Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most unquestionable significance is for the rulers nothing but a tool for attaining their ambitious and selfish ends, and for the ruled a renunciation of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish submission to those who are in power. Thus is patriotism actually preached, wherever it is preached.
Patriotism is slavery.
The advocates of peace through arbitration judge like this: two animals cannot divide their prey otherwise than by fighting, as do children, barbarians, and barbarous nations. But sensible people settle their differences by discussion, conviction, the transmission of the solution of the question to disinterested, sensible men. Even thus must the sensible nations of our time act. These reflections seem quite correct. The nations of our time have reached an age of discretion, are not hostile to one another, and should be able to settle their differences in a peaceable manner. But the reflection is correct only in reference to the nations, to the nations alone, if they were not under the power of their governments. But the nations which submit to their governments cannot be sensible, because submission to the governments is already a sign of the greatest senselessness.
How can we talk of the sensibleness of men who promise in advance to do everything (including the murder of men) which the government, that is, certain men who have accidentally come to hold this position, may command them to do?
Men who are able to accept such a duty of unflinching submission to what certain strangers will, from St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris, command them to do, cannot be sensible, and the governments, that is, the men who possess such power, can still less be sensible, and cannot help abusing it,—they cannot help losing their minds from such a senselessly terrible power. For that reason the peace among the nations cannot be attained by any sensible means, through conventions, through arbitrations, so long as there exists a submission to the governments, which is always senseless and always pernicious.
But the submission of men to the governments will always exist, so long as there is any patriotism, because every power is based on patriotism, that is, on the readiness of men, for the sake of defending their nation, their country, that is, the state, against supposed dangers that are threatening it, to submit to the power.
On this patriotism was based the power of the French kings over the whole nation previous to the Revolution; on the same patriotism was based the power of the Committee of Public Safety after the Revolution; on the same patriotism was reared the power of Napoleon (as consul and as emperor); and on the same patriotism, after the downfall of Napoleon, was established the power of the Bourbons, and later of the Republic, and of Louis Philippe, and again of the Republic, and again of Bonaparte, and again of the Republic, and on the same patriotism came very near being established the power of Mr. Boulanger.
It is terrible to say so, but there does not exist, and there has not existed, a case of aggregate violence committed by one set of men against another which has not been committed in the name of patriotism. In the name of patriotism the Russians fought with the French, and the French with the Russians, and in the name of patriotism the Russians and the French are now preparing themselves to wage war against the Germans,—to fight from two flanks. But war is not all,—in the name of patriotism the Russians crush the Poles, and the Germans the Slavs; in the name of patriotism the Communists killed the Versaillians, and the Versaillians, the Communists.