loopbaan doen en met sy vingers in die Ierse vleuel Luke Fitzgerald se bakkies begin woel. Die Ierland-flank Allan Quinlan loop dié toer mis ná ’n skorsing van 12 weke oor die einste oortreding.
Dié geel kaart was die overture tot ’n bittere Bok-simfonie – hierna was dit benoude boude tot sowat ’n kwartier voor die eindfluitjie, toe Brüssow ’n ritme kom help vestig het, Fourie meer teenwoordigheid in die middel gebring het en Steyn rigting gegee het aan ’n deurmekruis Springbok-span.
Eerlikwaar: tot in dié stadium kon ’n man net vir Fourie du Preez, Bryan Habana en in ’n mindere mate Juan Smith en JP Pietersen kwytskeld van wat na ’n oorgeruste poging gelyk het deur die tuisspan.
Die Bokke moes meer lak, had minder balbesit en ná die eerste helfte kon ’n man alleenlik hul gees prys op die verdediging in hul eie kwartgebied. Maar veggees is nie altyd genoeg nie. ’n Bietjie dieper denke voor die uitdrafslag help ewe veel.
Gister se wedstryd, só het dit gevoel, is so hittete in die kleedkamer verloor.
In elk geval: die kans is verbrou om Britse rugby vir die volgende seisoen of drie te traumatiseer.
Kans verbrou
Die gaping is gelaat vir hulle om verskonings te maak nadat daar die kans was om die toerspan te bêre soos selde tevore.
Hier is ’n grusame feit: die Bokke het (kon?) die bal gister net twee maal behoorlik wyd speel. Nommer twee was ’n deurslaggewende drie.
Peter de Villiers se besluit om Jean de Villiers af te haal vir Jaque Fourie was niks minder nie as domastrantheid: Adrian Jacobs, ’n skitterende speler wat tans van stryk is, is deur ’n gedeelte van die skare uitgejou, nes De Wet Barry voor hom.
Barry, ook op sy dag ’n skitterende speler, se toetsloopbaan is ook geruïneer deur ’n hardekop-afrigter wat vorm ignoreer het.
Dit maak my nou nog hartseer.
Hier is hy, Meneer De Villiers, van ’n linksgesinde, kleurblind voorheen bevoordeelde: u het verlede week aangejaag op legendariese skaal.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:43 am
I just love a journo with guts
and balls – telling it how it
is!
And in grand style.
June 28th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Reply to Boertjie @ 1:43 am:
Wat is skaal?
June 28th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
“die kans is verbrou om Britse rugby vir die volgende seisoen of drie te traumatiseer.”
Oscar Wilde was a very wise man and still my favourite quote of all: “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”
Not enough to just win, they must be annihilated. Isn’t it time to let go of the Anglo Boer war. It has been more than a century allready. No need to suffer “vervolgingswaan” anymore. Geesh it is worse than the Jews. Newsflash there is a future. The survival on mankind is not in the balance because of rugby.
And BTW the “Grensoorlog” is also something of the past.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Reply to bryce_in_oz @ 11:04 am:
scale
Jis dis excellent geskryf Louis.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Reply to DavidS @ 1:47 pm:
Ah thanks mate… got it…
June 28th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Thanks Deon,
for that.
I personally am gutted that we
haven’t managed to end one
Lion’s career yet.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Oscar Wilde was a very wise man and still my favourite quote of all: “Patriotism is the virtue f the vicious�
Oscar Wilde was a paff who became embittered because Victorian England sent him to jail for sticking his thing in another man’s bum.
The bulllshit in his remark is evident in history.
1. The patriotism made Greece rulers of the known world.
2. The patriotism that made Mongolia the second largest empire in the history of the world.
3. Patriotism created the Pax Romanum
4. America ruled the 20th century because its citizens are first and foremost AMERICANS.
5. Britain spent the 19th century becoming the largest emipre in the history of the world because people believed in Britain.
Oscar Wilde was nothing but an embittered poofter. If anything, patriotism is what advances competition among people and leads to competitive Darwinian progress… something moronic quotes like that use to consign man to the junk heap of dinosaurs and wooly mammoths.
Your second parafraph’s impugnations, when viewed against the factual moronism of the first is as excrecable.
Rather go sleep and hum Waltzing Mathilda in you Stormers shirt… or does the irony of that go above your ability to regurgitate a ready made quote?
June 28th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Vat so §
Mooi man Oom Dawie,
gee gas.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
hel, hierdie is higher-grade taal, kannie fokkol verstaan nie.
lol, oscar wilde may have been a paf, but he was a beautiful writer.
nice to see duiwel and donner’s return.
2-0 to the wee maestro.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Reply to Deon @ 1:41 pm:
Yes
Yesterday’s game is also something of the past.
It does still influence the next week as well.
The larger the scale of things( the event) the longer the influence will be.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
worthwhile to read this carefuLLy
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=11015
“On Patriotism
by Rep. Ron Paul
May 24, 2007
For some, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For others, it means dissent against a government’s abuse of the people’s rights.
