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Updated: June 26, 2025
Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.
"These words," said the Duke, "apply to the anti-patriot, the pro-Zulu, the pro-Boer, the inciter to rebellion in Egypt, and to the stirrer-up of strife in India. I do not see why rifle-shooting should not become a popular national sport, equal in prestige to games like cricket and football."
But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all.
Gustave Herve, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena.
He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
A democratic element is essentially necessary to a people in order that the people should not feel itself to be a mere onlooker, but should realise that it is a part and an important part of the body social, and that the words "You are the nation, defend it," have a meaning. Otherwise the argument of the anti-patriot demagogues would be just.
We think Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which, with a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and with reference to a kind of verse that could not but be distasteful to him, as needing no more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration than serves a trumpet.
They do not understand the anti-patriot argument, which was born of the false philosophy of the eighteenth century, and which has left so evil a mark upon our political life. To them the phenomenon which we call Pro-Boerism is not easily intelligible.
If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot?
If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot?
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