One of my favourite books growing up was Adewale Ademoyega’s “Why We Struck.” This account of the Nigerian Civil War was more insightful to me than the other available accounts because it focused not just on the nuts and bolts of the military campaign (which I found dreadfully boring), but also on the lead up to the January 1966 coup that started it all off.
What made a special impression on me was Ademoyega’s staunch and unapologetic belief that he and his co-conspirators acted in the best interests of Nigeria and that everything was conceived in good faith. The word “patriotic” appeared a lot in the book. They were not mere coupists – they were apparently “patriots” who “took decisive action” which they thought was for the greater general good.
The fallout of the January 1966 coup, including the bloody July 1966 counter coup and the even bloodier 1967-1970 conflict was treated as an unfortunate twist of fate. “Such a shame about all those lost lives. But we did what we thought was best.” This was my introduction to the dangerous, contradictory world of “patriotism.”
“Patriotism” is…whatever anyone wants it to be
To Ademoyega and friends, not only did patriotism give them license to carry out what essentially amounted to calculated murder, but it also gave them the right to decide on behalf of millions of Nigerians that the armed stabilisation of their barely 6 year-old independent state was the best course of action. Said Nigerians did not need to be consulted of course, because as long as the merry band of patriotic military officers were motivated by “patriotism,” everything was fine.
Every foolish, short sighted, one-handed decision in history made at state level, has either been motivated or justified by patriotism
Throughout history, this has been the recurring decimal with empires, states and regimes that inflict large amounts of violence and misery on the human race. There is always a small group of elite intellectuals, politicians, administrators, soldiers and merchants who arrogate to themselves, the power to make disastrous choices in the name of millions of people without consulting them or obtaining their permission. The enabling excuse is always some iteration of the word “patriotism”.
When Adolph Hitler made the decision to invade Poland in 1939 and kick off the most destructive kinetic war the world has ever seen, the pretext was German Nationalism, which was predicated on patriotism. When Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe launched destructive military campaigns that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, rapes and maiming in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the pretext was patriotism.
When Robert Mugabe took Zimbabwe into a ruinous economic war that it had no hope of winning, the pretext was land nationalism, which still boiled down to patriotism of some sort. When the South African apartheid regime became increasingly more vicious and unhinged to the point of shooting black schoolgirls, using HIV as a bio weapon and poisoning Soweto’s water supply, the justification in the minds of F.W. de Klerk and his contemporaries was patriotism toward their South African apartheid state.
Every foolish, short sighted, one-handed decision in history made at state level, has either been motivated or justified by patriotism, and the reason for this is simple. Patriotism is a shapeless, substance-free and formless entity. It means whatever anybody wants it to mean at any time. There is no objective measure for establishing what is or is not patriotic.
Emotionally charged rhetoric vs ideas
Getting out of the rabbit hole of patriotism requires being willing to accept that one actually knows nothing about the things one has long held convictions. In my case, getting out of the “Nigerian patriotism” rabbit hole between 2016 and 2018 involved accepting that the “Why Europe Underdeveloped Africa” worldview I once swore by was simplistic, reductive and often simply not true.
The reason this can be hard to do is that patriotism, being the formless and impossible-to-substantiate entity that it is, is not tied to intellectual ideals and logic, but rather to emotions. It has been repeatedly established that humans are primarily creatures of emotion rather than logic. Emotion is at the centre of human sociology and psychology, which is why, for example, we value our own children over other people’s children when logically we know that every human child has equal value.
Patriotism often mimics that child, cultivating within us a fierce attachment to it that transcends all sense and reason. To get out of its rabbit hole, we must accept that our deeply held feelings can be wrong and that it hurts nobody to check them out in the harsh light of facts, logic and opposing worldviews. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a sentimental attachment to a flag, a people and their paraphernalia of statehood, but here is the thing about patriotism. It is VERY good at starting from “We deserve better in the world” and slowly morphing into printing the dark joke “Work will set you free” at the gates of the concentration camp.
Visit Auschwitz one day and see what I am talking about.
