A DISTINCTION

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3195, 25 June 1932, Page 6

A DISTINCTION

NATIONALISM IS NOT PATRIOTISM. " There is a noisy, vain and boastful profession of love of country," says Dr Nicholas Murray Butler (President of Columbia University, U.S.A.), "which stalks abroad in the garments and under the name of Patriotism, but which is in reality something very different. It is crude and vulgar nationalism of the most offensive type. Among us it calls for huge expenditure on navies, for universal military training and for a general attitude of, armed aloofness toward the other civilised peoples of the world.

" This is not Patriotism but just the opposite. It is nationalism gone mad. Nationalism, when the outgrowth of true Patriotism and built upon it, is a sound and healthful development of the public mind, but when it is merely a reflection of one's ignorance of other countries and other peoples and of loudly-proclaimed indifference to them,, reinforced by constant reiteration of our own superiority, our own excellence and our own prosperous power, it becomes offensive in the extreme.

" True Patriotism has a moral basSs. It conceives the State as having moral personality, with those obligations, those sympathies and those ideals which attach to morality wherever found. It looks upon the nations, both past and present, as having each its own part to play in the making of a continuing and continuous civilisation,, and seeks through understanding and appreciation to multiply contacts with other peoples, to see more deeply into their national characters, to understand better their national traditions and to appreciate more fully their services and achievements.

. "It forms the habit of looking upon the faultily of nations as made up of many individual countries of different backgrounds, different traditions, different speech,, but each and every one having its characteristic part to play in the generous and kindly co-operation of all. " The opposite of this true patriotism is that sort of Pharisaical nationalism which is the source of half the trouble that exists m the world. It is this Pharisaical nationalism which frames public policies as if there were no Other members of the human family but ourselves. "It acclaims international trade and international financial interdependence, and then proceeds to build tariff, walls so high as to make both as difficult as possible. It permits private interest to insinuate itself into public policies which should be controlled solely and entirely by the larger interest of the whole people and it thinks of a nation not as a moral personality with duties and ideals, but simply as an economic unit intent upon exalting itself in all possible ways no mattelr at. whose cost or at what damage to the gen-* eral welfare. It is unintelligent selfishness personified. . ."