Friday, January 9, 2015

US Nationalism and Flag Patriotism Newsletter #2

OMNI
NATIONALISM NEWSLETTER and FLAG PATRIOTISM #2,  January 9, 2015
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice
What’s at stake: Understanding US hyper-nationalism and flag patriotism in order to judge whether and how they serve the US and the world.

Newsletters
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change.
j.dick.bennett@gmail.com    See:   Control of Information, Ethnocentrism, Fear, Flag Day (Liberty and Justice for All Day), Identity, Imperialism, Jingoism, Militarism, National Security State, Patriotism, Permanent War, Preemptive Invasion, Torture, War on Terror, Xenophobia, and many other related topics in the Newsletters (see the Index).
Contents of Nationalism Newsletter #1
Americentrism
Swain, US White Nationalism
Selfa:  US Economic Nationalism, Imperialism
Ousby: World War I, Verdun, France, Germany, Folly of Nationalism
Hedges, War Is a Force
Koenigsberg, Call for Papers on Mass Death Necessary to Nation
Koenigsberg: National Right to Kill?
Mystical Nationalism: Koenigsberg’s Rev. of The King's Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz 


Contents of Nationalism Newsletter and Flag Patriotism #2
Sarah Wire, “Womack Calls for Flag Protections”
J. William Fulbright on Flag Burning and  “Destructive Nationalism”
Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation
Koenigsberg, Nationalism, War, and Sacrifice
Speckhardt, Humanity Before Nationality
US Nationalism:  Google Search
Who Owns the Arctic Seabed?  A UN Issue.
Majid, We Are All Moors, Religious Nationalism

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Bid to protect American flag again in wind.  Sarah D. Wire
Washington, Jan 8, 2015  [“Womack Calls for Flag Protections, Says New Senate ‘Friendlier’ to Idea.”  Title in my copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette same date.  Bold emphases mine.  –Dick]

http://media.arkansasonline.com/img/photos/2015/01/07/resized_99265-fn-blue-ribbon-school-004_64-19185_t598.jpg?b7052f07a6139e7088ebc43100469802b2560d37
Andy Shupe
Credit: © NWA Media
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., proposed a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the United States flag.
U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., proposed a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the United States flag, his office announced Wednesday.
Congress has tried repeatedly to pass similar restrictions on destroying the flag in the 26 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is political expression protected by the First Amendment. Several civil-liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, oppose the restrictions.
The most recent ban attempt, in 2006, fell one Senate vote shy of the 67 votes necessary to send the measure to the states for ratification. The House passed its version in 2005.
Womack said the previous Senate vote, which occurred before he entered Congress, always bothered him. Then-U.S. Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., voted in favor of the amendment and Mark Pryor, D-Ark., voted against.
"It's always just kind of been an aggravating thought to me that our ability to protect the symbol of this nation, to give Congress the authority to protect the symbol of this nation fell one vote short of going to the states," he said Wednesday.
Similar measures have been proposed nearly every year since but have not been brought up for a vote.
A joint resolution creating a constitutional amendment needs approval from two-thirds of the House and Senate members, and passage by three-fourths of state legislatures before the amendment can go into effect. The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, have not been changed since they were approved in 1792.
Womack co-sponsored the joint resolution along with Reps. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., Phil Roe, R-Tenn., Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. It has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Womack of Rogers said the new Republican majority in the Senate and the large Republican margin in the House could make it easier to pass the measure this time. Arkansas now has an all-Republican congressional delegation that includes three members who have co-sponsored similar measures in the past.
"We've got a much friendlier Senate to deal with. This is an opportunity for us to really make a big statement about who we are as Americans," Womack said. "Given the changes that have taken place and the majorities in place in both chambers, now is as good a time as any to reaffirm what we all believe about our beloved America."
One obstacle this year could be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who was one of three Republican senators who opposed the 2006 effort, and he now leads the Senate.
In a 2006 editorial in the Central Kentucky News, McConnell wrote that freedom includes the freedom to burn a flag. "I revere the American flag as a symbol of freedom. But behind it is something larger -- the Constitution."
Before the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision that flag burning was a constitutionally protected form of political expression, nearly every state had a law banning desecration of the American flag. The court's decision invalidated those laws.
Congress quickly passed a federal law to protect the flag, but that was struck down in the court's 1990 United States v. Eichman decision.
"There is not a more symbolic effort that we can make in my strong opinion than ... to answer the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989," Womack said. "It's a thing that needs to be done, is long overdue."
Civil-liberties groups oppose the proposal.
Americans shouldn't give up their freedoms so Congress can restrict how a flag is used, said Rita Sklar, the head of the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The First Amendment is what should not be desecrated," Sklar said. "As distasteful as desecration of the flag is to many people, it is the essence of the First Amendment to prevent the government from deciding what is tasteful and what is not."
Sklar pointed to a 1990 speech on the Senate floor by then-U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., who cautioned against altering the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.
"Colleagues ask yourself, because some lunatic in Texas, in Dallas in 1984, decided to burn the flag, is that incident worthy of tinkering with the most precious segment of the Constitution that gives us religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of press?" Bumpers said, adding, "I say no."
Womack said Wednesday that he wasn't going to debate whether he or Bumpers has the right opinion.
"I am a true believer in the Constitution, which is why I'm trying to pursue an amendment to the Constitution to give Congress the authority to protect Old Glory," Womack said. "He's entitled to his opinion, and I respect that, but Steve Womack, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has a different opinion."Click here to read the original article.
[Go to end to contact Cong. Womack.  --D]


