Students saluting the flag, 1940s, NYC Public School #23
The Iowa state legislators are considering a bill that would mandate all public school students K-12 to stand and sing at least one of the four verses of the National Anthem.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/iowans-react-to-proposed-law-that-mandates-students-sing-national-anthem/ar-BB1hiTOw
Opposing the bill, Democrat Sue Cahill states that the law violates the First Amendment despite the amendment clearly bans religious mandates and says nothing about banning the public expression of national pride and patriotism. Common sense and an amount of objective knowledge of our nation’s founding shows that unlike European and other nations, we are a collection of sovereign states and carefully and mindfully limited the powers of the federal government.
The Republicans in the Iowa legislature are responding to a call by the electorate sentiment via candidate Donald Trump to Make America Great Again. Trump advisor Stephen K. War Room Bannon is presently hoping on a pro Christian Nationalist movement. C-Pac founder Matt Schlapp is on his way this week to join forces with populist nationalist in several European nations. But the zeitgeist totally lacks objectivity. Slapp and Bannon joining forces with Europeans is a distraction from the needed conversation here at home, here in a Republic where states are sovereign and thereby local culture awaits our devotion.
I am reminded of the scene in the film Gettysburg and the valiant soldiers in Pickett’s brigade charging up the hill to their deaths while yelling “FOR VIRGINIA!”. It was Lincoln and the War For Southern Independence when nationalism, the dying for one’s country was born here. I am currently reading an incredible history by Southern authors Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson, Jr.. The book entitled Lincoln, Marx and the G.O.P. traces the history between Marx and Engles’s support for Lincoln and the North. Engles is quoted in a letter to fellow communist and a future brigadier general in the union army:
one of the preliminaries for the advancement of the communist revolution was the establishment of a single indivisable republic.”
Benedict Anderson who wrote one of the best books on the origins of nationalism Imagined Communities 1983 wrote that
The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.”
Humanism Rejects Nationalism
On these posts, I have attacked humanism and made it clear that humanism is embedded in all of American education. Humanism was created to eliminate religion, but, in that process, it has become a religion. Not just a religion in the West, but a state-sponsored religion which is not allowed by the First Amendment. Humanism in our public schools and universities is the main reason why I support home schooling.
Here is a statement by a humanist in Australia.
As an approach to life focused on equal respect and dignity for all, humanism is a natural opponent of not just religion, but of any ideology which divides human beings into groups with unequal rights and status.
One such divisive ideology is political nationalism. Nationalism is a difficult ideology to challenge, because many see it as a natural part of an unchangeable ‘reality’. But, in fact, political nationalism is historically contingent.
It took centuries to move from a situation where it was unthinkable to question religion, but now we also need to urgently question nationalism. Today’s humanists need to be bold in challenging the assumption that the world must be divided into competing nation states.
Nationalism divides rather than unites human beings. The national identity created becomes too easily regarded as more important than our common human identity. Every war is in fact a civil war, a civil war of humanity.
Lyndon Storey
One of countless depictions of American patriotism by artist Norman Rockwell
American Nihilism
Benedict Anderson shows how religion was replaced by secular beliefs. As an anthropologist, I know that all societies (cultures) have clear distinctions for what is sacred versus that which is profane (ordinary). In the West, beginning with Europe, leaders soon discovered that societies (culture) could not function without something being sacred. Lincoln was the first to marry God with Country, but it has always been an unnatural union. Nations as “imagined communities” come up short in the imagination index. This is why so many MAGA are supporting Christian Nationalism. Returning to my call for objectivity, Christian Nationalism is not Christianity, nor is it nationism.
America is an idea and an ideal. Talking about “imagined communities” our Republic with sovereign states HAS THIS IN SPADES . Knowing that if Marx and Engles were alive today they would support the GOP Iowa’s mandated singing of the “NationaL” Anthem should give pause.