I have never met a politician in Washington or any American, for that matter, who chose to be called unpatriotic. Nor have I met anyone who did not believe he wholeheartedly supported our troops, wherever they may be.
What I have heard all too frequently from various individuals are sharp accusations that, because their political opponents disagree with them on the need for foreign military entanglements, they were unpatriotic, un-American evildoers deserving contempt.
The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George. I accept the definition of patriotism as that effort to resist oppressive state power.
The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self-interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state. Resistance need not be violent, but the civil disobedience that might be required involves confrontation with the state and invites possible imprisonment.
Peaceful, nonviolent revolutions against tyranny have been every bit as successful as those involving military confrontation. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved great political successes by practicing nonviolence, and yet they suffered physically at the hands of the state. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is nonviolent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.
True patriotism today has gotten a bad name, at least from the government and the press. Those who now challenge the unconstitutional methods of imposing an income tax on us, or force us to use a monetary system designed to serve the rich at the expense of the poor are routinely condemned. These American patriots are sadly looked down upon by many. They are never praised as champions of liberty as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have been.
Liberals, who withhold their taxes as a protest against war, are vilified as well, especially by conservatives. Unquestioned loyalty to the state is especially demanded in times of war. Lack of support for a war policy is said to be unpatriotic. Arguments against a particular policy that endorses a war, once it is started, are always said to be endangering the troops in the field. This, they blatantly claim, is unpatriotic, and all dissent must stop. Yet, it is dissent from government policies that defines the true patriot and champion of liberty.
It is conveniently ignored that the only authentic way to best support the troops is to keep them out of dangerous undeclared no-win wars that are politically inspired. Sending troops off to war for reasons that are not truly related to national security and, for that matter, may even damage our security, is hardly a way to patriotically support the troops.
Who are the true patriots, those who conform or those who protest against wars without purpose? How can it be said that blind support for a war, no matter how misdirected the policy, is the duty of a patriot?
Randolph Bourne said that, “War is the health of the state.” With war, he argued, the state thrives. Those who believe in the powerful state see war as an opportunity. Those who mistrust the people and the market for solving problems have no trouble promoting a “war psychology” to justify the expansive role of the state. This includes the role the Federal Government plays in our lives, as well as in our economic transactions.
Certainly, the neoconservative belief that we have a moral obligation to spread American values worldwide through force justifies the conditions of war in order to rally support at home for the heavy hand of government. It is through this policy, it should surprise no one, that our liberties are undermined. The economy becomes overextended, and our involvement worldwide becomes prohibited. Out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic, most of the citizens become compliant and accept the argument that some loss of liberty is required to fight the war in order to remain safe.
This is a bad trade-off, in my estimation, especially when done in the name of patriotism. Loyalty to the state and to autocratic leaders is substituted for true patriotism; that is, a willingness to challenge the state and defend the country, the people and the culture. The more difficult the times, the stronger the admonition comes that the leaders be not criticized.
Because the crisis atmosphere of war supports the growth of the state, any problem invites an answer by declaring war, even on social and economic issues. This elicits patriotism in support of various government solutions, while enhancing the power of the state. Faith in government coercion and a lack of understanding of how free societies operate encourages big-government liberals and big-government conservatives to manufacture a war psychology to demand political loyalty for domestic policy just as is required in foreign affairs.
The long-term cost in dollars spent and liberties lost is neglected as immediate needs are emphasized. It is for this reason that we have multiple perpetual wars going on simultaneously. Thus, the war on drugs, the war against gun ownership, the war against poverty, the war against illiteracy, the war against terrorism, as well as our foreign military entanglements are endless.
All this effort promotes the growth of statism at the expense of liberty. A government designed for a free society should do the opposite, prevent the growth of statism and preserve liberty.
Once a war of any sort is declared, the message is sent out not to object or you will be declared unpatriotic. Yet, we must not forget that the true patriot is the one who protests in spite of the consequences. Condemnation or ostracism or even imprisonment may result.
Nonviolent protesters of the Tax Code are frequently imprisoned, whether they are protesting the code’s unconstitutionality or the war that the tax revenues are funding. Resisters to the military draft or even to Selective Service registration are threatened and imprisoned for challenging this threat to liberty.
Statism depends on the idea that the government owns us and citizens must obey. Confiscating the fruits of our labor through the income tax is crucial to the health of the state. The draft, or even the mere existence of the Selective Service, emphasizes that we will march off to war at the state’s pleasure.
A free society rejects all notions of involuntary servitude, whether by draft or the confiscation of the fruits of our labor through the personal income tax. A more sophisticated and less well-known technique for enhancing the state is the manipulation and transfer of wealth through the fiat monetary system operated by the secretive Federal Reserve.
Protesters against this unconstitutional system of paper money are considered unpatriotic criminals and at times are imprisoned for their beliefs. The fact that, according to the Constitution, only gold and silver are legal tender and paper money outlawed matters little. The principle of patriotism is turned on its head. Whether it’s with regard to the defense of welfare spending at home, confiscatory income tax, or an immoral monetary system or support for a war fought under false pretense without a legal declaration, the defenders of liberty and the Constitution are portrayed as unpatriotic, while those who support these programs are seen as the patriots.