J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT ON FLAG BURNING
Fulbright Calls Flag Issue Unimportant, Emotional : Politics: Former U.S. senator decries shift away from world events to debate constitutional amendment.
June 19, 1990 From United Press International in the Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. J. William Fulbright expressed disappointment with his successors in government, saying it is a "great tragedy" that politicians have shifted their attention from world events to debate a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.
The 85-year-old Democrat from Arkansas invited reporters to his home Monday to call for greater funding for the scholarship program that bears his name and has helped nearly 180,000 students worldwide attend universities in other nations.
But Fulbright, the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an early congressional foe of the Vietnam War, also surveyed the world scene and found much to his liking.
"I feel more optimistic about the international situation than any time I was in the Senate," he said, adding that he believes even the Chinese will "come around" and join the world move toward democracy.
http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif
But Fulbright was clearly troubled by the response of American politicians, faulting President Bush for refusing to cut defense spending or raise taxes, criticizing the invasion of Panama and the funding of the rebels in Nicaragua and accusing Democrats in Congress of timidity.
Asked to comment on the flag amendment, he said, "I think it's a great tragedy that in this time of very promising issues that we should be diverted by such an . . . utterly emotional and unimportant issue.
"I just don't understand it. But I thoroughly disapprove of fooling with (the Constitution). I think it ought to be left alone." . . . .

J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT on NATIONALISM
“A new idea has sprung up out of the ashes of two World Wars:  the idea that the sovereign nation can no longer serve as the ultimate unit of personal loyalty and responsibility.  We have begun to perceive that our happiness and prosperity, and perhaps even our survival, may depend on whether we allow the West to succumb once again to divisive and destructive nationalism. . . .”  Old Myths and New Realities (108).  

US Nationalism, Flag, Patriotrism
Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation

Publisher:    Cambridge  UP.
Author: 
  Carolyn Marvin & David W. Ingle

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
The authors argue that American patriotism is a civil religion organized around a sacred flag, whose followers engage in periodic blood sacrifice of their own children to unify the group. Using an anthropological theory, this groundbreaking book presents and explains the ritual sacrifices and regeneration that constitute American nationalism.  [Book in UA’s Mullins Library  JC346 .M27 1999  --Dick]
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (review)
From: Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2001
pp. 173-175 | 10.1353/rap.2001.0007
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. By Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. xv + 398.
Flagburning. Flagwaving. The role of the flag in American culture, the way in which it is used, and what it symbolizes are the topics of a new book on blood sacrifice, violence, and the flag. Marvin and Ingle argue that "violent blood sacrifice makes enduring groups cohere" (1) despite the belief in civilized society. The flag, for these authors, rests at the center of the sacrificial system, or the civil religion of patriotism. The necessity of this sacrifice in order to preserve the nation remains a secret, for the nation cannot acknowledge that it is willing to kill its own children in order to maintain the system. Thus, Marvin and Ingle contend that the operation of the flag in society demonstrates the power of the totem myth, the creation-sacrifice story. Utilizing Durkheim's theory of totem ritual to undergird much, although not all, of their analysis, they set out to "explore how American national identity is created and maintained" (3).
After a brief introduction of the argument, the book proceeds to lay out how the totem myth operates, beginning with defining civil religion and explaining the attributes of the totem flag. The subsequent chapters further elaborate the totem myth by outlining its various parts, including the totem secret, the willing sacrifice, the totem leader, and the re-creation of the myth. Each of these initial chapters builds upon those previous to construct an image of the totem myth in practice. Later chapters, each of which somewhat narrows the focus to affiliate groups and sports, flag use in the popular domain, elections, and commerce, provide both an analysis of the totem myth and a glimpse into its power in society.
For readers of this journal, the authors' approach to this analysis may be one of the most interesting parts of the book. Marvin and Ingle refute theorists who have rejected a civic religion of patriotism by commenting that those authors have tended to focus on presidential statements while ignoring the wider culture (17). Because they see this as the flaw in previous studies of patriotism, they place a greater emphasis on a variety of texts. Their analysis then encompasses a range from historical narratives to media statements to children's contest letters to movies. They are careful to point out, however, that they do not view the flag as a text, but as a body, prompting a discussion of the differences between body and text (42-44).
The approach Marvin and Ingle take offers several insights. First, this emphasis on a wide variety of cultural texts does indeed provide an engaging glimpse into the role the American flag plays in the culture. The recognition by schoolchildren of the semiotic symbolism (who, of course, do not use those terms), for example, shows a deep penetration into the American psyche of the flag's importance to what we believe to be true. In several instances, the choice of texts to support the authors' argument proves poignant and illustrative.
Additionally, chapter five on military culture thoroughly encompasses the explanation of the totem myth while adding to existing literature on the military's symbolic role in unifying the nation. Marvin and Ingle point out that the sacrificial system requires individuals who are willing to make the sacrifice, the most obvious example of whom are members of the military. These soldiers are "border-crossers" who both are given the authority to kill and are sacrificed in order to purify the community that has sent them to kill (100). While the idea that the military exists as a unique culture set apart from society has been well developed elsewhere, Marvin and Ingle's addition lies in this notion of borders; "[b]order-crossers model and train for death" (104), they state. In doing so, crossing back over the border after touching death becomes difficult for these soldiers, especially if the country lacks pride in the sacrifice...  [See OMNI’s newsletters on the recent Iraq and Afghan wars, on returning soldiers and PTSD, and related topics.  –Dick]







