THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WORDISM: MOTHER RUSSIA AND POTEMKIN PATRIOTISM | nationalsalvation.net

Now that one is not allowed to be loyal to anything, Potemkin Patriotism concentrates all attention on

The Flag and khaki uniforms.

Veterans are sort of the new Semites, as in anti-Semitic. It was a bad mistake when the 60s protests concentrated on falling American soldiers paid killers. This tactic ended up with hardhats marching in a pro-War rally on Wall Street, American Solidarity.

With the Potemkin definition of Patriotism today, anyone who fails to worship uniforms and veterans is anti-American instead of anti-Semitic.

Like busing, the draft in the 1960s was strictly for children of working stiffs who couldn't afford to send their children to private schools and draft-exempt colleges. Marxists used the term "working class" since.

Loyalty is something almost everyone wants. That is a basic need that Marxism tries to ignore. Lenin, who declared that any loyalty to anything but the Working Class to be treason, would have had a fit if he found out that Soviets had to call World War II The Great Patriotic War.

But the simple fact was that, even after a generation of Soviet rule, soldiers would not fight for Wordism, the Truth According to Marx.

It had to be Mother Russia.

McGovern got stomped in the 1972 election because of this backlash against people who carried the Viet Cong flag in parades and falsely informed parents that their son had been killed in Vietnam.

All that made their "working class" pretensions so absurd that they stopped using "working class" in America because it had become a joke.

In the present series of wars against Arabs, they wised up a bit when Bush, Sr. attacked Iraq and got a 90 plus approval rating for it. They have changed their tactics on loyalty.

After their 60s experience, they have finally faced the fact that their hero Comrade Stalin learned thirty years before. Marxism cannot get rid of loyalty. But it can redirect it.

This is a major blow to Marxism in the West, just as it was to the Soviets, but the simple fact is that no form of Wordism can actually replace loyalty.

That is because Wordism is silly. Students can actually believe that people can actually replace their gut feelings with a book and the Words of Mommy Professor. Like Stalin's naming of World War II, they have given up on their belief that words can replace loyalties.

But they can divert it.

Hence the new Potemkin Patriotism. One can be a Good American by worshipping Our Men and Women in Uniform. One can even wave an American flag.

Potemkin Patriotism diverts natural loyalty to our Mother Russia, to khaki uniforms that represent loyalty to nothing, a flag dedicated to what National Review calls "post-racial America."

Right after 9?11, Call for Patriotism hosted by Sidney Poitier included a shot of a white girl and a Black man wrapped together in an American flag. That ad was pulled and put into the libservative Memory Hole. It showed too plainly what loyalty means to liberals and respectable conservatives.

But it is their strategy now. Potemkin Patriotism, like The Great Patriotic War, is Wordists coming up against reality.