If there is a war going on, supporting the state’s effort to win the war is expected at all costs, no dissent. The real problem is that those who love the state too often advocate policies that lead to military action. At home, they are quite willing to produce a crisis atmosphere and claim a war is needed to solve the problem. Under these conditions, the people are more willing to bear the burden of paying for the war and to carelessly sacrifice liberties, which they are told is necessary.
The last 6 years have been quite beneficial to the health of the state, which comes at the expense of personal liberty. Every enhanced unconstitutional power of the state can only be achieved at the expense of individual liberty. Even though in every war in which we have been engaged civil liberties have suffered, some have been restored after the war ended, but never completely. That has resulted in a steady erosion of our liberties over the past 200 years. Our government was originally designed to protect our liberties, but it has now, instead, become the usurper of those liberties.
We currently live in the most difficult of times for guarding against an expanding central government with a steady erosion of our freedoms. We are continually being reminded that 9/11 has changed everything.
Unfortunately, the policy that needed most to be changed, that is, our policy of foreign interventionism, has only been expanded. There is no pretense any longer that a policy of humility in foreign affairs, without being the world’s policemen and engaging in nation building, is worthy of consideration.
We now live in a post-9/11 America where our government is going to make us safe no matter what it takes. We are expected to grin and bear it and adjust to every loss of our liberties in the name of patriotism and security.
Though the majority of Americans initially welcomed the declared effort to make us safe, and we are willing to sacrifice for the cause, more and more Americans are now becoming concerned about civil liberties being needlessly and dangerously sacrificed.
The problem is that the Iraq war continues to drag on, and a real danger of it spreading exists. There is no evidence that a truce will soon be signed in Iraq or in the war on terror or the war on drugs. Victory is not even definable. If Congress is incapable of declaring an official war, it is impossible to know when it will end. We have been fully forewarned that the world conflict in which we are now engaged will last a long, long time.
The war mentality and the pervasive fear of an unidentified enemy allows for a steady erosion of our liberties, and, with this, our respect for self-reliance and confidence is lost. Just think of the self-sacrifice and the humiliation we go through at the airport screening process on a routine basis. Though there is no scientific evidence of any likelihood of liquids and gels being mixed on an airplane to make a bomb, billions of dollars are wasted throwing away toothpaste and hair spray, and searching old women in wheelchairs.
Our enemies say boo, and we jump, we panic, and then we punish ourselves. We are worse than a child being afraid of the dark. But in a way, the fear of indefinable terrorism is based on our inability to admit the truth about why there is a desire by a small number of angry radical Islamists to kill Americans. It is certainly not because they are jealous of our wealth and freedoms.
We fail to realize that the extremists, willing to sacrifice their own lives to kill their enemies, do so out of a sense of weakness and desperation over real and perceived attacks on their way of life, their religion, their country, and their natural resources. Without the conventional diplomatic or military means to retaliate against these attacks, and an unwillingness of their own government to address the issue, they resort to the desperation tactic of suicide terrorism. Their anger toward their own governments, which they believe are coconspirators with the American Government, is equal to or greater than that directed toward us.
These errors in judgment in understanding the motive of the enemy and the constant fear that is generated have brought us to this crisis where our civil liberties and privacy are being steadily eroded in the name of preserving national security.
We may be the economic and the military giant of the world, but the effort to stop this war on our liberties here at home in the name of patriotism is being lost.
The erosion of our personal liberties started long before 9/11, but 9/11 accelerated the process. There are many things that motivate those who pursue this course, both well-intentioned and malevolent, but it would not happen if the people remained vigilant, understood the importance of individual rights, and were unpersuaded that a need for security justifies the sacrifice for liberty, even if it is just now and then.
The true patriot challenges the state when the state embarks on enhancing its power at the expense of the individual. Without a better understanding and a greater determination to rein in the state, the rights of Americans that resulted from the revolutionary break from the British and the writing of the Constitution will disappear.
The record since September 11th is dismal. Respect for liberty has rapidly deteriorated. Many of the new laws passed after 9/11 had, in fact, been proposed long before that attack. The political atmosphere after that attack simply made it more possible to pass such legislation. The fear generated by 9/11 became an opportunity for those seeking to promote the power of the state domestically, just as it served to falsely justify the long-planned invasion of Iraq.
The war mentality was generated by the Iraq war in combination with the constant drumbeat of fear at home. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who is now likely residing in Pakistan, our supposed ally, are ignored, as our troops fight and die in Iraq and are made easier targets for the terrorists in their backyard. While our leaders constantly use the mess we created to further justify the erosion of our constitutional rights here at home, we forget about our own borders and support the inexorable move toward global government, hardly a good plan for America.
The accelerated attacks on liberty started quickly after 9/11. Within weeks, the PATRIOT Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Though the final version was unavailable up to a few hours before the vote, no Member had sufficient time to study it. Political fear of not doing something, even something harmful, drove the Members of Congress to not question the contents, and just voted for it. A little less freedom for a little more perceived safety was considered a fair trade-off, and the majority of Americans applauded.
