Beyond Patriotism
From Truman to Obama
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Beyond Patriotism argues that some millions of Americans have become "post-national" people who put the good of humanity ahead of patriotism or national honour. It discusses the decisions that led them from the Vietnamese War, to the attempt to put Pol Pot back into power, to the sanctions against Iraq. Rather than lamenting the hay day of patriotism, post-national people should congratulate themselves on attaining moral maturity. They should clarify their thinking about why nationalism is bankrupt, what American should do to pacify the world, what they owe to their native land, and what they owe to themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A renowned scholar of the science of intelligence, Flynn (Where Have All the Liberals Gone?) bookends his latest by appealing to a "morally mature public" to go beyond an "era of automatic patriotism." However, he conflates "patriotism" with a kind of uncritical nationalism, which, as he himself points out, many Americans abandoned during the Vietnam War. In one section, he takes a sometimes spotty, sometimes spot-on look at the most problematic aspects of America's armed interventions from Hiroshima to Afghanistan. In arguing that none of America's wars of the past 50 years have been "morally permissible," Flynn sometimes effectively documents his case, for example, addressing the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties in the first Iraq War and the sanctions that followed. However, when he discusses American support for Israel, he expresses extreme, and largely unsupported, anti-Zionist tropes such as claiming that "Israel was established by displacement of the local population." Strangely, for all his critique of American foreign policy, Flynn provides guidelines for how it should act as a "world sovereign," and unfortunately relies too heavily on (often very dated) magazine and newspaper articles to support his points. The result is more muddled than original or provocative.