We are extremely excited by the abstracts we've received in response to the call for papers for our second edited book volume, Nationalism, War and Sacrifice: Dying for One's Country.
We received well over 100 proposals, and have narrowed them down to the 12 that are summarized below.   We hope our Newsletter subscribers will read these extracts—as well as the book's Statement of Purpose, authored by the book's editor, Richard A. Koenigsberg.
We are very grateful to everyone who submitted an abstract.
With best regards,
Orion Anderson, Communications Director
Library of Social Science, Telephone: 718-393-1104
oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com
Nationalism, War and Sacrifice: Dying for One’s Country
Statement of Purpose
Richard A. Koenigsberg, Volume Editor
It seems that the sun revolves around the earth—but this is not the case. War was once conceptualized as “male aggression.” Contemporary research points in a different direction.
General Sir John Hackett observes that the military makes demands that “few if any other callings do.” While emotionally-disturbed people talk about being “trained to kill,” the whole essence of being a soldier, Hackett says, is “not to slay but to be slain.” Gwynne Dyer states that by becoming soldiers, men “agree to die when we tell them to.&rd quo; General Douglas MacArthur concurred with these assessments when he told West Point graduates that as soldiers they were required to practice the “greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.”
This book will explore the idea of “dying for one’s country” as a central dimension of the ideology and institution of warfare.
According to “realist” theories, nations go to war for rational, utilitarian reasons: the quest for territory or power, national defense, etc. Adolf Hitler is conventionally seen as wishing to achieve “world conquest.” It seems that way. Yet in 45 years studying Hitler’s texts, I never saw him speak in terms of conquest or conquering.
When Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939, he asked each German to do “what he was prepared to do”: to “lay down his life for his people and for his country.” Hitler went on to say that if anyone thought he could “evade this national duty,” he would “perish.” In his declaration of war, Hitler set forth the essence of Nazism: Either die for Germany, or we will kill you. Building on the case of Nazism, this book will explore the role of sacrificial death in nationalism and warfare.
In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Carolyn Marvin examines this intimate link between nationalism and sacrificial death in war. Focusing on the United States, Marvin argues that “bodily sacrifice is the core of American nationalism.” At the behest of the group, the “lifeblood of the community must be shed.” Group solidarity flows from the value of this sacrifice. Based on his study of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Babak Rahimi similarly concludes that the soldier’s sacrificial blood “bestows new life for the community,” as it “identifies the reality of the nation with the destruction of each body on the battlefield.” Or as Nazi leader Rudolph Hess put it: “The stream of blood which flows for Germany is eternal—the sacrifices of German men for their Volk is eternal—therefore Germany also will be immortal.”
Writing about the Second World War, John Dower observes that Japanese soldiers—like American soldiers—died believing they were giving their lives for a noble cause, and did so in a spirit of duty, honor and obedience in ways familiar everywhere. Japanese fighting men died because “their country and sovereign called upon them to do so.”
In the opening days of 1943, General Sir Thomas Blamey gave an emotional speech to his exhausted Australian troops: “You have lost many comrades,” he told his men, “but you have learnt that it is the highest and sweetest achievement of us all that we should die for our country.”
Such words, Dower says, could have been “placed in the mouth of a Japanese commander almost without change.” But when Japanese spoke of the nobility of dying for their emperor and country, their enemies offered this as evidence of their “peculiar fanaticism, irrationality, even collective psychosis and death wish.” The number of United Kingdom airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater than the number of Japanese who died as pilots.
This book builds on the hypothesis that sacrificial death in warfare is common to many cultures—revolving around the willingness to give one’s life as a testimony of devotion to an object conceived as sacred in one’s society. When the other guy dies for his sacred object (e.g., the Japanese soldier or Islamic jihadist), sacrificial death seems self-destructive, even bizarre. When we die for our sacred object, sacrificial death is conceived and experienced as noble, honorable and beautiful.
Hitler stated that any man who loves his people “proves it solely by the sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it,” insisting that giving one’s life for the community constitutes the “crown of sacrifice.” Political leaders of nearly every nation in the world have expressed, and continue to express, similar sentiments.
The French theorist Ernest Renan—in his famous essay “What is a Nation?” (1882)—stated that one loves one’s nation in proportion to the “ills that one has suffered.” Suffering in common, Renan says, “unifies more than joy does.” A nation is a large-scale solidarity constituted by the “sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”
Following the Vietnam War, the belief in the validity of sacrificial death for a cause faded as mankind seemed to be moving toward the “end of history”. September 11, 2001 resurrected the idea of sacrificial death (martyrdom) for the sake of a sacred ideal. Bin Laden declared that Muslim youth “Love death the way you Americans love life.” Islamic revolutionary Ali Belhadj declared that if a faith or belief is not “watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow.”
René Girard observes that resemblances among sacrificial rites practiced in disparate cultures are striking—that variations are never sufficient to “disguise the basic similarities.” Hubert and Mauss describe the sacrificial process apart from any specific culture’s context as “some kind of technique.” How can we understand the sacrificial technique or methodology?
Girard states that sacrifice “accords the god all he needs to assure his continued growth and vigor.” Or as I put it in Nations Have the Right to Kill, “As the soldier dies, so the nation comes alive.”
Excerpts of abstracts selected for possible inclusion in
Nationalism, War & Sacrifice
“Memorializing War Heroes in the Context of the War on Terror, 2001-2012”
Michael Blain, Boise State University
The “compulsive repetition” of victimage rituals provides a stage for leaders to engage in the use of dramatic rhetorical discourses to vilify opponents as ultimate threats to “security” and to glorify heroes to sustain military or terrorist campaigns. The sacrifice of human life is central to these cultural practices (e.g., memorials to the Crucifixion of Christ in the Christian movement; the Nazi use of World War I memorials; the 9/11 memorials). These memorials are as crucial to generating a willingness to fight and die as are the disciplinary practices of the military, which deliver the troops to the field of battle and sustain the willingness to fight and die facing the enemy.
“Nationalism, Honor, and Sacrificial Victims in the War Movies of Stanley Kubrick”
George A. Dunn & Kevin Corn, University of Indianapolis
Kubrick examines the ideologies that leaders have used to justify the bloody sacrifice of their citizens to the transcendent ideal of nationhood and, like the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous tale, allows us to see that “the emperor is naked.” The ideologies that underlie the sacrificial machinery of the state are shown to be monstrous when their fruits are measured against the demands of human decency (Paths of Glory), comically absurd when their rhetoric is held up to rational scrutiny (Dr. Strangelove), and generally paranoid in the way they forge solidarity by dehumanizing the “other,” who is in reality just a fantastic projection of our own insecurities and fears (Fear and Desire and Full Metal Jacket).
“Dying for the Motherland: Orthodox Christianity & the Invention of “Isaac” a Jewish Military Hero”