The PATRIOT Act, though, severely eroded the system of checks and balances by giving the government the power to spy on law-abiding citizens without judicial supervision. The several provisions that undermine the liberties of all Americans include sneak-and-peek searches, a broadened and more vague definition of domestic terrorism, allowing the FBI access to library and bookstore records without search warrants or probable cause, easier FBI initiation of wiretaps and searches, as well as roving wiretaps, easier access to information on American citizens’ use of the Internet, and easier access to e-mail and financial records of all American citizens.
The attack on privacy has not relented over the past 6 years. The Military Commissions Act is a particularly egregious piece of legislation and, if not repealed, will change America for the worse as the powers unconstitutionally granted to the executive branch are used and abused. This act grants excessive authority to use secretive military commissions outside of places where active hostilities are going on. The Military Commissions Act permits torture, arbitrary detention of American citizens as unlawful enemy combatants at the full discretion of the President and without the right of habeas corpus, and warrantless searches by the NSA. It also gives to the President the power to imprison individuals based on secret testimony.
Since 9/11, Presidential signing statements designating portions of legislation that the President does not intend to follow, though not legal under the Constitution, have enormously multiplied. Unconstitutional Executive Orders are numerous and mischievous and need to be curtailed.
Extraordinary rendition to secret prisons around the world have been widely engaged in, though obviously extralegal.
A growing concern in the post-9/11 environment is the Federal Government’s list of potential terrorists based on secret evidence. Mistakes are made, and sometimes it is virtually impossible to get one’s name removed even though the accused is totally innocent of any wrongdoing.
A national ID card is now in the process of being implemented. It is called the REAL ID card, and it is tied to our Social Security numbers and our State driver’s license. If REAL ID is not stopped, it will become a national driver’s license ID for all Americans. We will be required to carry our papers.
Some of the least-noticed and least-discussed changes in the law were the changes made to the Insurrection Act of 1807 and to posse comitatus by the Defense Authorization Act of 2007. These changes pose a threat to the survival of our Republic by giving the President the power to declare martial law for as little reason as to restore public order. The 1807 act severely restricted the President in his use of the military within the United States borders, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 strengthened these restrictions with strict oversight by Congress. The new law allows the President to circumvent the restrictions of both laws. The Insurrection Act has now become the “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” This is hardly a title that suggests that the authors cared about or understood the nature of a constitutional Republic.
Now, martial law can be declared not just for insurrection, but also for natural disasters, public health reasons, terrorist attacks or incidents, or for the vague reason called “other conditions.” The President can call up the National Guard without congressional approval or the Governors’ approval, and even send these State Guard troops into other States.
The American Republic is in remnant status. The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into a military dictatorship, and few seem to care. These precedent-setting changes in the law are extremely dangerous and will change American jurisprudence forever if not revised. The beneficial results of our revolt against the King’s abuses are about to be eliminated, and few Members of Congress and few Americans are aware of the seriousness of the situation. Complacency and fear drive our legislation without any serious objection by our elected leaders. Sadly, though, those few who do object to this self-evident trend away from personal liberty and empire-building overseas are portrayed as unpatriotic and uncaring.
Though welfare and socialism always fails, opponents of them are said to lack compassion. Though opposition to totally unnecessary war should be the only moral position, the rhetoric is twisted to claim that patriots who oppose the war are not supporting the troops. The cliché “Support the Troops” is incessantly used as a substitute for the unacceptable notion of supporting the policy, no matter how flawed it may be.
Unsound policy can never help the troops. Keeping the troops out of harm’s way and out of wars unrelated to our national security is the only real way of protecting the troops. With this understanding, just who can claim the title of “patriot”?
Before the war in the Middle East spreads and becomes a world conflict for which we will be held responsible, or the liberties of all Americans become so suppressed we can no longer resist, much has to be done. Time is short, but our course of action should be clear. Resistance to illegal and unconstitutional usurpation of our rights is required. Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes.
But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.
“
June 28th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
http://www.inquiry.net/ideals/on_patriotism.htm
On Patriotism
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by Ernest Thompson Seton
The word patriotism stands in history for the noblest type of fortitude and self-sacrifice, and yet that same word can be used as a cloak for almost any crime,–has been the excuse for more crimes in history, perhaps, than any other known motive power, except religion. Without attempting to dissect what has always proven the most intricate complication of impulses, I shall relate four incidents which shed light or contain guidance for those who are in need of such.
1
At a great military review in the Old World long ago, a young soldier was selected to stand before the Emperor as the perfect type of military physical manhood. To make sure that his moral and mental equipment were as satisfactory as his physique, the Ruler said: “If I command you to slaughter your mother right now, would you do it?”
“Instantly, without hesitation, Sire,” was the answer.
“Correct,” said the Emperor. And he forthwith decorated him as the ideal of his Army.
2
When George III of England ordered the British Army to America to crush the Colonists, then in rebellion, British officers by the hundred resigned, rather than fight their brethren who were in the right; consequently King George had to import Hessians for the job.
