Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour of interviews on politics, the environment, and more. I’m Dori Smith

“I call it < "http://www.michaelparenti.org/superpatriotism.html">Superpatriotism because it’s an unthinking knee jerk thing which equates more and more military expenditure and military strength with “patriotism”. It equates attacking and waging wars on other people with love of country.” Michael Parenti, August 2005

Our guest today is Michael Parenti. His latest book is “Superpatriots.” You can learn more about “Superpatriots” and other titles by Michael Parenti on his web site

“Superpatriotism” he says, can manifest itself in religion, sports, the military, school, and big business. I asked Michael Parenti to give us a definition of “Superpatriotism” and to talk about the contents of his new book.

MICHAEL PARENTI: “It’s the very troubling aspects of US foreign policy that led me to raise some critical questions about the way the term and the concept of patriotism and love of country are used to justify all these kinds of crimes that are being perpetrated in the name of patriotism.

Our U.S. rule is play upon people’s patriotism and love of country to get them to go along with policies that do not serve the interest of the American people and do not serve the interests of people in other countries. Under the guise of defending freedom, protecting us from terrorism, and the like, those of us who love our country are supposed to fall into line and support the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Grenada, the occupation of Somalia, sending troops to Lebanon, building of eleven hundred major military bases in 56 different countries, bombing of Yugoslavia for 78 days non-stop, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the menacing threats toward Iran and North Korea, China; the constant conjuring up of adversaries who may threaten us; and under the guise of defending us from these threats and such people fall into line.

In fact, what U.S. rulers are doing is building a global empire that serves the needs of giant multi-national corporations that batten on the huge contracts that are set forth. Consider Iraq for instance. The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel and other companies, just about 70 other companies have made, billions and billions of dollars in profits, a lot of it unaccountable, a lot of it not even properly supervised, in Iraq: Well you see to say that Bush’s policy in Iraq has backfired, or is a failure, is not true. It’s quite successful for certain interests. They are sitting on 5 trillion dollars worth of oil in Iraq. They have no exit strategy. People say, “they have no exit strategy,” as if you are really exposing their stupidity and all of that. But they have no exit strategy because they don’t want any exit strategy. They are not intending to exit. They are sitting on 5 trillion dollars worth of oil, it’s the largest oil grab in the history of humanity.

To justify all of this they wave the flag in people’s faces and many people fall into line. And those of us who criticize such policies and say, wait a minute, these policies are built on deception. –These policies benefit the privileged investing class at the expense of the U.S. Taxpayers, and we expend our taxes and the blood of our sons and daughters and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, whatever, to support that. And people fall into line because the flag is waving and you are told to be a “good American” you’ve got to back the President and all of that.

And those of us who are critics are accused of lacking patriotism. You must be making these criticisms because you don’t love your country. For some strange reason, you live here, you work here, and all of that, but you don’t love your country the way I love my country, and I love my country because I unquestioningly submit to whatever the President wants. He wants more taxes to support his wars? I pay more taxes. He wants the blood of my son or daughter or brother or whatever? I go along with that too.

Such a person is not the citizen of a democracy. Such a person is not the citizen of a democratic polity; he is a citizen of a totalitarian mentality. And so patriotism has been used in this way. I call it “superpatriotism” because it’s an unthinking knee jerk thing which equates more and more military expenditure and military strength with patriotism.

It equates attacking and waging wars on other people with love of country and the like, and most of these super patriots know very little about the history of their country. They know very little about the really wonderful things in our history. So you wonder what it is they really love about their country. They know very little about the struggles for the eight hour day, the struggles for organized labor, the struggles for public education, for medical care for the ill and indigent, the struggle for decent housing, the struggles against racism and segregation, the struggles against sexism, against class oppression, the fight for progressive income taxes: Many of these victories being undone by the Bush Administration, and in the last twenty years by the Reagan Administration and others.

