How is that significantly different from, “The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots”? Do you think Thomas Jefferson was a traitor as well?
I think it’s a case of people that do not grasp an obvious truth: that a patriot cannot be self-described, because nearly everyone will self-describe as a patriot. Permitted to be self-applied, the term will encompass everything, until those persons who openly advocate the overthrow or abdication of their own state’s sovereignity begin to paint themselves and their particular heroes as patriots.
Thank you RTF, I guess I will have to do some digging to provide proof about Debs clearly not being a patriot. I have not read about him in about a decade. It does little good doing an internet search as the Unions have made him a patron saint. However, I would think his own words were enough to make my point that he was no American Patriot.
I will bow out of this and let everyone resume bashing the Op and Dave.
Jim
What I found impressive about this slim volume was that he pretty clearly set out a convincing (to me) interpretation of the US’s position over the 20th century, beginning with pre-WWI isolationism, and then in response to our superpower status following WWII. I believe he traces certain downward trends to the 60s, when we set the precedent of going into debt to go into Viet Nam. The beginning of our attitude that we could have guns AND butter. The fiscal irresponsibility continued through the fall of the iron curtain. In his words, the Cold War is over and Japan and Germany won.
IIRC, among the trends he found troubling were our continued dependence on (cheap) oil, our interference with foreign governments to accomplish political purposes, the decline of our manufacturing industries, and our willingness to become a debtor nation.
If you buy his arguments that any of these are undesireable, it is hard to see how any of them have improved since the book was written in 1991.
I guess someone could fashion arguments contra to each of his planks. Explain why it is just as good to prop our economy up with debt and the sale of assets, rather than income from the production of goods. Argue why other countries with growing industry will willingly subsidize our “service” economy. Etc. But that type of arguments surely strike me as more convoluted and less convincing than the clearly stated commonsense alternatives.
What Exit, is it not possible to both be a patriot and admire the actions of people who emphatically considered themselves not to be patriots? Things have changed a lot in the last hundred years. At that time, I suppose that Debs (I say I suppose because he is in fact a character I know very little about) didn’t consider himself a patriot because his government was supporting the bosses’ reprehensible practices he was working against, so he felt he had to oppose his government (and not only that, but the whole system as well). Today, things have changed; ideas that can be considered “socialistic” have been adopted in many democratic countries, including the US. So I guess it is possible to both consider oneself a patriot and consider that Debs was an important player in the US’s progress in the last hundred years.
Maybe I misunderstood Weirddave, but I took his comment as meaning that any American citizen with any idea that can be considered “socialistic”, including, as Guinastasia mentioned, a national health care system – something that just seems normal to me, a Canadian – is a traitor to his or her country. Now to me that’s just terribly hateful, and it’s saying that a large number of people on this board are traitors and should be executed (but he doesn’t actually advocate that). Maybe that’s not what Weirddave meant, after all, I believe BrainGlutton is a democratic socialist and doesn’t merely advocate “socialist” positions, he really wants the replacement of the capitalist or mixed system in the US with a socialist one. Still, that certainly doesn’t make him a traitor, which is why so many people condemned Weirddave. In any case, it’s certainly worse than claiming to be both a patriot and an admirer of Eugene Debs.
The context would help - I mean, how do I know the first isn’t a reference to the American Revolution, for instance.
The second is easier to see what you’re getting at, but, of course, being an internationalist, I think it’s in the best interests of all countries to cease to exist, so you’ll get no agreement from me that that’s an unpatriotic thing to say. Looking out for your country to the end should be what patriotism is all about.
I think the word you’re confusing for patriotism is jingoism, myself.
Socialism is one stage in the evolution of a communist economy. Marx recognized a variety of socialist theories, including what he called “Bourgeois Socialism” — the sort that seems to be popularly advocated especially on the SDMB. (See The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 3, section 2.)
The Bourgeois Socialists are the leftist handwringers who are “desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society”. He identifies particularly “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.” Marx notes that this form of socialism had, even by then, worked its way into mainstream society and been instituted as “complete systems”. He writes:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
Okay, I won’t bow out. Jefferson was an American Patriot, when he promoted and acted on revolution, he was not a British Patriot and that was still technically his country. In fact he was a traitor to his country.
You are confusing the terms Traitor and Patriot with Evil and Good. A common mistake I think.
More importantly when he proclaimed “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world.” He clearly stated he was not an American Patriot. This did not make him evil or even treasonous, but he did clearly proclaim that he was not a Patriot.
Jim
I am commenting on BG, not defending Weirddave. I don’t agree with most of what **Weirddave ** posted. I find it offensive to see Debs called a patriot and that it stood unchallenged. I don’t even think he was a good person, but that is my opinion. I think by any standard definition it is just plain wrong to call Debs a Patriot.
I said it in my last post, not being a Patriot does not make you a bad person, but being an internationalist does fly in the face of Patriotism.
This was the post I found offensive:
I think it is clear that Teddy and Woodrow were Patriots and Debs was not.
I don’t think I can explain this any better. Debs works with international concerns against the interests of America in his day. He had reason to dislike the government and the oligarchy of big business, but this did not make him a patriot. He was closer to being a traitor. I think he was wrongly jailed at least the second time but he was interfering with a national effort in wartime. I understand why he was jailed.
