REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
Superpatriotism
By Michael Parenti
City Lights Books 2004
160 pages
Michael Parenti's latest book is an impassioned and eloquent essay on "superpatriotism", Parenti's term for the ideology of US free-market global capitalism.
In a series of 15 short but powerful chapters, Parenti traverses many different aspects of politics, culture and life in contemporary USA — militarism, sports, religion, the media, the cult of the nation, the cult of the leader — and analyses how superpatriotism inculcates "the readiness to follow national leaders unquestioningly in their dealings with other countries, especially in confrontations involving military force".
One highlight is Parenti's memorable description of current President George Bush as "this corrupt but affable draft-dodging Jesus-freak billionaire and former cokehead alcoholic".
The US of the superpatriots is one in which the murder rate among young men is 20 times that of Western Europe and 40 times that of Japan; in which a tiny fraction of the population is obscenely wealthy and in which the vast majority knows no economic security; in which patriotism is equated with male chauvinism and aggressive militarism; in which the average teenager has seen 13,000 TV killings by the time she or he graduates from high school; and in which the ruling plutocracy uses "loyalty to our troops" to stifle dissent, yet charges soldiers wounded in Iraq US$8.10 a day for their hospital meals.
Parenti describes how a "creeping theocracy" of fundamentalist Christianity threatens to prevail over all aspects of US life; how the Bush family enriched itself on profits from slave labour from Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps; and how the 9/11 terrorist attacks were anticipated in a report published in 2000 by the right-wing and superpatriotic Project for a New American Century, which noted that the US public would be unlikely to support its plans for total domination of the entire globe unless shocked by "some catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor".
Parenti notes that "In the year before 9-11 — as legally required — the US military launched fighter planes on at least 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft or airliners that had moved significantly off their flight plan. But on 11th September itself, in the almost two hours during which the four airliners were hijacked and the attacks occurred, not a single US fighter plane took flight."
Parenti finds Bush's behaviour suggestive of a cover-up: he describes how Bush attempted (unsuccessfully) to prevent an independent bipartisan investigation into 9/11 and then refused to testify in public and under oath to it. In a chapter titled "Why do they hate us?", Parenti explains that the US is an object of hatred of people throughout the world, not because people hate democracy, prosperity, or secularism, but because of the US ruling-class's record of global exploitation and because "US sponsored terrorism — in the form of death squads, invasions, and occupations — has taken millions of lives in scores of other countries".
Overall, Parenti carefully demolishes any pretensions the superpatriots may have to being patriots in the true sense of the word, exposing them for the parasites, liars, and tyrants that they are. He gives the rest of the world some hope with a trenchant reminder that there is another USA: the USA of true patriots such as Tom Paine, Mark Twain, Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Eugene Debs, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King. Essential reading for the student of contemporary imperialism.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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