Patriotism and Scoundrels

[Above: Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna, 1897-1910]

I will return to the fellow above shortly, but I will begin with a famous quotation, from Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." 

Johnson, one of the great literary critics of the modern age, authored many influential essays and books. He is best known for his highly successful Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and as the subject of the first modern biography, James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). He was a conservative, but an unusual one who criticized many of the evils of his time.

According to Boswell, Johnson made the remark about patriotism in the midst of a conversation with friends one night in April 1775. Boswell does not say who Johnson had in mind, but from the context of the discussion it was likely to have been the contemporary Whig politician Edmund Burke. 

The image below is a painting of the The Conversation Club, at which Johnson was a regular attendee. Johnson is the figure in brown at left. Boswell is at the far left behind him. The man with the ear trumpet to his right is the artist and organizer of the The Club, Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

The Club met at the Turk's Head Inn in Soho, in what is now London's China Town. It survives as a Chinese market. Burke is also pictured here, which means it probably wasn't the time when Johnson made his famous remark. In any case, Johnson later said some kind things about Burke.

On that particular evening, Johnson was not condemning patriotism. In his dictionary he had defined patriotism in a positive sense. He was attacking those who sought to exploit patriotic feelings for personal or political advantage. Burke was perhaps guilty of that, but less guilty of this than more modern practitioners of the art. 

Johnson's quotation has lasted because it exemplifies a major problem of our age of mass voting and mass communications. As democracy advanced, so did the number of scoundrels able to leverage patriotic and nationalist sentiments to gain power. 

The arrival of cheap daily newspapers and other inexpensive publications in the late 19th century provided a platform for demagogues appealing to the new voting public. The simultaneous spread of pseudo-scientific nationalist and racialist views provided them with a popular agenda. 

By the 1920s, radio and film became additional platforms for rousing patriotic outrage against the "enemies" of the nation, which fascists and others on the far right increasingly defined in narrow ethnic and racialist terms. 

From the 1950s, patriotic scoundrels could use television to spread their malign messages. In our time, social media has opened up another outlet. 

Obvious examples of patriotic scoundrels from the last century include Hitler and Mussolini. The USA produced Senator Joe McCarthy and more recently, Donald Trump. The UK had Oswald Mosley in the 1930s and in the past few years Boris Johnson has offered Trump Lite. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is the recent Latin version. There have been others.

They have all to varying degrees exploited the same cliché-ridden formula. They promise to "make our country great again" and "protect it against its enemies within and without."  

These well-known demagogues are just the tip of the patriotic scoundrel iceberg. It includes a huge cast of less well-known historical and contemporary figures. I could list many of them, but who wants to read a laundry list?

Most of them from the past do not get much air time on the History (AKA Hitler) Channel, Yesterday and their imitators. Most of them from the present may not register much on the public consciousness, except perhaps among frequenters of social media or talk radio. 

That is a shame. The lesser known purveyors of patriotic rubbish enable the more visible ones by spreading and often creating their message. Focusing so much of our attention on a phenomenon like Hitler lulls too many of us into thinking that only leaders wearing swastikas and heiling are dangerous. 

The rabidly anti-Semitic Karl Lueger, pictured at the top of this post, was the mayor of Vienna in the early years of the 20th century. He looks innocent enough but he and others of his ilk inspired Adolf Hitler. Trump's acolytes included Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and many others others.

It is depressing to reflect that 250 years after Samuel Johnson's famous quip, charlatans and demagogues continue to deceive the public almost effortlessly with "patriotic" rhetoric. 

Perhaps, some would say, education is the answer. It wouldn't hurt. But we humans are exceedingly slow learners. Perhaps the fault lies not in the scoundrels but in people so easily and willingly deceived by the nonsense they spout. That is depressing.    

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