Yael S. Feldman, New York University
“Ultimately,” says B. Anderson, national ‘fraternity’ made it possible, for so many millions of people, “not so much to kill, as willingly to die”… A WWI Jewish volunteer to the British Army similarly declared: “You don’t understand me: I am going to die… not to kill”. Sentiments of this sort abound in my study, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (2010). However, the language and imagery in which these sentiments are often couched reveal that they were not necessarily fuelled by the “horizontal comradeship” of the “imagined communities” argued for by Anderson. Rather, the willingness to die for one’s father/motherland seems to derive from a much older human ‘habit’ or ‘reflex’—the universal need to secure one’s well-being by appeasing the gods (or their human representatives).
“Mishima’s Negative Political Theology: Dying for the Absent Emperor”
Akio Kimura, Meiji University
Just as Hitler asked every German to sacrifice his life for the country, the Japanese military government at the end of World War II told every Japanese to sacrifice his life for the country under the slogan, “Ichioku sogyokusai,” which literally means one hundred million broken jewels, and encouraged the people to keep fighting to the death. In fact, many Japanese died while the government hesitated to surrender and among those were the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were regarded as the sacrifice for the country. But more precisely, they were sacrificed not so much for the country as for the Emperor. After the war, in the transition from the pre-war authoritarian regime to the post-war democracy, such a blind Emperor worship gradually faded. But when Mishima Yukio, Japanese novelist, killed himself by seppuku in 1970, after expressing his loyalty to the Emperor, Japanese realized that it was only a dream that Japan had been democratized. Why did Mishima kill himself? Mishima’s suicide was a rite of sacrifice aimed at advertising for the exceptional presence of the Emperor in the post-war Japan, no matter how empty and outdated it looked.
“Human Wave & Communist Ideology: Chinese Massive Attacks during the Korean War”
Xiaobing Li, University of Central Oklahoma
Some Western historians describe the massed Chinese assaults as “human wave” attacks “in an effort to overwhelm their better-armed opponents and capture their weapons.” Edward C. O’Dowd claims that “American infantrymen dubbed these massed groups of Chinese soldiers ‘hordes,’ and the attacks became known as ‘human waves’.” One of the important characteristics of the Chinese military is its emphasis on the human component in war. Mao firmly believed that a weak army could win in a war against a strong enemy because he was convinced that a man could beat a weapon. “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor,” Mao wrote. “It is people, not things, that are decisive.” Mao’s confidence in a human being’s “subjective capability” to determine defeat or victory in war made sense to the Chinese officers and soldiers. The idea that a soldie r or a warrior, because of his godliness and virtue, can vanquish stronger opponents has a long tradition.
“Of Heroes, Martyrs and Apathy: the Limits of Ideological Manipulation in a Place like Columbia
Gregory Lobo, University of the Andes
this chapter presents an “ideology critique” of Colombia’s ongoing media campaign to recruit martyrs for the nation, enriched by juxtaposing it with “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” that classic exaltation of the fallen and exhortation to the living. Taking Pericles’ validation and justification of the ultimate sacrifice as, in a sense, normative, allows for a revealing and contextually rich analysis of a series of television commercials in which a Colombian soldier – situated in the jungle in full battle gear – takes a few moments out from pursuing the (our) enemy to look directly at an individualized spectator and declare to him: “Even though I don’t know you, I will give my life for you.”
“Why Enlist? Anatomy of a Recruit”
Moni McIntyre, Duquesne University
What motivates someone to join an all-volunteer force when the possibility of their death or dismemberment is clear and present? What, in addition to a poor economy, would entice individuals to put their life at risk when other options are available? How prominent is the prospect of dying for one’s country in the mind of a potential inductee? Do they aspire to be heroes or merely to “get by”? Do family expectations make a difference? Do officers and enlisted personnel have different motives for choosing the military either as a career or as a way station in their lives? How clear are they about the risks to their life and limb when they swear to support and defend the Constitution of their country? How much of a role does patriotism--as they understand it—play? Does religion play a part in their decision? If so, then in what way? Is the possibility of a sacrificial death and subsequent memorialization a part of their decision?
“Live faithfully, fight bravely, die laughing”: The Behavior Socialization of German Boys in the pre-war Hitler Youth”
Nancy E. Rupprecht, Middle Tennessee State University
This article will discuss the implementation of the Youth Leadership's personality profile for German boys that was structured to create enthusiastic and obedient soldiers for the German future.  To that end, German youth was systematically steeped in National Socialist behavioral values that were simultaneously ideals in which they were expected to believe and behavioral traits they were required to exhibit.  In particular it will discuss those values designed to socialize boys to sacrifice their lives for their nation without hesitation: These include bravery, courage, toughness, discipline, duty, loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice and sacrifice-readiness (opferbereitschaft).
“Their name liveth for ever more”: Narratives of sacrifice in British public remembrance 1918-2011”
Mark Sandle, The King's University College
This essay will examine the history of public remembrance of the two world wars within Britain since the end of World War One. The focus of this essay will be upon how a democratic state seeks to both remember and legitimate the sacrifices of its own citizens for the defence of the nation-state, and especially the use of religious and Christian notions in the public discourse surrounding remembrance. The theoretical approach taken in this piece will be to examine the idea of nationalism as a civic religion, and the way in which the nation-state becomes sacralised in times of war, showing how dying for the state confers immortality, hence the phrase “their name liveth for evermore”.
Title and Topic To Be Announced
Ivan Strenski, University of California, Riverside
“Sacrificing Women for Uniformed Men: Imperial Japan’s Comfort Women Rape as the Nationalism-Enhancing Cult”
Chiaki Takagi, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
War occurs within the male sphere. When a nation goes to war, men are asked to sacrifice their lives for the nation. Traditionally, women have engaged in this national project indirectly by serving men in uniform.  During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army established the special facilities called Jugun Ianjo (Military Comfort Stations) to release their soldiers’ mental stress from combat and the strict military discipline. For this military project, many young women, mainly from Japan’s colonies, were recruited in deceitful manners and inhumanely treated as Ianfu (comfort women), or sexual slaves, by men who were to die for their nation. In this system, men’s bodily sacrifices for the nation were rewarded with women’s bodily sacrifices for men. It was a factory line of sacrificing crafted in the name of war.
Title To Be Announced
Michael Vlahos, United States Naval War College
The new, emerging consciousness is a declaration by all of us that we are indeed together as humans, everyone: Every lingering and atavistic claim of religious nationalism is as corrosive of humanity's collective progress as a laboratory acid-beaker flung in hopeless spite at a glorious experiment near fruition. Religious nationalism is now a civilizational "dead hand," holding us all back. The final sacred spasms of blood-sacrificial visions may be the ruin of our collective hopes for a new world, pulling human energies away from the challenges that lie ahead.


