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Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
Stephen Decatur (1779–1820), U.S. naval commander. Toast, April 1816, proposed at a banquet in Norfolk, Virginia, to celebrate Decatur’s victory over Algerian “Barbary pirates.” Quoted in A.S. MacKenzie, Life of Decatur, ch. 14.
The words were revived in a speech by Carl Schurz (1829-1906), German orator and later U.S. general and senator, to the U.S. Senate (January 17, 1872): “Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.”
“My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936), British author. “Defence of Patriotism,” The Defendant (1901).
Nationalism is militant hatred. It is not love of our countrymen: that, which denotes good citizenship, philanthropy, practical religion, should go by the name of patriotism. Nationalism is passionate xenophobia. It is fanatical, as all forms of idol-worship are bound to be. And fanaticism—l’infame denounced by Voltaire—obliterates or reverses the distinction between good and evil. Patriotism, the desire to work for the common weal, can be, must be, reasonable: “My country, may she be right!” Nationalism spurns reason: “Right or wrong, my country.”
Albert L. Guerard (b. 1914), U.S. author, educator. “The Paradoxes of Nationalism,” Fossils and Presences, Stanford University Press (1957).
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