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 XIX

PATRIOTlSxM AND GOVERNMENT

The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interests of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.' — E. Belfort Bax.

J HAVE already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering ; and that, consequently, this feeling should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say — though it is undeni- able that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling — all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism, or Chau- vinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked.

^VTiat this real, good patriotism consists in, we are

never told ; or, if anything is said about it, instead

of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases,

or, finally, some other conception is substituted for

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