So what is it that they love about their country? They know very little about the darker side of our history also, about the terrible epic of slavery, about the terrible oppression of working people in America, child labor, the terrible conditions of our medical industry, our pharmaceutical industry, and the like, and you can go on and on and on; the plight and the plunder and desecration of the environment. –That other whole story which they don’t even want to look at, and if you criticize they see you as being again, anti-American and lacking in patriotism. So patriotism to these people is to be a mindless, flag waving, follow the leader, sort of drone, you know?”

Smith: “We are talking with Michael Parenti, he’s author of Democracy for the Few, and that book has been used by many college professors to teach classes on the other side of U.S. History, not often taught in high schools certainly. Often, I think Professor Parenti; your book Democracy for the Few is one of the first shocks that college students ever get to show some of the other sides of the country that they are living in.”

MICHAEL PARENTI: “That’s true, yes.”

Smith: “Now talking about the book, “Superpatriotism,” though and U.S. foreign policy. Talk about the fact that the White House has so many problems now addressing the American people about the facts on the ground in Iraq. The violence is getting worse. There are signs that the country is split between new forces that may be leaning more toward Iran than America, and that the government that was helped into office by the U.S. is fraught with problems and possibly gearing up for civil war by creating paramilitary forces.”

MICHAEL PARENTI: “Saddam Hussein in his worst days as a torturer and a murderer and an oppressor was supported by the CIA and the U.S. Government. He was Washington’s poster boy. He was backed for assassination gigs back in 1959. He was the man who destroyed and killed and murdered every Communist, every progressive, every Democrat, every Constitutionalist, or drove them into exile under ground. He even wiped out the whole left wing of his own Baathist Party. And when he was doing all of that he was Washington’s hero. They gave him aid, they had nothing but the highest praise for him. -But when he got out of line on the oil quotas and oil prices and he wanted a bigger share of the market to sell they were worried about oil prices dropping. It was when he proved himself not to be a complete comprador leader opening up his country completely to foreign investment on terms that were entirely favorable to the big foreign investors. When he started doing that, this was when they started finding fault with him. He started committing economic nationalism. He kept the whole economy publicly owned rather than privatizing it, handing it over to the corporations at garage sale prices. He trained cadres of engineers. He started developing Iraq.

Iraq is a very crucial nation in the Middle East. If you ever look at the map of the Middle East it is the hub, the center. It borders on six other very important countries including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. It’s the one country, and a lot of countries in the Middle East have water but no oil, or oil but no water, but Iraq had both. It was very prosperous; it had a standard of living that was the highest in the Middle East.

Today it’s a country that has been reduced to utter desperation and destruction. What the U.S. has done is worsen the conditions of the people; increase the dangers of violence and death; destroy the economy. –I was just reading about a U.S. Marine who has come back and he said he went to Iraq thinking he was going to be fighting and defending people and helping to reconnect their water supply and electricity and sewage systems and in fact he was put on patrol to guard the oil wells and pipelines. He said large numbers of the troops, (that’s why the U.S. Military force in Iraq, one of the reasons it is so ineffectual is that a huge chunk of it,) nobody ever talks about this, a huge chunk is out there guarding the well heads and the pipelines and whatever else and having a hard time of it too because it’s hard to patrol hundreds of miles of pipeline.

This is what has developed. There wasn’t an Al Queda terrorist network in Iraq until the U.S. invasion. Today they have attracted every group; every violent nut that you can think of is now in that country blowing things up and killing people. -They are not, I’m sorry to say, the insurgency is not a people’s war of national liberation which would build cadres and help the people and build schools and whatever things, the way such wars of national liberation have done in some countries, it’s just hit and run groups, made worse as I say attracting and multiplying in numbers with every day of the U.S. occupation.

So the occupation has really been the worst thing for peace, the worst thing for the well being of the Iraqi people and it’s now creating a Frankenstein monster that will lead, as you have said, to civil war probably and to the most extreme form of Islamic oppression. The longer the U.S. stays there the worse it gets despite the window dressing of a Constitution and an election. –90% of the violence and such is because of the U.S. presence and occupation. Even the people who say, “Yes I’m glad you overthrew Saddam Hussein,” say, “now would you please go home.”