ROY SPECKHARDT, “PLANETARY PATRIOTISM: PUTTING HUMANITY BEFORE NATIONALITY,” FREE MIND (WINTER 2014): “Nationalism remains a potent cause of violence between opposing governments.”   A succinct case for internationalism by the Executive Director of the American Humanist Association.

US NATIONALISM, Google Search
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American nationalism is the nationalism of Americans - as in the people of the United States of America - and American culture. American scholars such as Hans ...
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Sep 28, 2011 – Call it what you will — American nationalism or patriotism — it is covering the country like a Wi-Fi cloud — above the fruited plain from sea to ...
4.   Nationalism
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Aug 8, 2005 – While nationalism is a strong force in both the US and Canada, the expression of it is quite different on people divided by the arbitrary border ...
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Mar 22, 2012 – The backlash against the misguided video campaign may say more about how American self-conceptions have changed in the last 10 years.
1.            'No nationalism please, we're Swedish'
The Local.se‎ - 14 hours ago
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Includes platform, issues of the Nationalist Times, a news service and bookstore. Organization opposes free trade, immigration and the United Nations. Founded ...
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Jul 15, 2011 – Marty, for God's sake, the World already existed "before" the US was created!, in fact, the contribution -so to speak- to 'nationalism' of the US is ...
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Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States ...
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Feb 13, 2008 – A Survey at the roots of nationalism in the United States after the War of 1812 in dealings with the British and Spanish governments.



