PATRIOTISM AND AGGRESSION

Bertrand Russell describes patriotism as the willingness to kill and to be killed for trivial reasons. There can be no doubt that this is a very sarcastic observation, but the question is how true it is. On another occasion, Russell’s erstwhile colleague and collaborator on the monumental Principia Mathematica Alfred North Whitehead aphorizes to the effect that “there are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths, it is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.”

In this sense, Russell’s saying is only a half-truth, of course, but being a true philosopher, he makes us think about which half of it is true, and which is not. It is true that a patriot driven into a patriotic frenzy is indeed ready to kill and to be killed just on the wing of his passion; but there are two distinctive types of patriotism here: one which is benign and honorable and the other which is vainly chauvinistic, shallowly bellicose, and unwarrantedly aggressive.

Russell’s description of patriotism can be found offensively cynical in some quarters, but I don’t blame him at all for it. The expansionist patriotism of the British during the Imperial era was essentially gung-ho at the time when Britain herself was in no immediate peril. German aggressive chauvinism has also been of a not-so-pleasant variety: even those wars in which Germany ended up as a victim in the last three centuries or so were either explicitly initiated by Germany herself, or, as in the case of the Napoleonic wars, were her punishment for an excessive belligerence, anyway. In today’s world, American aggressive patriotism (or, rather, chauvinism, plain and simple) is manifestly unattractive, and even obnoxious to the outsiders. There could have been a theoretically imaginable rationale for an American war in, say, Canada, or in Mexico, for some valid strategic reason, but definitely not in Iraq or elsewhere, against a minor, conspicuously unthreatening nation, far away from the American shores.

Summarizing all these cases, where similar displays of “patriotism” have deserved Russell’s skepticism, in each of them we are talking of the hubris of the aggressor.

Russian patriotism is of a different kind, and although every Russian patriot is willing to kill, or to be killed in the service of his nation, none would agree that their nation would ever allow them to die without a good cause and for a trivial reason. My personal experience of the Russian patriotism has been of the wholesome and honorable kind with the memory of the horrific German aggression against the Russian nation in World War II still fresh in the national psyche. Such defensive patriotism is qualitatively different from the cheeky hubris of aggressive patriotism, and these two types ought to be judged by different standards.

Of course, there had been a Soviet war with Finland in 1939-1940, which despite its aggressive appearance, was indeed a defensive war, in anticipation of an imminent war with Nazi Germany. Moscow had a reason to suspect that Finland would join the war on Hitler’s side, and demanded from the former dependency within the Russian Empire, a relatively small, but strategically indispensable, piece of land in close proximity to the city of Leningrad, to be returned to the USSR, so that, when the war started, Leningrad would not find itself unprotected from the north-western direction, and be quickly overwhelmed. And so the war was fought. After a heroic Finnish defense, earning a genuine Soviet respect for the Finnish nation and for its great statesman Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the contested territory was reannexed to the USSR, making an important difference in the future war against Hitler.

Then there was a 1979-1988 Soviet war in Afghanistan that does not seem to fit the defensive pattern at all. Yet it was fought for a very understandable reason too: to protect the secular government of an immediate Soviet neighbor from a jihadist Taliban threat. (Does it ring any kind of bell?) Still this war was an aberration of sorts, and the Soviets paid for it dearly, while the secular government they had been trying to protect paid even more dearly, collapsing soon after the Soviet retreat and being savagely massacred.

There used to be a very popular Soviet song Do the Russians Want a War? with the powerful words by the Russian/Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The answer to the song’s title question is, in my expanded paraphrase, no, we do not want another tragic loss of life that is in the nature of all wars, but yes, we know how to fight and how to win wars, if that is what it takes to win peace. And whenever there is a threat to the Russian Motherland, defensive patriotism, and whenever the Russian Fatherland is in peril, patriotic passion, the Russians are ready to strike back or even to strike first, whenever mother nation calls them. Thus Russian patriotism, the veiled half of Russell’s truth, is possible to describe in his terms as the willingness to kill or to be killed, yet by no means for a trivial reason, but only for a very good cause.