3
When Socrates was on trial for his life, he spoke in his own defense. After reminding them that he had been a valiant soldier in defense of the republic, he proceeded to show that his loyalty to righteousness was stronger than his loyalty to his country’s government in the following words: “When the Oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to execute him. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes; and then I showed not in words only, but in deed, that, if I may be allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my only fear was the fear of doing an unrighteous or unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda, the other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end.”
4
The Pharisees came to Jesus and said: “Who is my neighbor.”
And Jesus, answering, said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half-dead.
“And by chance there came down a certain priest that way and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.
“And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.
“And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
“And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him: “Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.”
“Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? ( Luke 10. )
June 28th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
http://www.hindunet.org/vivekananda/patriotism
VIVEKANANDA ON : PATRIOTISM
*******************************************************************************
They talk of patriotism. I believe in patriotism, and I also have
my own ideal of patriotism. Three things are necessary for great achieve-
ments : First, feel from the heart. What is in the intellect or reason?
It goes a few steps nad there it stops. But through the heart comes insp-
iration.Love opens the most impossible gates; love is the gates to all
the secrets in the universe. Feel, therefore, my would-be reformers, my
would-be patriots! Do you feel? Do you feel that the millions and millions
of the descendants of gods and of sages have become next-door neighbous to
brutes? Do you feel that millions have been starving today, and millions
have been starving for ages? Do you feel that ignorance has come over the
land as a dark crowd? Does it make you restless? Does it make you sleepless?
Has it gone over your blood, coursing through your veins, becoming consona-
nant with your heart-beats? Has it made you almost mad? Are you seized with
the one idea of misery and ruin, and have you forgotten all about your name,
your fame, your wives, your children, your property, even your own bodies?
Have you done tht? This is the first step to become a patriot, the very
first step…….
You may feel, then; but instead of spending your energies on frothy
talk, have you found any way out, any practical solution, some help instead
of condemnation, some sweet words to soothe their miseries, to bring them
out of this living death?
Yet that is not all. Have you got the will to surmount mountain-
high obstructions? If the whole world stands against you sword in hand,
would you still dare to do what you think is right? If your wives and
children are against you, if all your money goes, your name dies, your
wealth vanishes, would you still stick to it? Would you still pursue it
and go on steadily towards your own goal? As the great King Bhartehari
says (Niti-sataka, verse 74) :
Nindantu nitinpunah yadi va stuvantu
Laksmih samavisatu gacchatu va yathestam;
Adyaiva va maranamastu yugantare va
Nyayyat pathat pravicalanti padam na dhirah-
“Let the sages blame or let them praise; let the goddess of fortune
come or let her go wherever she likes; let death come today, or let it come
after millions of years; he indeed is the steady man who does not move one
inch from the way of truth.”
Have you got that steadfastness? If you have these three things,
each one of you will make miracles.
Vol III-pp. 225-226
*******************************************************************************
Srikant Mookerjee
Math/Stats
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsbugh, PA 15146
USA
June 28th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
http://www.serendipity.li/wot/nc_patrio.htm
Noam Chomsky on Patriotism
Question:
What in your view are the main reasons for patriotic feelings in the USA? Do you believe that such feelings can ever be justified? Do you think such feelings exist on a similar scale (in a similar manner) outside the USA, and do you think they can be justified in other countries?
Reply:
The questions are serious and important, and merit reflection and analysis.
To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That’s a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what “patriotism” means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as “anti-Soviet” or “hating Russia”. For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are “anti-American” and “hate America”; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, “patriotism” means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, “patriotism” means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That’s a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It’s one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of “patriotism” fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long.
With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of “patriotism”; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It’s a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc.
That’s only the beginning. A lot is at stake.
Noam Chomsky
November 2002
June 28th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Reply to DavidS @ 2:05 pm:
You forgot to add the Germans attempts in both WW1 and WW2.
What you did forget to add was the methods used by these patriot acts. Women and children put into camps to starve, public executions to those who dare to defy, etc.
So thank you for proving my point.
Thank you for the advice and I will give you some too. Why don’t you step outside and just make sure which way the wind blows. You wouldn’t want to be caught supporting the wrong side now.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/03/10/george-kateb/on-patriotism/
On Patriotism
by George Kateb
Lead Essay
March 10th, 2008
Patriotism is love of country. What kind of love is that? Some defenders of patriotism who want us to love our country use such terms as fatherland and mother country. Such usage seems to indicate that we should love our country as we love our parents. Do they mean that a country is a person and should be loved as a person is loved? Obviously a country is not a person. There is a metaphor involved. If we notice the metaphor, we see that what we are doing when we liken a country to a parent is performing an act of the imagination. More commonly, the metaphor is not understood as a metaphor. Rather, many people just accept the usage as if it were natural and can and should go without examination. They manage to do two contradictory things simultaneously: they know that of course a country is not a person, yet they act with energy on the belief that it is. The metaphor facilitates an exploitable mental confusion.
