Anarchism and Other Essays: Patriotism: A MENACE To Liberty! Patriotism Excuses ABUSE of POWER!
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Newest Mindgasms Quickie that is my first in a series on a book by Emma Goldman called Anarchism and other Essays. This is a classic text on Anarchism. Goldman was a famous/infamous feminist American radical Anarchist from Russia. She was against the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and advocated for political violence, including assassinating politicians. This episode is about her essay called Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty. As you can probably guess based on the title, she explains the pretty obvious theory that loving your country to the point of extreme patriotism is a threat to our rights because it allows you to excuse or even love fucked up and violent shit that authoritarian governments do to regular people. There are plenty examples of this in our modern western society, like cops beating up and locking up protestors, killing unarmed people who are not threats, arresting non-violent drug offenders and putting them in cages, giving criminal records to prostitutes and people who pay them, widespread surveillance on all of our electronic communications, endless wars in the Middle East, and torturing prisoners. These are all reasons that I actually agree with Emma Goldman’s argument in this essay, to an extent. I just think that she oversimplifies reality a bit. In my opinion, it’s okay to love your country as long as you still call out terrible abuse of government power like what I described. Even if you, like many Americans, think that “Merica is “the greatest country in the world!,” that certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that you automatically have to approve of everything they do.
Playlist with every video in my “Anarchism and Other Essays” series so far:
Playlist with every Mindgasms Book Review so far:
