Red Patriotism, White Patriotism
Earlier in July, I shared my personal journey about how my understanding of “patriotism” has changed over time. Recently, due to the Mbappe scandal, the discussion surrounding patriotism has come back: are Chinese people who love China and Chairman Mao just “brainwashed minions” of the Communist Party of China (CPC)? Is our patriotic sentiment reactionary?
Viewing the world through a Western “either-or” lens, some leftists can get a very simple answer: yes, just like the slogan “ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards)”, all patriotism is reactionary; “Make China Great Again” is just as fascist as “Make America Great Again”. Undoubtedly, such a generalized, reductionist view can be very useful if one runs an identity show and radical appearance is everything that matters. However, for real anti-imperialist struggles, this view is rather harmful: it neglects global class structure and fails to see through appearance to grasp the essence.
So, instead of asking whether patriotism is reactionary, a better question will be: what kind of patriotism is reactionary?
In my opinion, there are two types of patriotism: red patriotism and white patriotism. While both can trigger a surge in oxytocin (the love hormone), their roots and effects are the exact opposite.
Red patriotism has its roots in the fertile soil of resistance, soaked with the blood of revolutionaries in the colonized and imperialized peripheries. It is a revolutionary sentiment shared by the downtrodden living under the iron boots of the imperialist West, whose lives have been cheapened and wasted for five centuries.
To call it a revolutionary sentiment is not because it alone can lead to successful revolutions, but because it prepares the ground for revolutionary thoughts and practices. It is perhaps the most essential weapon the masses have in the still-ongoing global class war.
On the one hand, red patriotism motivates people in the third world to search for solutions: patriots in Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, and China found Marxism and used this ideological weapon to defeat colonizers and the comprador bourgeoisie and to build socialism. Patriots in Iran and Yemen studied rocket science and are using this technological weapon to win the decades-long genocidal war waged by the imperialist West and to reclaim the sovereignty of Arabic people in West Asia.
On the other hand, red patriotism unites anti-imperialist forces inside third world countries to fight their common enemy.
Taking China as an example, without red patriotism, there would have been no unity among Chinese people from 56 ethnic groups; without national unity, Chinese people would not have defeated fascist Japan in its imperialist war. (More about stories of Chinese people from ethnic minority groups fighting against Japanese invaders in my previous article “The resistance history against imperialism in Southeast Asia (part 2): Chinese Ethnic Minority Groups’ anti-imperialist struggle”).
Without red patriotism, the national bourgeoisie would not have formed the people’s democratic united front (人民民主统一战线) with the CPC. Without the united front, they would not have chosen to stay in mainland China instead of following the comprador bourgeois party Kuomintang to move all factories and valuable assets to Taiwan Province; without their contributions after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China’s industrial development in the early stage would have faced even more obstacles.
And nowadays, without red patriotism, one cannot fully explain why some Chinese capitalists are willing to follow the leadership of the CPC and make significant contributions to China’s development: Tian Jia-bing (田家炳), as one of the most prominent Chinese patriotic capitalists, has donated 80% of his assets to welfare projects in China, helping build 93 universities, 166 middle schools, 41 primary schools and 1800 school libraries in rural areas.
Although patriotism does not make class contradiction disappear in China, it does help maintain it at a non-antagonistic level.
(Undoubtedly there are also material reasons behind the Chinese national bourgeoisie’s support for the CPC, but this is not the focus of this article.)
Moreover, the unity effect of red patriotism goes beyond national borders. Red patriots seeking national salvation clearly understand that the destinies of people in the imperialized third world are deeply intertwined. No third world country can achieve full liberation from capitalism and imperialism until reactionary forces of the imperialist West are defeated everywhere; no third world country can enter a higher stage of socialism until the Empire’s death machine in the entire third world is completely smashed and people everywhere, from Palestine to Cuba, from Sudan to Libya, stand up once again with dignity and sovereignty. Red patriotism will not be complete without the principle of international solidarity.
And what is white patriotism?
It is the exact opposite pole of red patriotism: the psychological foundation of colonialism and imperialism. Red patriotism is yang; white patriotism is yin. Red patriotism aims to dismantle the imperialist world order built on white patriotism, while white patriotism aims to defend the domination of the imperialist West and bring red patriots to submission.
But is white patriotism just national pride, i.e., “my nation is the greatest”? Certainly, there is such an element in white patriotism, but this alone doesn’t explain why white patriotism prepares psychological ground for colonialism and imperialism. National pride is not a unique sentiment exclusively existing in Europe; many people, including Chinese, are proud people who believe their own country is the best, but only Europeans have chosen to colonize and imperialize the global majority.
So, what’s the missing puzzle here? It’s the Western dualist worldview: Europeans see themselves as dominators of Nature, which includes not only the ecosystem but also women and imperialized people in the third world (More about this in Jason W. Moore’s book “Capitalism in the Web of Life” and my recent article “Burn the Natives’ House and Blame the Natives: How the White Empire weaponizes Nature in its Class War”).
In other words, the essence of white patriotism is white saviourism and white supremacy, i.e., Europeans see themselves as the chosen ones who have the right to conquer and dominate Nature, to dictate and form it in their own way. Following this logic, there is nothing wrong with Europeans forcing their own way of thinking, way of life, religion, philosophies, languages, and later capitalism onto the rest of the world, which is part of Nature, in the name of “civilization”, “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights”, and “sustainability”.
But white patriotism is not just a harmless feeling that raises one’s heartbeat and ego, but an effective weapon of the White Empire to divide and conquer in its global class war.
Facing the threat of communism after the Soviet Union successfully defeated European fascism and spread Marxism to many corners of the world, including the imperialist cores, the White Empire, i.e., the ruling class in the imperialist cores, decided to bribe its white workers with the gift of white patriotism and to turn them into class traitors of the global working class.
A gift is a present but also a poison (giftig in German means poisonous). While the imperial mode of living is certainly a generous present from the ruling class, these white working-class people have paid a high cost for becoming labor aristocrats: their minds have been poisoned by white saviourism and white supremacy, their class consciousness has been almost completely erased, and their illusion makes them voluntarily kneel to their ruling class, and what’s worse: they are now willing to die for their ruling class to defend Western “democracy” against the “dictatorship” of Putin, a typical syndrome of white patriotism. And the remaining few workers with a sober mind against remilitarisation are now demonized as far-left or far-right extremists.
The White Empire didn’t stop in the belly of the beast. It has been trying to spread the opium of white patriotism in non-aligned countries for decades to weaken the unity among the masses built up by red patriotism. In China, the opium is wrapped as Han Chauvinism and given for free to a reactionary stratum of Chinese who have lived or studied in the West and are attracted to bourgeois ideologies. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to distinguish red patriotism from white patriotism in China: the question “is Chairman Mao a dictator or a revolutionary leader” will tell us everything.
Even more fortunately, the White Empire is not invincible; anti-imperialist vanguards in West Asia have flooded open the real face of the paper tiger. And since Tufan al-Aqsa, we are witnessing a qualitative change in the power relations between red patriotism and white patriotism. Yahya Sinwar has not only flooded away the Empire’s invincibility illusion for the masses in the imperialized peripheries, but also its “human rights defender” mask for the masses in the imperialist cores.
For the first time since the 1960s, red patriotism is once again on the offensive, even in the rearguard Europe. Desperate French teenagers waving Palestinian flags and burning police cars will not shut down Empire’s death machine in Gaza tomorrow, but will burn down the Empire to ashes one fire after another. For siblings in Gaza, this might be too late. So I wish we had a time machine and could bring the day of judgment sooner.