What really made me vomit was listening to an NPR gabfest yesterday afternoon as liberal commentators competed with each other to see who could whine the loudest about being SO MISUNDERSTOOD about patriotism. They complained that conservatives were unfairly labeling them as unpatriotic for questioning George Bush's war. "We're as Patriotic as the next guy," they whimpered.

Sorry, Mr. & Ms. Liberal, but I'm unsympathetic to your plight. On a moral level, the notion that human beings born on one side of an invisible line of the map are inherently superior to those on the other side is not only absurd, it's chauvinistic. Your national chauvinism (the impolite term for patriotism) is the root ideological justification for this war which you claim to oppose. Patriotism, the blinkered notion that one nation is intrinsically better than all of the others, lends credence to the notion that the United States, alone among the world's nations, has the right to threaten and invade other countries with its huge military machine, wield disproportionate power in the United Nations and its Security Council, pollute and consume a wildly disproportionate share of the world's resources, etc., etc.

It is ironic that many who claim to oppose American domination of the world are, by their endorsement of patriotism, oblivious to the one form of chauvinism which is most directly in sync with that domination. Are we going to be a movement which is about promoting human liberty or are we not?

EVERY nation has its citizens, past and present, who fought honorably for the rights, livelihoods and dignity of their fellow humans (usually with direct opposition by their "own" governments). EVERY nation has its citizens whose avarice and brutality should appall all but the most misanthropic among us (most often supported by those governments). It is utterly illogical to propose that the path to greater human freedom will be won by all the saints and rogues who happen to live in the same territorial entity combining against similar mixtures in other territorial entities.

To my patriotic liberal friends who say they oppose racism, I say that by endorsing patriotism, you are endorsing a form of racism, the notion that Americans are somehow deserving of special treatment in the world. If you truly want to break the stranglehold that rightwing ideologues have on the political debate in this country, you will not do so by adapting to that most loathsome aspect of their ideologies—chauvinism. National chauvinism is no more pretty than sexist chauvinism, anti-gay chauvinism, or other forms of racist chauvinism.

National chauvinism finds repeated expression within our anti-war movement, to the detriment of the movement as a whole. Liberal organizations are fixated on the 1,700+ American deaths in the conflict, while mentioning merely as an afterthought (if at all), the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians who have died thanks to the American invasion. It is precisely this racism, this devaluing of Iraqi lives versus American lives, that gave us Abu Ghraib. Around the world, military machines have long known that the key to training new soldiers is to first get them to dehumanize "the enemy," call them racist terms, and thus make it "okay" to kill and brutalize them. This is how you get otherwise decent young men and women to commit unspeakable acts on their fellow human beings. For any section of the peace movement to implicitly endorse this racist dehumanization is nothing short of disgraceful.

The peace movement in the United States will not advance by soft-peddling its opposition to national chauvinism, or worse, mimicking that chauvinism, any more than our movement "advanced" when then-President Clinton pandered to the right at every step, paving the way for the "Republican Revolution." As a small section of a worldwide anti-war movement, we are hardly deserving of solidarity from our sisters and brothers abroad if we refuse to cut our apron strings to the government which has so many of them under its heel.

No, I'm not proud to be an American. An accident of birth, it's like being proud of being right- or left-handed. Some 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by Americans and their allies. Some 1 million-plus Iraqis died thanks to American-inspired sanctions before the war. Probably 30,000 to 50,000 Iraqi military personnel were killed by the U.S. and its allies during the invasion, according to a pair of U.S. generals. Especially in light of the Downing Street memo, those 30,000 to 50,000 Iraqis have got a far better claim to having died defending their country than did the 1,700+ killed on the U.S. side of the war.

So no, on this 4th of July I will not pledge allegiance to the flag and the country for which it stands, because like all countries around the world, it is divided by class, with race, sex, sexual orientation and other nasty divisions thrown in for good measure, with liberty and justice for some. I instead pledge allegiance to the human race and the globe on which we all must live. If forced to align with any nation, I align myself with those nations which are fighting to be freed from the domination of the U.S. and other bullies around the globe.

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The writer was born on May 1st (May Day, no kidding!) and is a member of the Gay Liberation Network in Chicago. The views are his own, and not necessarily those of GLN. He can be reached at CCAWR (at) aol.com