Let us repel the metaphors of fatherland and mother country by thinking about love of parents. We might find that it would be fairly monstrous to love a country as one already loves one’s parents (or conversely to model love of parents on the love we are urged to feel for our country). I love my parents — if I do — because I began my life in infant attachment to them, well before I had a sense of self and a developed mind. They “imprinted� themselves on me; we bonded; only pain ensued from their neglect or abuse, while I was content if they wrapped me in their enfolding nurturant love. As I grew, I realized that I would be lost without them; I was wholly dependent on them; I loved them. With the onset of maturity, I felt gratitude towards them. I knew that without them there would literally have been no me. Love of parents is an obligation that is more than an obligation and should not be felt as one, except under the most trying circumstances. Love should overwhelm all feelings of reluctant duty. Despite conflicts and frustrations I loved my parents; if the difficulties were too great and I became alienated or even hostile, my feelings would remain at least ambivalent. (Is there ambivalence from the start?) I realized that alienation or hostility was an open wound; only reconciliation could heal it. Perhaps it could never be healed, to my inestimable loss.
Are such feelings properly transferred to a country? Should love of country overwhelm all self-centered reluctance? In particular, is gratitude, a kind of love, the right emotion to feel towards one’s country? Although children are not usually asked to die for their parents, and most parents wouldn’t accept the offer if it were made, some defenders of patriotism imagine the state as a super-parent that may ask its children to die for it. The idea of patriotism is inseparable from killing and dying for your country. A good patriot is a good killer.
I do not literally owe to my country my coming into existence. It’s true that I could not go on if I didn’t live in some society, but my genes are not politically identifiable; a country is not a biological entity. My parents could have moved after I was born; my country could have lost the territory in which I was born; I could have been abducted and raised elsewhere. My parents are one thing, my country another, altogether different. A country would not exist without its people; the reverse is literally false and appears true only by metaphorical distortion.
A famous assertion that the feelings towards parents are the right feelings towards one’s country, but with even greater intensity, is Socrates’ speech in the Crito. In various diluted forms, the sentiment he expresses so radically appears, at least residually, in many defenses of patriotism. Some attention to it, though not solely to it, helps us to see why patriotism is urged by theorists and why many people feel it. As he waits to endure capital punishment when he could escape it with the help of friends, Socrates impersonates the city and its laws, and lectures his friend Crito while also lecturing himself, and says things he never said before. In the speech, he says “your country is to be honored more than your mother, your father, and all your ancestors, that it is more to be revered and more sacred . . . that you must worship itâ€? (51b-c). The city is the mother of all mothers and the father of all fathers. What makes it so? Its laws establish the institution of marriage and provide guidance in the rearing of children. Without the city, it would seem, no one would exist – or at least no human being would grow up as a person with an identity, a role in life, and a purpose for living. The city gives a person more than parents do, and what it gives is parental in nature. The major meaning is that obedience to it under all circumstances is required, above all, as an exaction of gratitude. The ultimate exaction is to die in war or punishment; one must be ready to endure in a grateful spirit whatever the will of the parent-city commands.
Socrates’ speech takes in earnest the metaphor of the city as parent, while insisting on an un-enlightened, un-democratic conception of the powers of parents. He moves in the direction of likening children to slaves and hence citizens to slaves. Citizens are owned because they owe their very lives to the country. The double meaning is that without the country they would not now be alive, and that therefore if the country needs or wants to take their lives it can do so. What it gives, it actually lends; what it lends, it can take back. One’s life is not exactly a debt that one owes and that only one’s death can discharge, but it is only a conditional gift.
Where Pericles in his Funeral Oration can urge devotion to the city even at the expense of one’s life, he is sure to avoid all endorsement of slavishness in his appeal to Athenian patriotism. His oration mixes elements that are, in turn, erotic passion for the city, aesthetic wonder at its beauty, and a mystical loss of self in its sublimity. But one strong element is the invocation of the practical advantages that people enjoy by living in a democratic city that elevates them above a life of humiliating inferiority to their betters and affords them a chance to live decently and make the best of themselves. He breaks the back of the parental metaphor because it is inappropriate for adult citizens in a democracy, even though he urges them to risk death for the sake of the city’s defense of itself as an empire, and rather maniacally asks them to keep on replacing the dead warriors with new children. At the same time, he speaks to an audience that, if Plato is to be believed, had already re-defined the relation between parents and children in a democratic manner, thus liberating children from unquestioning obedience and subjection to the unexplained will of their parents.
I do not think, however, that Pericles’s defense of patriotism, though it is far more enlightened and democratic than Socrates’ servile advocacy of total submission to the parent-city, settles the matter of the validity of patriotism.
I believe that buried pretty far down in some modern defenses of patriotism is a sentiment rather close to what Socrates is expressing in the Crito, if not exactly the same. The best recent defense of patriotism, Maurizio Viroli’s For Love of Country, bases itself on the metaphor of country as fatherland, as fidelity to the legacy of the political fathers, who are supposed to bind succeeding generations by a kind of filial piety. An intensely American philosopher, William James (in “The Moral Equivalent of War�), can think that it is good for young people especially to feel that they are “owned� by their country. I find it surprising that such a clear-headed thinker, democratic through and through, can voice such a view. But the much larger surprise is that we find in him, where we shouldn’t, a defense of the idea that, being owned, we owe the state or the country a debt, a “blood-tax� that must be paid when the state demands it. A blood-tax, however, isn’t an exaction of gratitude. Rather, the patriotic heroism of dying prematurely or risking death is the best definition of being a man. If James doesn’t follow Socrates in saying that the state, as our parent, gives us our lives, he exceeds Socrates by suggesting that in being owned by the state, we owe it a blood-tax, not merely a grateful readiness to die when it commands. For James, only death or its risk proves patriotism.
