Blind patriotism leads to disaster

These days, the Eiffel Tower conjures up almost as much contempt as the spires on Saddam… These days, the Eiffel Tower conjures up almost as much contempt as the spires on Saddam Hussein’s palace. Although we’ve taken the “French problem” to juvenile excess, the issue of European endorsement is an important one. After all, we’re the living beneficiaries of their turbulent history – we were lucky enough to be able to make a pastiche of the democratic ideals they had to achieve with bloodletting. America is like the Bill Gates of international policy – we let someone else do all the research and development and then made the software user friendly. It only makes sense that we seek validation of our ideas from their designers.

But I don’t really give a damn what the French think. The standard I hold myself to is the Polish one. No nation has been so systematically and ruthlessly brutalized, or had the particular misfortune of being on the receiving end of Nazi and Communist treachery simultaneously. As the historian Norman Davies says, Poland is where the final stages of the European experiment “played out in their most acute form.”

In short, I think a knowledge, or at least an awareness, of the recent history of Poland is important for a mature perspective of where our new democracy experiment is taking us. And historical maturity is at a premium these days. We’re getting unsolicited opinions from Oscar night speeches. And we’re not burning the works of Proust to protest the French – we’re pouring Carlo Rossi into the gutters. The problem, Michael Moore, isn’t that we have a fictitious president. It’s that we don’t have a historical president. If he were fictitious, that would make him negligible. But unfortunately he’s in a position to put a “big-Texas” spin on U.S. policy.

If you’ve seen “The Pianist,” you walked away with some awareness of Polish suffering during World War II. Poland was bombed by the Germans in 1939 as an act of unprompted “retaliation.” Adolf Hitler decided the world needed to be made safe for German nationalism, and found a convenient enemy in Poland to initiate his campaign. Although I’d like to quickly dismiss any suspicion that I’m likening Bush to Hitler, I will say that I have an unhealthy suspicion of where Bush eventually plans on drawing the line between defense and manifest destiny. I think after operation “North Korean Liberation,” he’s going to stop running out of euphemisms.

I know, we’ve outgrown dreams of imperialism. What we’re doing is just shuttling in democracy to places that need it, right? Maybe that really isn’t so bad. The Polish probably would have had a substantially lower death toll if the British had honored their commitment to the Poles immediately. But then I realize that I have to strain my memory quite hard to recall a teary-eyed Bush mourning over the troubles of the Iraqi people before Sept. 11, 2001.

I guess I’ll end with a warning. If you’re boycotting the fries formerly known as “french” or buying into Bush’s rhetoric, grow up and hit the history books. There’s a particularly ugly bit known as “the German question,” which is a retrospective way of trying to answer: How does something so treacherous arise from a culture that is not made of inherently treacherous people? Although there are as many guesses as there are historians, most agree that the major problems started when a man in power found the magic formula to transform patriotism and duty into a nationalistic mythology that pulled the historical wool over people’s eyes.

Jason Castro can be reached at jcastro@pittnews.com.