So that’s really the answer. And what I would invite people to do is look at the underlying interests behind all of these interventions. Why does this country, why do these rulers, feel so compelled to have to intervene everywhere, have troops in 56 different countries getting involved in military actions in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Grenada, supporting all sorts of other groups in Columbia, and all through Latin America, fighting fighting everywhere, fighting everywhere to make the world safe for the fortune 500. Fighting to make the world safe for George Bush’s plutocracy and reactionaries; And that has nothing to do with patriotism and nothing to do with freedom, nothing to do with national security, and nothing to do with democracy. It’s just the opposite. It creates more problems for all of us. –But it gives them a lot of gains and a lot of advantages.”

Smith: “So with this juncture we are at, with the Peace Movement very active, with people hoping they might be able to make a difference still; just talk about this whole idea of fixing what is wrong in Iraq from the point of view of what can the White House still do and the Military, and then the point of view of how peace activists can be effective in what they call for and try to do.”

MICHAEL PARENTI: “My point is that it’s incorrect to say that the Iraq policy isn’t working. It is working. It is doing what they want. They have got control of the oil and they are exporting it, and they have stripped a government that was 90% state owned and they are privatizing it. They have special committees to privatize it. They have taken a country that was self defining and self developing and is now an impoverished prostrate devastated country where people will line up to work for slave wages or become members of the police or army because it’s the only job they can get and serve as adjuncts to U.S. imperialism.

The policy is working for certain very select interests and as far as anyone else to hell with them, it doesn’t matter. And so the Peace Movement should be making clear, quo bono; who benefits from this policy? And to assume that nobody benefits, nobody is being served; this is just a total disaster. If you think your enemies who control so much power, so much of the world, so much wealth, if you think they are stupid you are being stupid. They know what the hell they are doing.

Of course there have been unexpected and very costly responses. They didn’t expect an insurgency of the kind they got. They thought it would be a walk in and a waltz, but they are not paying the price on that. They are even profiting from that. It’s enabling them to boost the U.S. Military budget to record heights. $440 billion dollars, not to mention the off budget expenditures day to day in Iraq which come to a billion and a half a day more, which will starve out the human services at home; give them greater justification to cut back on Social Security payments and Medicare and housing and education; all of those things; get us back to a third world nation. Their goal is the impoverishment of the world. The poorer they can make you or the Iraqis or other people, the poorer and hungrier they can make people the harder those people will work for less and less and the more profits they themselves will make.

So that’s where I see the policy going. As I said they have no exit policy because they have no intention of exiting. They have been in Korea for 50 years, a half a century, and they are quite prepared to stay in Iraq for half a century. They won’t say that to people because they are losing 50 or 70 soldiers and marines a months, but that’s a sustainable loss, you know, Richard Nixon was losing 110 a week in Vietnam and he got reelected in 1972 by a landslide.

Even among the people who lose their children you get these interviews, a lot of them, a lot not all, but a lot of them come up and say, “my son wanted to serve and I’m proud of him, and he died so that we could be free, and it’s the land of the free because we have the home of the brave, the brave have made us free.” I mean there are people in America who really think we are defending freedom in Iraq, defending our own freedom, and the whole trick is to show them that this isn’t in their interest but it is in the interests of other people.”

Smith: “We’ve been interviewing people here on Talk Nation Radio like Gareth Porter who has discussed the idea that we need to identify those in Iraq who might need to negotiate so that we can try to help stabilize Iraq and provide a way towards peace talks.”

MICHAEL PARENTI: “It really varies. It’s really a mess because you have Shiites and Sunni who are already at loggerheads and killing each other and doing preliminary civil war. You have Shiites and Sunni who are working together and saying, “there are no differences, we are all Iraqis, and we have one common enemy which is the U.S. and it should get out now. You have Kurds who want to quote, collaborate, but most Kurds, or the element that has been most supported and financed by the U.S. is the separatist element because the function of the Kurds is to be separatists undermining the Iraqi Government. So if they can negotiate and get a broad based coalition which says; we are going to live in peace and restructure our government and we don’t need you Americans now and we’ve put a damper enough on the insurgents and the terrorists, so you can go home now, that would be very nice, and yes, sure we should support those elements. But it doesn’t really look like those are the people who are calling the tune.

