Patriotism – Ricardo Flores Magón (1917)

_{Ricardo Flores Magón and María Talavera Broussé, in the Regeneración offices, Los Angeles, California}

From ‘Regeneración’, February 24, 1917, Los Angeles, California, translated by C.B.

We poor people are incited in a thousand ways to be patriots. From the time we’re born until we exhale our last breath, these words buzz in our ears: “Love your country, love your country, love your country.”

It could be said that we suck in patriotism with the first drops of milk from the breasts of our mothers. The mother lulls us to sleep with songs that glorify the nation. Later, we’re taught to love the flag, whose colors appear more brilliant to us than those of any other flag. As children, we’re overwhelmed with playthings that make us play at being soldiers: drums, wooden swords, flags, clay or lead soldiers, and, stuffed full of the legends which extol the exploits of the nation’s heroes, we pretend in our games to be on battlefields where we would make all those who had committed the crime of being born outside the nation’s boundaries bite the dust, because every good patriot is the enemy of those who aren’t born inside his country’s borders.

Patriotic education doesn’t end with childhood games: it continues in grammar school. There, the good teacher makes us intone choruses in which we exalt the country; in our reading book we spell out compositions in prose and verse in honor of the country, and our eyes fill with wonder before the illustrations representing acts of war, with each one of us wanting to be the happy flag-bearer who has the great honor of holding aloft his country’s banner in the midst of the butchery. We hear the national anthem, and our blood stirs faster in our veins.

The priest, in his sermons, exhorts us to love the nation; the politician, in his speeches, speaks to us about the greatness of the country; the bourgeois periodical stimulates our patriotic sentiments; wherever we turn our gaze we find a statue of a patriot or a drawing with a patriotic theme; patriotic holidays, besides being numerous, have an air of great solemnity. Everything, in the end, is carefully calculated to light, and to keep lit, the patriotic fire in our breasts.

Prepared in this manner, and even when we don’t own a clod of earth to recline our heads on; even when we don’t possess a square inch of the country we’ve been taught to love; despite all the indignities, humiliations, abuses, and misfortunes we’ve been subjected to in our place on the lowest rungs of the social ladder; despite everything, we find ourselves disposed to commit the worst excesses, to kill and allow ourselves to be killed for the nation, for this thing which for its part provides us no benefit and in exchange demands of us the greatest sacrifices.

It’s necessary to confess that all of the demands implied in patriotism fall exclusively on the shoulders of the poor. The poor man knows only that he has a country because he has to serve in the army, and the benefits he receives from the country are the clubbing by the cop, the taxes to pay the government’s costs, his unpaid nightly rounds, the “fatiga” [provision of unpaid services], and the law which subjects him to eternal servitude beneath the claws of the owners of the lands and machinery.

To the poor man, the country provides no benefit because it’s not his. The country is the property of the few who are the owners of the lands, the mines, the houses, the factories, the railroads — of everything that exists; but the poor man is indoctrinated from childhood to love the country so that he’ll pick up a gun in defense of interests that aren’t his when his bosses realize that their interests are in danger and send out a patriotic call to the masses. It’s so certain that material interests are at the heart of the country that the bourgeoisie will not oppose a foreign invasion when its aim is not to despoil them of their properties, and they’ll even welcome it when the foreign bayonets can lend some support to the principle of private property and this principle is in danger of falling to pieces under the furious assaults of popular justice.

The two invasions that Mexico has suffered during the course of the revolution have had no other object than to suffocate the revolutionary movement that threatens the stability of the principle of private property. The two U.S. invasions were carried out to place Venustiano Carranza in the presidential seat and to consolidate a strong government capable of making the law respected, that is, capable of being the shield of the strong, their defense against the possible attacks of those who possess nothing.

The Mexican bourgeoisie haven’t protested these two invasions, because they were intended to save their properties which were threatened by the virile attitude of Mexicans eager to gain their economic liberty. If it hadn’t been that the American workers protested against this invasion and refused to join the army to go put Carranza in the presidential seat, there would have been long months in which this acting president would have had the shelter of strong contingents of U.S. soldiers.

Patriotism is a dish seasoned exclusively for the consumption of the poor. We’re informed that the invasion is an affront and that we ought to resist it. Did Carranza resist it? He didn’t resist it because it benefitted the social class which every government must support: the capitalist class.

Now, deprived of the hope that American bayonets will keep him in power, Carranza is throwing himself into the arms of Germany. In a note which he’s sent to the neutral nations, Carranza invites these nations to suspend commerce with the belligerent nations, arguing that in this manner they will be left isolated and will see themselves forced, in the end, to agree to peace in view of not being able to count on provisions from the outside.

The Central Powers will be the beneficiaries if this project of Carranza is put into practice, because England will receive a mortal blow impeding it from obtaining from the petroleum-producing area of Tampico the oil it needs to keep its fleet in motion, and England will have to adopt extreme measures to keep its supply lines open. What will happen? England will send soldiers to occupy the Tampico region.

It’s patently obvious that patriotism isn’t practiced by those who inculcate it into others. It’s a sentiment that’s infused in us so that we’ll put ourselves at the disposition of our exploiters. When we take the gun in hand to defend the nation, that which we’re defending is the property of our bosses. Let us open our eyes.