“Jingoistic patriotism is now mobilized in the highest reaches of government, in the media, and throughout society, put on perpetual display through the rhetoric of celebrities, journalists, and nightly news anchors, and, relentlessly buttressed by the never-ending waving of flags – on cars, trucks, clothes, houses and the lapels of TV anchors – as well as through the use of mottoes, slogans, and songs. As a rhetorical ploy to silence dissent, patriotism is used to name as unpatriotic any attempt to make governmental power and authority accountable at home or to question how the appeal to nationalism is being used to legitimate the United States government's aspirations to empire-building overseas. This type of anti-liberal thinking is deeply distrustful of critical inquiry, mistakes meaningful dissent for treason, constructs politics on the moral absolutes of “us and them”, and views difference and democracy as threats to consensus and national identity. Such “patriotic” fervour fuels a system of militarized control that not only repudiates the authority of international law, but also relies on a notion of preventive war to project the fantasies of unbridled American power all over the globe.”
Henry Giroux: Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics after Abu Ghraib, Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2005, p. 41-42.
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