A Fourth of July in Poland Reminds of Dangers Facing U.S.

Like Ron Kovic and George M. Cohan, I was born on the Fourth of July. Because of that happy coincidence, my birthday has always been celebrated with more enthusiasm than I might have otherwise expected: with fireworks and patriotic speeches when I was growing up, and with softball games and parties in later years.

But in 1990, I’m celebrating my birthday in a very different way, in a country in which there will be no speeches or flag-waving on the Fourth of July but where the people know a great deal about the kind of struggle for freedom that prompted this holiday in the United States in the first place. I’m spending my birthday week this year exploring Warsaw, Poland, and the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.

We are in the middle of a trip through Eastern Europe, about which I will write more when we return. But it seemed important to me to write about our Independence Day at a time when I am immersed in the stark remnants of a kind of authoritarianism we once fought against. That was so long ago that we tend to forget the excesses that can be visited by a despotic government on people who yearn for freedom. Here in Poland, amid the still-fresh reminders of such despotism--both of communism and fascism--it is much easier to remember.

The Poles remember, even though virtually nothing is left of the Warsaw ghetto in which many thousands of Jews were herded by the Nazis in World War II, then wiped out with unbelievable ferocity when they resisted. Only a slab of dark granite remains to commemorate the heroes of the ghetto. Both the Polish Jewish population and what was once the ghetto in which many of them lived and died are gone, almost as though they never existed save for this piece of stone.

Auschwitz, by contrast, is still very visible. About 35 miles outside the Polish city of Krakow, enough of Auschwitz remains to enable a visitor to imagine what it must have looked like almost 50 years ago, when the Nazis methodically gassed and shot 4 million Jews and political prisoners. There is grass now, instead of mud, and most of the wooden buildings have disintegrated. But the foundations of the four crematories--pretending to be factories--remain, and so do the ghosts.

To this visiting American on his country’s Independence Day, these graphic remnants of the monstrous brutalities of which man is capable are potent reminders that we seldom pause in the United States to ponder what we have. And even less often--especially among the young--do we recognize that there may be a price to pay to keep it.

I suppose all this falls under the heading of what we vaguely call patriotism. It is a word that has become badly abused in our society. Special-interest groups wrap themselves in it to foster causes that frequently aren’t in the best interests of anyone but themselves. Sophisticates are wary of it as a sometimes dangerous example of emotion over reason. And our young people pretty much ignore it, at least partly because they have no frame of reference in which to embrace it.

It hasn’t always been this way, of course. When I was growing up, patriotism wasn’t an embarrassment to young or old. There was always a band concert and a Fourth of July speech in the Indiana town in which I lived, and we went and listened. My uncle, who was a lawyer and a noted Lincoln scholar, always gave the speech, and it never varied, except possibly for the opening sentence or two--small concessions to the movement of time.

But I recognize now--as I didn’t then--that behind the patriotic homilies of the WASP society in which I was raised were the aberrations of racism and the exploitation of groups pushed out to the edges of our culture. So the patriotism played at two levels: It was hypocritical in the sense that it helped us ignore injustices that needed to be rectified. But it also permitted a healthy love of country and awareness that our liberties had been fought for once and might have to be fought for again. That’s what 10 million or so of us took into World War II.

Now, in this far-off country amid artifacts of oppression and a newly free populace, it occurs to me that there is as much danger--maybe more--from the misuse of patriotism in the United States as in the absence of it. More and more, patriotism is being used as a rationale for denying rights to Americans that are guaranteed in the foundation documents of the country. Standing here in Auschwitz, it’s easy to remember that the Germans used the same rationale in the early days of Hitler.

In this time, when Americans are blessed with peace and a dramatic lessening of international tensions, the greatest danger is likely to come from within. We may undermine our own freedoms in ways that no other power has ever been able to accomplish from outside.

Already there are signs of this, as our greatest strength--our pluralism--is being used to divide us. The cornerstone of our freedom is protection of the rights of our minorities. On this Independence Day, especially, it seems to me important to renew our conviction that if this protection breaks down for any segment of our society--however small or powerless--it threatens the freedoms of us all.

My uncle used to say that between the lines of his oratory. I believed it then, and I believe it now. It seems particularly vivid on this Fourth of July in Poland.