But, to say he was as much of a Patriot as Teddy Roosevelt is shameful!
Jim
…
Thanks, Lib - very informative.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s from a May Day speech he gave in 1907:
It seems to me that it’s kind of silly to fling around the word patriot and traitor. Traitor has a pretty precise legal definition, and I don’t think having merely having ideas, no matter how silly or evil those ideas are , makes you a traitor. Patriot, on the other hand, is so vague as to lack much meaning at all. Everybody claims to be a patriot.
IOW, a right-or-wronger?
Is one less of a patriot if one supports the country’s principles and ideals rather than its existing power structure?
No, I don’t believe so, but Debs did not support his country’s principles and ideals. He was for radical change and probably violent change, but I cannot support the last without more work than I am willing to do. I will stand by the radical change.
BTW: The ideals of the time and the founders were not really compatible with a socialist agenda. **Liberal ** on the other end of the spectrum probably comes closer to the ideals of those times.
I cannot seem to explain myself on this. Check any dictionary and see their definition of Patriot. Whether you like it or not, it is closer to jingoism than being good. Not all Patriots are good, in fact many are not. Not all traitors and revolutionaries are bad, in fact many are not.
Jim
Since a large part of your post seems to be related to fiscal irresponsibility, it’s worth looking at what I think is the best measure of such things: debt as a proportion of earnings, which for a nation would be GDP.
We came out of WWII having borrowed a shitload of money to pay for the war effort, so gross national debt was 121.7% of GDP in 1946. By 1961, we’d whittled the debt down to 55.1% of GDP, and by 1969 (encompassing LBJ’s guns-and-butter approach) it was down to 38.6% of GDP. By 1981, it was at 32.6% of GDP.
By 1993, it was up to 66.2% of GDP. The economy grew quite a bit during the Reagan/Bush era, but our debt grew a hell of a lot faster.
By 2001, Clinton had whittled it down to 57.4% of GDP. By 2006, it was back up to 64.7% of GDP.
These numbers are from the 2008 U.S. budget historical tables, downloadable as an Excel file from the GPO here.
I agree that, in the abstract, being a traitor carries no normative value. Our country encourages treason all the time–just treason committed against foreign countries on behalf of our sympathetic agents. We regard this as a good thing in, say, Burma or Iran.
But when it comes to calling someone a traitor in the specific context of treason against the US, I don’t agree that the word carries no normative value. This is especially true when one is called a traitor because of their peaceful speech. Thus, in context, the allegation of traitor becomes a slur.
There may be some definition under which **Weirddave **can rightly call BG a traitor. I don’t think any such definition makes sense. Any definition that includes MLK as a traitor, for example, is unsuitable, and should be rejected.
What Exit? this is pretty much the crux of why I engaged Weirddave and not BG. Traitor is an epithet, and its definition is somewhat precise. The patriot designation can be argued, and in general I’m not in favor of questioning whether certain people are patriots–even if they are dead socialists. Perhaps I am just intellectually lazy, but it was a much more salient statement to me at the time.
No, based on post #109 what he seems to be saying is that he differentiates between some sort of “Big S socialism” and “little s socialism”, with the “Big S” variety being essentially synonmous with Marxism. Such that a utopian big government society where all private property was banned and private industry regulated would be antithetical to the currently constituted nature of the United States. And that for anyone advocating such a system to refer to themselves as a patriot is laughable. Further he regards such persons as treasonous traitors and on an emotional level thinks they should be executed for advocating such beliefs. But he doesn’t actually advocate executing them in real life, he just kinda wishes it were so :dubious:.
Like I said Dave is probably on solid enough rhetorical ground with the patriotism argument ( you too What Exit, if it makes you feel better 
). It’s not inarguable, but its reasonable.
But the treason thing is crap. If BG were an advocate of some purist dictionary definition of a “Big S Socialism”, it still wouldn’t make him treasonous. And from the description of his actual politics, he’s not. If he were being paid by the government of Albania to undermine the United States, THAT would be treasonous. Advocating gradual, democratic transformation into a more socialistically-inclined welfare state doesn’t even remotely qualify.
Also I’m afraid the “Socialists are traitors that deserve execution” meme makes my eyebrows twitch slightly. I like my commie parents. They’re pretty good people, pretty pragmatic as Reds go. Heck, they celebrated Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter for the sake of us poor unenlightened young’uns and never lectured us about what our beliefs or politics should be. They even own their own home :p. I admire their idealism, even if ultimately it comes down in my mind to hapless, pie-in-the-sky utopianism. But if you ask me it ain’t anymore hapless and pie-in-the-sky ( and if you ask me, unAmerican ) than hardcore libertarianism. And I don’t think Dave is not-advocating-but-wishing that we execute them.
But whatever :).
Definitions seem to vary, in dictionaries as well as elsewhere. The 1982 American Heritage Dictionary sitting on my shelf defines patriotism as “love of and devotion to one’s country.” Clearly there’s a lot of play in such a definition, and while jingoistic definitions would fit, so would very anti-authoritarian, anti-militaristic definitions of patriotism.
You’re welcome. 
That’s why people like Ted Kennedy are still filthy rich even as they whine endlessly about the plight of the poor.