Socrates’ position in the Crito and the sentiment expressed by William James and other advocates of patriotism share the idea that we do not own ourselves. We come into the world already obliged after a certain age to serve the country and feel patriotic passions for it. I associate this notion with traditions of thinking that have not yet arrived at the idea that political society owes its rightful existence only to the consent of the people, originally and continuously thereafter. Through consent, the people own the state, which is its servant, not its parent or owner. The premise is the principle that each person owns himself or herself. From self-ownership is derived the idea of political consent, freely given or withheld or withdrawn, and it is formulated variously by theorists of the social contract, from the seventeenth century and after. The most relevant theorists are the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The most formidable social contract is the United States Constitution. I hazard the thought that all defenses of patriotism finally rest on the rejection of the idea of individual self-ownership, even though people have patriotic feelings that can and do emerge without the assistance of any theoretical defense.
The common thread in contract theory is that the obligation to obey can derive only from consent, expressed or tacit, and always given by the individual, whether as a personal pledge or a pledge given in association with other like-minded people. Every person is born equally free by the very nature of his or her humanity. The first enemy of the social contract is therefore patriarchy, the assertion that the state, usually a hereditary monarchy, exists by the will and grace of God; the ruler is father of his country; as father, the king rules without consent, just as children did not and could not choose their father (or mother); as patriarch, what is more, the king owns the people of the kingdom and their property. They belong to him and they ought to feel grateful for his protection. The king’s only obligation is to God; otherwise he may dispose of the people and their goods as he sees fit. In battle with this outlook, the theorists of the social contract tried to kill not the king exactly, but the view that the king is father in the image of the God who is the lord and father of mankind, the source of life and death.
A great irony is that, try as it might, the theory of the social contract never wrestled free of the claim that the people owe their existence to the state and hence that the state owns the people. While the contract theorists unmistakably struggle to establish the proposition the state does not own the people, they nevertheless also say – and I think, inconsistently – that it can require citizens to die to preserve it. All the theorists accept this requirement. It is as if by eroding the idea that the king is father and owner of the people and owes his authority to God’s grace, they feel the compensatory need to replace devotion to the king by some other bond that would yield a moral obligation to sacrifice oneself for the state. The claim is that such a bond is created by a person’s consent to live under a state. The basis of the state in rational choice is turned into the basis for morally allowing the state to cause the death or the risk of death of citizens. Our choice to preserve our lives is turned by the contract theorists into a choice to assume an obligation to die for the sake of what supposedly, in the first place, exists in order to preserve us. Necessity gives birth to the state but the state gives birth to another kind of necessity, which is a dangerous and recurrently lethal necessity. The state for all does not preserve all lives, and loses or wastes a good many.
There is cruelty lodged in the heart of the theory of the social contract, even though it seeks to demystify the state and to replace the traditional awe of the parent-state by clear-sighted understanding of the state’s rational purpose. The language of obligation supersedes the language of gratitude and devotion. But the mentality of self-sacrifice perhaps takes on a greater strength when it is made to flow logically from the obligation that choice creates. The social contract tends to become a more ingenious trap than any appeal to the patriotic love of country rooted in filial loyalty, whether in its pure Socratic form or in the various dilutions of it that are always current. Just because parents usually don’t ask their children to die for them, and consider it an unspeakable tragedy when any child dies before its parents, the metaphor of the state as parent must contradict its literal source: parents feel horror at the death of their children. The theory of the social contract must confront and try to overcome a different contradiction: a contract for life is also, and inevitably, a contract for (premature violent) death. The upshot is that the social contract can become a more bloodthirsty theory, despite its apparent dispassion, than the idea of the parent-state (or owner-state), because its contradiction seems more successfully resolvable on the theoretical level. Children are not supposed to die for their parents but equals are supposed to die for one another.
Yet the theorists of contract knew that consent would not supply the passionate energy that is required to discharge the obligation to die, if need be. Hobbes and Rousseau, more than the Levellers and Locke, proposed techniques of indoctrination in political mystique in order to shore up what they knew was, to begin with, a quite shaky scheme by which the choice to live turns into an obligation to die. The mystique of patriotism, shored up by civil religion, mattered most to Rousseau because he was keenly aware of the cruel irony lodged in the heart of the theory of the social contract, as Hobbes was; but, at the same time – and here is another irony – Rousseau was much more eagerly insistent than Hobbes to provide a worked-out rationalization for the obligation to die that did not depend on the mystique of patriotism. Hobbes went this way and that on the problem of conscription and its possibility of death, as if to suggest that the problem really was not soluble at all within the framework of consent and contract – or perhaps within any theory.
