(I
have several entries on patriotism, and this is just one of them. The reference
in the next sentence is to my entry Oneness
And Allness, published on this blog on July 7th, 2012.)
The
previous discussion of “oneness and allness” leads us naturally to the
subject of patriotism.
There
are two kinds of patriotism: of the mouth and of the heart. This entry is
dedicated to the latter kind. I define true patriotism plain and simple as
putting one’s nation’s interests above one’s own.
My
father was a true Russian patriot, and so was my mother. Russia has always been
a breeding ground of patriots. I knew scores of true Russian patriots
personally, in my Soviet years. Today, I believe, their breed has not become
extinct, despite the calamity of the 1990’s. I think that Vladimir Putin is a
true patriot, and so are the people around him who have been helping him to
pull Russia out of the Yeltsin hole. (Here was a wretch, Yeltsin, recently
deceased, for whom I wouldn’t have one good word, nor would I resort to nihil
[as in aut bene aut nihil], on account of him being counted now
among the dead! In fact, I cannot call a patriot any of those who either
contributed to the collapse of the USSR, or, following the collapse,
matter-of-factly threw their Communist Party cards out with the trash and
smugly readjusted themselves to the new order of things... Having said that, I
must probably make an exception for those who facilitated the wrecking of the USSR as part of a secret grand
design ad maiorem Russiae gloriam, but
even if I must objectively call them patriots,
I shall do it with an uneasy mind.)
As
for America, I can name many true American patriots throughout her two-century
history. But recently, their flow has dried up. I can count none for the New
American Century. In the last two
decades of living in the United States, I have not met a single American
patriot face to face, nor seen one on television. In fact, there is just one
American patriot whom I can name in all this time. He was Pat Tillman, the NFL
star, who volunteered to fight for his country in Afghanistan after 9/11, and
died there shortly thereafter, murdered by “friendly fire”…
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