WHO OWNS ARCTIC SEABED?  The Importance of the United Nations Seabed Treaty
A newspaper report and an article from a scientific journal focus on only one of many international disputes that reveal the urgent need of UN jurisdiction.
“John Baird, Canada’s Foreign minister, said his country intends to extend its seabed claims in the Arctic to include the North Pole.”  ADG (Dec. 10, 2013).
geology.com › Climate Change
Control of Arctic resources is an extremely valuable prize. ... The United Nations sought to bring order and equity to the diversity of claims being made by nations ...


OVERCOMING ANIMOSITIES OF NATIONS: CENTURIES OF PERSECUTION OF MUSLIMS
Book Review: We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades... by Anouar Majid
Living in the 21st Century, we believe, of course, that we base our decisions and actions upon contemporary ideas. We've advanced enough to throw off the shackles of antiquated thinking in favor of modernity. Yet Anouar Majid's We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities reveals we may not be quite so free of historical influences as we might think.
Majid, in fact, argues that our current attitudes toward such things as immigration and the so-called "clash of cultures" between the West and Islam hearken back some 500 years or more and that we have yet to overcome "medieval animosities." Those animosities are reflected in the efforts to drive Muslims from Iberia, one phase of which culminated when the last Muslin stronghold in Spain fell in 1492 and the country became a united, Christian nation. We Are All Moors not only traces Spain's persecution of and efforts to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent but how those attitudes spread in both Europe and the Americas and encompassed far more than those of Islamic faith.
To Majid, Moors are a prototype, and not one that redounds to our credit. The persecution of Moors as "undesirable" or worse by a Christian nation was emblematic of how Western civilization also would treat Jews, Africans, Hispanics or Native Americans at various times. "It is only in this symbolic or metaphorical sense that minorities living in the West after 1492 are the descendants of the Moors," he writes in the Introduction. "Given that the archetypal Other of Europe before 1492 was the Muslim, the world's non-European natives or religions were all stamped with the taint of Muslim impurity."
Thus, for example, We Are All Moors also explores how the treatment of African slaves and Native Americans was impacted not only by a Spanish and Muslim influence in the New World but also the fact that portions of Africa already had a Muslim influence. In essence, the argument is that the same characteristics used to justify attacks on Moors — racial inferiority, religious impurity, and cultural incompatibility — also were the prism through which other non-Christian minorities were viewed. Majid argues that we still use that prism today, whether in the clash with so-called "Islamists" or European unease over the number of Muslim immigrants and similar feelings in American toward Hispanic immigrants.    MORE  http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-we-are-all-moors/

Rep. Steve Womack
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