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Wordism: Mother Russia and Potemkin Patriotism
Now that one is not allowed to be loyal to anything,
Potemkin Patriotism concentrates all attention on
The Flag and khaki
uniforms.
Veterans are sort of the new Semites, as in anti-Semitic. It
was a bad mistake when the 60s protests concentrated on falling American
soldiers paid killers. This tactic ended up with hardhats marching in a pro-War
rally on Wall Street, American Solidarity.
With the Potemkin definition of Patriotism today, anyone who
fails to worship uniforms and veterans is anti-American instead of
anti-Semitic.
Like busing, the draft in the 1960s was strictly for
children of working stiffs who couldn’t afford to send their children to
private schools and draft-exempt colleges. Marxists used the term “working
class” since.
Loyalty is something almost everyone wants. That is a basic
need that Marxism tries to ignore. Lenin, who declared that any loyalty to
anything but the Working Class to be treason, would have had a fit if he found
out that Soviets had to call World War II The Great Patriotic War.
But the simple fact was that, even after a generation of
Soviet rule, soldiers would not fight for Wordism, the Truth According to Marx.
It had to be Mother Russia.
McGovern got stomped in the 1972 election because of this
backlash against people who carried the Viet Cong flag in parades and falsely
informed parents that their son had been killed in Vietnam.
All that made their “working class” pretensions so absurd
that they stopped using “working class” in America because it had become a
joke.
In the present series of wars against Arabs, they wised up a
bit when Bush, Sr. attacked Iraq and got a 90 plus approval rating for it. They
have changed their tactics on loyalty.
After their 60s experience, they have finally faced the fact
that their hero Comrade Stalin learned thirty years before. Marxism cannot get
rid of loyalty. But it can redirect it.
This is a major blow to Marxism in the West, just as it was
to the Soviets, but the simple fact is that no form of Wordism can actually
replace loyalty.
That is because Wordism is silly. Students can actually
believe that people can actually replace their gut feelings with a book and the
Words of Mommy Professor. Like Stalin’s naming of World War II, they have given
up on their belief that words can replace loyalties.
But they can divert it.
Hence the new Potemkin Patriotism. One can be a Good
American by worshipping Our Men and Women in Uniform. One can even wave an
American flag.
Potemkin Patriotism diverts natural loyalty to our Mother
Russia, to khaki uniforms that represent loyalty to nothing, a flag dedicated
to what National Review calls “post-racial America.”
Right after 9?11, Call for Patriotism hosted by Sidney
Poitier included a shot of a white girl and a Black man wrapped together in an
American flag. That ad was pulled and put into the libservative Memory Hole. It
showed too plainly what loyalty means to liberals and respectable
conservatives.
But it is their strategy now. Potemkin Patriotism, like The
Great Patriotic War, is Wordists coming up against reality.
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