Rousseau in The Social Contract (Bk.2, chap. 4) asserts that by dying to preserve the city, its citizens are merely giving back to the state what they received from it. In his theoretical desperation, he thus returns us to the pre-contract idea that the state owns the people: because it has given them life, it may take life away from them, if need be. To this old mystique, Rousseau then adds the enlightened rational calculation that without a state, they would have had to risk their lives in the anarchic condition in an eventually vain attempt to preserve them. Don’t people gain from collective strength? Don’t they reduce their chances of dying by living in a political system that their consent has created? Yes, they do – that is, some do, but some don’t. The dead have been sacrificed for others, and therefore the whole egalitarian logic of the social contract is violated by a majoritarian calculation. It is a best bargain only for those who live, not for those who died before their time. And so Rousseau works to bypass the dilemma by advocating a tight communal life infused with patriotic love of country. His theory is a tremendous effort to make political life more fair and less arbitrary. But in many respects the life he advocates is finally not more rational. It is as irrationally based in devotion and gratitude to the city as other societies are, or even more so. Even worse, his theory may seduce us, by its promise of justice, to grant the blood-tax it levies. I doubt, however, that Rousseau’s version of the blood-tax joined to his sketch of the best bargain can succeed in theoretically reconciling the social contract with the obligation to die for the state.
If neither the metaphor of the parent-state nor the idea of the people’s consent to government can justify killing and dying for the state, patriotism has not run out of resources. Whatever theory says, patriotism will prevail. One main reason is that it is a usually tacit ideology and flourishes without philosophical assistance. The theoretical debate about patriotism directly interests only thinkers who concern themselves with questions of political and moral philosophy, and publicists who are eager to promote some policy or other. The debate about patriotism reaches undeniably to some of the most profound speculative matters, yet patriotism itself proceeds as a brute fact of life. The trouble is that this brute fact contributes to the erosion of the sentiment that government exists by consent and has the status of servant to the people. But haven’t I just said that the manifestation of consent, the social contract, tends to rationalize killing and dying for the state? Yes. But I think that properly revised, it need not; the revision must build on the ambivalent work of Hobbes and the ambiguous work of Locke, as I have elsewhere tried to suggest. In any case, modern liberty can’t do without the premise that government rightfully exists only by means of popular consent to a system of government that routinely works through continuous popular consent. The point is to show that patriotism facilitates the erosion of the idea of rational consent, and does so by means of an improvident and un-reasoned acceptance of a second social contract that usurps and inhabits the body of the original one that created the system of constitutional democracy.
The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.
In general, an activist foreign policy works tirelessly to de-legitimate any constitutional democracy. Patriotism is the greatest asset in the internal and ever-present war against the sentiments and institutions of free government. The support of one’s team is not the defense of the Constitution. What gets hollowed out is government by rational consent, while a number of basic freedoms are steadily attenuated. The original contract for constitutional democracy is usurped, and replaced, in significant part, by a second contract for expansion and predation. It is bad enough that the original contract is interpreted to mandate dying for one’s country. Much worse is the displacement of the original contract. The spoils of activism and imperialism intensify political and economic inequality while immunizing leaders from their accountability to citizens to an ever greater extent. Citizens become followers. Leaders and followers live in different worlds. Citizens allow the patriotic thrill of team sports to obscure the radical alteration that descends on the original contract, while acquiescing in the gains of large and sometimes sinister interests that use patriotism in their appeals for support. The great theorists of the social contract would have been horrified; they didn’t quite have such a drastic mutation in mind – not to mention the anti-imperialist Socrates in his espousal of the parent-state.
Patriotism, more than any other passion in political life, makes virtues do the work of vices while promoting the praise of vices as disguised virtues. It thus sustains enormous moral perversity. If no one were a patriot, the world would be better off than it now is, when almost all are patriots. Theorists shouldn’t join in.
—
George Kateb is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University and author of Patriotism and Other Mistakes.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Kan nie sokke lang goed in
hierdie formaat lees nie.
Sorrie.
Reply to cab @ 2:46 pm:
Really?
Then get the Boeremeisie to
translate for you.
Tell me how she translated
“benoude boude.”
June 28th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Reply to Deon @ 3:09 pm:
That was not patriotism
That was
WW1 = forced on Germany
WW2 = IMPERIALIST RACISM of Germany… ever heard of Lebensraum? If not, rather don’t debate with people who do.
WW1 and WW2 both lead to amazing ADAVANCES in humanity.
Think of this
air travel
atomic power
telegraphy
rail travel
communications speeded up
radar
All these things because of war.
In any case a case study like the two mentioned highlights your lack of insight in the understanding of the concept of ‘patriotism’
No greater a man than George Washington said
“It is dangerous to be right when everyone else, especially the government is wrong…”
I prefer not to let “the wind” tell me what is right and wrong.
I have my OWN principles.
I am not a sheep.
Thanks for trying anyway.
PS. Your examples of women in concentration camps and public executions have no bearing on patriotism’s advantages as opposed to the stupidity of some embittered anti patriotic gay idiot writer.
June 28th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
patriotism is a tough one, especially when it grows into facism as seen in SA, yet we all seem to want to see our countrymen win.
June 28th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
sorry nationalism, not facism, tho suppose two sides of the same coin.