PATRIOTISM AND FREEDOM

Having probably shocked my reader, in the earlier posted entry This Land Is Your Land, by my iconoclastic suggestion that without protest there is no freedom, with the natural inference that there is no freedom in an authentic patriotic formula, I have an intellectual obligation to explain what I mean.
To further rub it in, I dared to assert that Irving Berlin’s beautiful patriotic hymn God Bless America (which I admire as one of the best American songs ever written) has no “freedom” in it, and I am asserting now that any true patriotism amounts to a total voluntary renunciation of personal freedom, representing an absolute, albeit glorious, form of slavery.

...For those faithful readers who are still with me after this horrific attack, I am going to support my claim by drawing the most natural parallel with religious faith.
All devout Christians call themselves “slaves of God” (rabý bózhii, in Russian), or “slaves of Jesus Christ.” It is rather unfortunate that in the English translation the intensity of the original word “slave” (“doulos” in Greek; “servus” in Latin [does “serf” sound familiar?]) is somewhat diluted by the substitution of the milder form of the same etymology: “servant.” There is no such ambiguity in most other languages, such as, say, in Russian, where rab (slave) cannot be mistaken for a servant (slugá), and in the Bible’s New Testament, the Apostles Paul (Romans 1:1), James (James 1:1), Simon Peter (2 Peter 1:1), to name just these three explicit cases, unequivocally declare their bondage as slaves of God and Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, there is very little difference of principle between a religious man’s allegiance to God and a Patriot’s allegiance to his country and his people. The Russians call their nation “Svyatáya Rus, Holy Russia,” which effectively equates their allegiance to God to their allegiance to their Motherland. Anybody who fails to see the connection is probably not a Patriot at heart. For, patriotism is indeed a glorified form of slavery, and we simply cannot wiggle out of this ostensible paradox.

Does this mean that a free spirit cannot be a patriot? Well, man is a tragically conflicted creature! Without a conflict, there is no creativity, there is no consciousness, there is no genius. Oh, that Nietzschean “tension of the bow”! A free spirit and a patriot tearing at each other inside one human soul… What a truly magnificent contradiction! Ecce homo!