PATRIOTISM AND DISSENT PART I

I have several definitions of patriotism in this book, and a fairly large number of entries devoted to it. They all boil down to one: a patriot is he who puts his nation’s interests above his own.

But what is national interest? What if our patriot’s understanding of national interest clashes with that of the State? In times of revolutions, is it in the national interest to support the old regime, opting for stability, rather than the uncertainty of the new and unproven troublemakers? Or, recognizing the decrepit condition of the old power that permitted the revolution in the first place, isn’t it better to take your chances with new blood that may be healthier and better for the nation?

In his novel The White Guard, the Russian genius writer Mikhail Bulgakov is conspicuously sympathetic to the enemies of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. (This does not prevent him of course from praising the Bolsheviks as well.) Stalin, who was a huge admirer of Bulgakov, thus explained this seeming paradox to my father, then a preteen boy:

“Look, Bulgakov’s Whites were Russian patriots too! It is a terrible tragedy when patriots on both sides of a Civil War are compelled to kill each other, but such is life.”

Indeed, it is a great tragedy when patriotic loyalties clash in a civil war, but let us step away from extreme cases and focus on a milder form of social conflict, which is dissent.

The tricky question of this entry is now about a person’s conflict of loyalties when his patriotic sensibilities clash with his aversion for the ideology and policies of the State, that is of the community that he is part of. What are the admissible forms of dissent under normal or at least sub-extremal conditions?

The practical question here is whether a dissident can accept money and other forms of support for his anti-government activities from foreign powers, particularly from those who have demonstrated an avid interest in weakening the power of the rival nation whose citizen our dissident happens to be.

The reader may have noticed that I am alluding to the recent decision of the Russian State Duma to declare all individuals and Non-Governmental Organizations in Russia who literally make their living by receiving financial aid from abroad “foreign agents.” This decision is currently causing a brouhaha in the West, but is it reasonably justified, or is it yet another telltale manifestation of the undemocratic trend in today’s Russia, as observed by the traditionally Russophobic Westerners?...

Part II will follow…