In an earlier article about the left and the right, I mentioned that the spiritual driving force of the so-called left is in fact narrow nationalism, and that although this nationalism flies under the banner of “patriotism,” it is in fact not proclaiming “love” at all, but rather preaching hatred:
We might notice the contexts in which those people extol and emphasize the word “patriotism”: how many of them are gentle, affirmative scenes full of love, and how many are destructive scenes of brave struggle, courageous sacrifice, pressing forward wave after wave, and dying together with the enemy? The essence of the left-wing nationalism is resentment—xenophobia and enemy-hatred, hatred toward the West—and it is by no means patriotism. To love one’s own mother does not mean hating other people’s mothers; to love one’s own homeland and to harbor enmity toward one’s neighbors’ homelands are two entirely different things.
At the time I called this counterfeit patriotism “country-hatredism,” but that name is obviously inaccurate; now I call it “enemy-hatredism.” In my view, separating this concept from “patriotism” is extremely important, and worth a blog post of its own.
I remember that more than four years ago, when I looked back on articles from the blog’s early period two years before, I pointed out that some discussions about “patriotism” at that time could be seen as a boundary-marker, a kind of watershed. Looking back now, that was indeed the case. However, the discussion of patriotism back then was not sufficiently thorough. Now is just the right time to bring it up again and continue filling out this topic.
When I was preparing for the Marxism-Leninism philosophy exam at the end of 2005, I discovered a serious sense of incongruity in the textbook:
On the one hand, current official discourse and textbooks advocate “patriotism”; on the other hand, they tell us that the “state” is such a cold machine—it arose together with class antagonisms, with the emergence of an army that can suppress internal enemies as one of its major signs, and it will also ultimately disappear as communism abolishes class antagonisms. So how could such a makeshift, violent thing be worthy of our love? The authors of the textbooks often pay very little attention to the self-contradictory situation into which they fall here.
Looking back now, they were not really being “contradictory.” In fact, on the one hand the state as they define it is a violent machine for suppressing enemies; on the other hand, the “patriotism” they promote is precisely brave struggle against enemies. The thing called “the state” originally exists in order to resist enemies, so the meaning of patriotism becomes “being keen on fighting back against enemies”—and that really is not contradictory.
Love is not obedience, and even less is it destruction. Love should be a positive, constructive emotion. To love one’s hometown and land, to feel uplifted by one’s country’s good, to feel distressed by its bad, to feel comfortable when one is in one’s homeland and homesick when one is far away… a sane person will not fail to love their country. Love is such a positive, beautiful emotion, which is why I do not want “patriotism” to come to mean the opposite.
The key point is that “patriotism” should become a reason to love others rather than to hate others. Love is, after all, a feeling of putting oneself in another’s shoes; if you understand how to love your own parents, then by empathizing you will also be able to respect and revere other people’s parents. Precisely because you love your own nation, you should also be able to respect other nations. But in reality, the slogan of patriotism is often used for a completely opposite purpose: to use patriotism to argue for the necessity of hating enemies.
Admittedly, there are times—for example, when one’s beloved is bullied by others, especially when young people in an early romance are obstructed by their elders—when hatred may indeed be born out of love. It is undeniable that such resentment arises from love, but this is by no means an essential component of love itself. Loving your lover does not necessarily require you to hate your parents, and vice versa. Even if your parents want to destroy your romance, you can still love them, and at the same time continue your own love. Love may conflict with love, but that is not a contradiction; and such a conflict does not require turning one side into hatred in order to be resolved. Hating one’s mother because of one’s girlfriend’s interests, or abandoning one’s girlfriend because of one’s mother’s demands—acts like these do not make love any greater.
Light always needs the shadow of darkness as a background in order to stand out, but love does not necessarily need hatred as its backdrop. Rather than saying love is like dazzling light, it is perhaps better to say that love is like warmth. When you are experiencing love, when you are immersed in love, your whole body can be wrapped in a sense of warmth; this tenderness contrasts with coldness, but it does not necessarily have to be set against a cold background in order to be felt. Hatred and love are indeed not unrelated, but hatred is the product of love after it has gone bad and become distorted, not the content of love itself. Sour rice comes from fragrant rice, but fragrant rice does not necessarily have to go through the stage of souring.
Much of the propaganda that brands itself as patriotism is not, at root, promoting a loving emotion at all; it is preaching hatred and murderous intent. Enemy-hatredism is not only not sincere love; it does not even count as a fervent romance. If one insists on saying that it has any genealogical relation to patriotic feeling, then it is only a kind of corruption that should be completely avoided.
It is true that there are still people who “hate the country,” people who think the moon in foreign countries is rounder than the moon in China, and who are so eager they would like to paint themselves white. There is also such a thing as excessive universalism, which atomizes people and thinks that even the slightest trace of national pride is unacceptable. Such views also exist. But I believe that one must first love one’s own home before one can love one’s neighbors; one must first love one’s country before one can embrace the world with universal care.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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