About patriotism and slavery

On the love of power as a form of Stockholm syndrome

Patriotism comes in many shades, but I would single out two.
One is love for the native state, when a person is proud of the merits of his state, his government and ruler, is wary, and even hostile to everything foreign.
The other is tender love for the motherland, grief over its troubles and shortcomings, attentive and benevolent observation of all that is good in the world, the desire to learn this good from the world in order to transfer this good to one's homeland.
These two kinds of patriotism - be proud or learn - are competitors. Or maybe political opponents.
Patriotism as love for the state is warmed up in every possible way by the authorities. In its extreme manifestation, love for the country and the state (authorities) acquires the hysterical character of “national narcissism”, in the words of one well-known publicist, and elements of hysterical malice appear in relation to a significant part of the rest of the world. Apparently, this kind of patriotism was meant by Leo Tolstoy when he said: “Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and undoubted meaning is nothing but a tool for rulers to achieve power-hungry and selfish goals, and for the ruled it is a renunciation of human dignity, reason, conscience and slavish submission to those in power... Patriotism is slavery" * * Leo Tolstoy, "Christianity and Patriotism", 1893-1894.
It seems to me that with this definition - patriotism is slavery - Tolstoy's genius anticipated the discovery of such a phenomenon as the Stockholm syndrome: love, sometimes passionate, victims - for a terrorist invader, for a rapist who treats his victims like slaves. In Stockholm, robbers who took over a bank and held its clients and employees hostage for several days and turned them into slaves eventually became objects of true love for their victims - to the point that they began to protect the robbers from the police. It is possible that in ancient times the love of a slave for his master made it easier for the slave to endure his slavery, increased the chances of survival and the creation of offspring, and it was reflected in the genome. Now this is a harmful atavism.
We have seen the manifestation of such patriotism of slaves across the country in the examples of Hitler's Germany, the Stalinist USSR, Pol Pot's Kampuchea, and today's North Korea.
The history of civilization proves that society must keep power at arm's length, in no case allowing it to its heart. “A true patriot must always be ready to defend his country from his government,” wrote the American philosopher Edward Abbey. “Distrust of power should be the first civic duty,” the Scottish writer Norman Douglas also argued (I quote from the article by Russian bureaucracy specialist Alexander Obolonsky “Political distrust as a positive factor”). At the same time, both the British and the Americans are the first patriots of their countries.
Photo: Roman Goncharov