Larken Rose knocks it out of the park with this one.
If you ask your average flag-waving, patriotic Murican when it’s okay to forcibly resist the thugs in blue (a.k.a. “law enforcement”), they will often have tantrums at you, accusing you of being a communist, or a terrorist, or unAmerican. (That last one is especially funny since they also celebrate July 4th, which honors a bunch of lawless criminals telling the “law enforcers” of their day to get lost or get shot.)
However, if you ask those SAME flag-waving, patriotic Muricans if they approved of the subjects of various tyrannical regimes forcibly resisting their oppressors–such as those who suffered in communist China, or under Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, and so on–they will vehemently cheer the idea of armed rebels forcibly battling tyranny.
And if you break it down to specifics, their hypocrisy gets even more obvious. Do they think the people of Germany had the right to disobey, even resist, when the Nazi SS would stop people at random, demanding to see their “papers”? Of course they had that right (proclaims the nationalistic Murican)! How about when U.S. police do the “stop and frisk” routine, or stop all cars driving down a road for a “border checkpoint” that isn’t at the border, or for a “regulation checkpoint” to ask to see people’s… well… papers? Do Americans have the right to disobey, even resist? Of course not (most flag-waving Muricans will say)! Only a despicable criminal would refuse to cooperate with “the law”!
The moral of the story is that a lot Americans claim to love freedom, while also proclaiming that Americans should passively tolerate MORE injustice and oppression than the people of Germany should have tolerated under Nazi rule. And that should tell you something about how unobjective nationalism and patriotism makes people.
