India Today – August 19, 2019

IF PATRIOTISM IS A LOVE OF SOMETHING ONE IS

WILLING TO DIE FOR, NATIONALISM—PRIDE IN AN

ABSTRACT NOTION OF NATION—IS SOMETHING

ONE IS WILLING TO KILL FOR

THE LANGUAGE

OF BELONGING

I

T IS A SIGN OF THE TIMES that Dr John-

son’s lapidary utterance—“Patriotism is the last

refuge of a scoundrel”—is enjoying a sudden re-

vival. This revival, however, is marked by some

tweaks that might spring from ignorance, or

malice. Thus, someone was tempted to substi-

tute “liberalism” for Dr Johnson’s “patriotism”.

However, there is little room for ambiguity as

to the actual words uttered—Boswell was at hand—but there

is some ambiguity as to what he might have meant by it. Ap-

parently, there are local political resonances—as well as some

suggestion that what prompted the good doctor’s ire might have

been the “patriotism” of the American colonists, fighting for

freedom from England, who were happy to utter the high rheto-

ric enshrined in their Declaration of Independence—life, liberty

and all that stuff—with no consciousness of any contradiction

there with their status as white slaveholders.

However, irrespective of what Dr J might have meant, for

our present purposes, his words are insufficient. Patriotism is

altogether too mild, and it is nationalism that demands our

attention—for it is nationalism that is, pace Johnson, the first

refuge of the scoundrel. From Orban in Hungary to Netanyahu

in Israel, from Erdogan to Salvini to Trump to our own, home-

grown, self-proclaimed “nationalists”—clearly, nationalism

is the flavour of the time. And there is little that the “anti-

national” “urban naxals” can do—when

they are not busy subverting the state and

bringing down the established order, that

is—except to suck on it. However, I have

no intention to dabble in such inflamma-

tory matters, so I will restrict myself to

a pedantic lexical exercise, exploring the

specificity, and the distinction, between

nationalism and patriotism.

Patriotism is by far the older idea—de-

riving as it does from “patria”, or father-

land. (Sorry, sisters, but “matriotism”

doesn’t have the same ring, does it?)

However, the crucial thing here is that pa-

triotism is understood typically under the

sign of love—love of one’s country, one’s

people, etc. And this “country” is certainly

not the “nation”. One classic expression of

this sentiment is Yeats’s poem, “An Irish

Airman Foresees his Death”:

...my country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor...

This enables us to remark another

characteristic of “patriotism”—that it is

a love of something that one is willing to

BY ALOK RAI

Illustration by TANMOY CHAKRABORTY AUGUST 19, 2019 INDIA TODAY^31