You know there is just so much one can say or one could go on and on but underlying the assumptions here is that the U.S. has a right to be in any country it wants to go to and try to solve supposedly, or at least pretend to solve the problems of that country, which in fact it’s the creator of many of the worst problems. And that mission is the messianic mission. I talk about that in “Superpatriotism” because there is a presumption not only among the leaders, but it’s propagated among large sections of our population, that our country, for some reason, has been called upon by history to go forth and define the fates and destinies of other countries and define how they shall develop, how they shall govern themselves: The idea that U.S. rulers have a right to go into Iraq to help them, and teach them how to govern themselves.

Here is a 5,000 year old civilization where many of the things in Western Civilization started in Iraq, things like the alphabet and writing; and to announce that we have come to help these lesser people who somehow are just lesser, they are not really quite as sharp or as gifted or as great as we Americans are.

They could be Iraqis today. Yesterday they were Panamanians. The day before they were Croatians and Serbians, and again and again there is this presumption of supremacy, this presumption of the U.S. being God’s gift to humanity, God’s gift to history, and that it will step forward and it will guide these countries. And meanwhile what they are doing is bombing villages, destroying their farms, destroying their homes, killing large numbers of them, blasting away, and they are hated. And if we are so gifted, if we are so generous, and if we are so much the savior throughout the world, why are we so hated?

George Bush was asked that question and I have a whole chapter in the book, it’s a short chapter, but “Why do they hate us?” And he said, “I don’t know, we’re such wonderful people.”

Well it must be that they are just crazy. They just hate us. Why don’t you take a look at what they say? They say, “Leave us alone. -You come in, you take over our country, you steal our resources, you push aside our government, you support the most retrograde repressive elements in our society, you set up dictatorships when we had started democratic movements, you do all of this, you steal our markets, our land, our capital, our labor, our natural resources, and all the while you are preaching to us about “democracy” and “peace” and “love” and “freedom” and all of that stuff, and the truth is your whole policy is based on lies and hypocrisy, and the only way we are going to get this through to your people is by bringing the war home to you.” -And this is what they say. Now I don’t back those people, I hate all of these forms of violence and madness that are going on, but you can understand that they are not waging war against America because they are just so jealous.

Osama Bin Laden was right when he said if we are fighting you just because we don’t like you because you are so free and you are so prosperous and you are so democratic, then why don’t we attack Sweden, or Denmark? They are freer and more prosperous and more democratic than you are.” He said we attacked you because you are over here. Our war is not a war of aggression against you, and it’s a war of retaliation. If you leave us alone we’ll leave you alone.

And that’s what they say again and again, and that’s the message that is played down. Instead, what Americans believe is we’ve got some mission with destiny or history to save the world and be the superpower leaders of the world. And in fact having so much power you even get media pundits who then transcribe that power into entitlement. We are a superpower and we had better act like a superpower, we have the right to, we have the power, therefore we have the right to, and we are going to get out there and we are going to make those decisions and take on those responsibilities.

Who said so? Who said, and why? If you are so hot to prove how great America is why don’t you start right here at home and start solving some of the problems right here in the U.S. that are so immense and so troubling instead of running to every little corner of the world to go bomb and occupy and spend billions of dollars of our tax money while we get poorer and poorer here at home.”

Smith: “Michael Parenti is author of 18 books. His new book is Super Patriots. Other works include Democracy for the Few, the Assassination of Julius Ceasar, a People’s History of Rome, which was the non-fiction book of the year in 2004. He has also written, The Terrorism Trap To Kill a Nation, Against Empire History as Mystery America BeseigedDirty Truths Land of Idols, Inventing Reality, and many more titles.

You will find his books at, Alibris, Book Sense online and other fine bookstores. For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation for news and discussion. This program was produced in the studios of listener supported WHUS Storrs, Radio for the People, at the University of Connecticut. listen live Wednesdays at 5 PM.”