(By Ken Germanson – From a homily presented before the Community of the Living Spirit, a nondenominational worship group in Waukesha WI. Feb. 23, 2025)
From childhood on, most of us have been taught – or should I say “indoctrinated” – to worship the flag, to say the Pledge of Allegiance with reverence and to sing the “The Star Spangled Banner” with gusto.
All that show of patriotism should be OK. Right? Well, not necessarily.
For most of my life – in fact since I was about 15 years old – I’ve wondered whether such exuberant displays of patriotism may indeed be dangerous, may be clouding our attitudes and beliefs and cause us to support policies and actions that may lead to wars or to make unwise decisions.
A bit of flag-waving certainly can be harmless. It’s like wearing a Green Bay Packer sweatshirt or a Milwaukee Brewers Baseball hat. Rooting for the Packers and the Brewers doesn’t mean I’m going to get in a fist fight with a Bears fan or a Cubs rooter.
My point is that mindless patriotism is no virtue. “My country, right or wrong” has long been read as a positive sign that you’re a loyal American. In actuality, the whole quote, as it is attributed to Carl Schurz, a onetime Milwaukeean, a political liberal and a former Union officer in the Civil War, goes like this: “My country right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”[i] I certainly think the whole meaning of that slogan is right on the mark.
It was when I was a junior in high school that I first began to see that blind patriotism may be a foolish and possibly wrong-headed philosophy – not a virtue that should be welcomed. World War II was still consuming our lives in winter of 1944-45 and I, as a high school boy, saw some senior boys being drafted right out of school and into the armed forces. My uncle, who had lived with us and helped raise me and my brothers, had been in the Army since 1940 and was in the Philippines. Most of us realized it would soon be our fate to join them, and we followed the news closely. I, for one, read the daily papers and followed the maps to see our army’s success in both Europe and the South Pacific. We truly cared about what was going on in the world. Names like Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge were etched into our brains.
It was at that time that one of my friends ran across a book entitled “The Anatomy of Peace,” by Emery Reves, and it was an eye-opener.
It argued that the existence of the nation-state … national sovereignty … was the core factor that encouraged nations to go to war. This book became the bible of a group of politicians, academics and thinkers who felt that the creation of a federal world government – a socalled “United States of the World” – would be the only way to end all wars. It’s difficult for later generations to realize that many persons had felt the First World War would be the war to end all wars. The League, of Nations was created to achieve that goal. It became nothing much more than a debating society, and its ineffectiveness became obvious when the United States refused to join the League. It failed. Then, in 1945, it was felt such a world government must be a stronger entity, and the United Nations was formed. But, it was still in many ways powerless to prevent war, particularly among the world powers.
The answer, Reves said, was to do away with the Nation-state, to do away with national sovereignty, including the power of nations to maintain armed forces and the ability to wage war. The formation of the United States of America was the model to form a world wide federal government, where the nations become like our states, keeping certain powers, but ceding the power to wage war in the hands of the federal government. Thus, it was that Wisconsin couldn’t invade Illinois, but each state could enact laws on most other things.
My two buddies of my high school years were Don and Dick, and we chummed around quite a bit, often standing on street corners discussing girls, cars, our respective jobs (we all worked) and usually drifting off into talk about the current world war, and the fact that all three of us in a couple of years would be off wearing a uniform of one of the Armed Services.
Soon we joined about another dozen of our classmates and formed a chapter of the United World Federalists, an organization that was quickly becoming popular across the United States. We became an official club in our high school, complete with a teacher as a sponsor (Mr. Matzke who taught math and otherwise had been the “enforcer” in the hallways) and with our picture in the school’s yearbook. We even put on a program before the entire school in an assembly. I remember being dressed as a caveman.
In the years after World War II, the idea of a federal world government spread worldwide, gathering supporters like Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer and several key Senators and Congressmen. I remember driving with three others to Minneapolis in 1948 for a national conference for the United World Federalists. Delegates from throughout the United States gathered. One of the highlights was the address by a young Hubert Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, who thrilled us with hope that we could indeed create a federal world government and build a permanent structure for world peace.
The world federalism idea was quite different from the United Nations, which basically has no power over its constituent member states. The UN does great work, but it has no armed forces of its own to maintain peace against a rogue nation; it must rely on the voluntary donations of troops from its member states.
The campaign for world federalism soon fizzled, as no nation seemed willing to give up its sovereignty, its ability to wage war and to have its own armed forces.
Right now, our nation, under the Trump-Musk Administration, we are turning our thinking back to the dark ages. The “America First” ideals, you must remember, were dramatically espoused in the 1930s (just before World War II) by Gerald L. K. Smith and the “America firsters,” who in 1938 attracted more than 20,000 persons to Madison Square Garden at a German-American Bund rally. Right here, among Milwaukee’s large Germanic population, such pro-Nazi “American firsters” were prominent.
Reves, in his book, “The Anatomy of Peace,” in 1945 saw the dangers of such myopic world views. This book spelled out, using history, the philosophical founding of the world federalism ideal.
Quoting from this book: “During the first half of the twentieth century, (remember this book was published in 1945) in so far as our political, social and economic thinking is concerned, we find ourselves in the same dead-end road as Copernicus during the Jubilee of 1500, We are living in a geocentric world of nation-states. We look upon economic, social and political problems as “national” problems. No matter in which country we live, the center of our political universe is our own nation. In our outlook, the immovable point around which all the other nations, all the problems and events outside our nation, the rest of the world, supposedly rotate, is our nation.”
Reves draws a parallel between the theories of early philosophers, like Ptolemy who in the 2nd Century A.D. declared that the earth was the center of the universe and that the moon, sun and stars revolved around the earth. That theory prevailed for another 14 centuries until the 1500s when Copernicus proclaimed the sun was the center of the universe and that all the planets revolved around it.
Not everyone immediately accepted the Copernican theory, and it was roundly criticized by the Roman Catholic church.
Finally, as another example of blind patriotism, let’s look at our Civil War. In 1962, Edmund Wilson published a book, “Patriotic Gore,” which examined how propaganda was able to make southerners feel justified in fighting for slavery and their form of state’s rights while northerners had their own justification.
Now in the year 2025, can we afford to turn our thinking back the “America First” ideas of the past? Yet, blind patriotism takes us there.
Yes, let’s be proud of the United States; let’s relish the ideal that has permitted us to remain a democracy for the last nearly two and a half centuries; let us show the flag if we wish, but also let us look plainly at the fact that our nation is not perfect, that racism still persists, that the US ranked 57th among the 195 countries in infant mortality rates; that the US ranks 63rd among the 237 nations with a life expectancy of 79.46 years, and on and on.
Thus, the MAGA myth – based on the “America First” nonsense – must be discarded. As human beings, we need to recognize that our nation is not the center of the universe; rather we one of the nations within a broader universe.
[i] https://theobserver63.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/my-country-right-or-wrong/
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