and don't you forget it!

Because it's been unseasonably beautiful here -- shorts and sandals in November! -- after a month of dark clouds and cold rain, I thought I'd explore those nooks and crannies of the neighborhood I hadn't yet discovered. After a couple of hours of wandering, I came upon this sign, hung on a tall privacy fence across the street from a baseball field and playground:


OK, fine. "One Nation Under GOD." I remember it from school and I remember it from Boy Scouts. (Though not with GOD emphasized in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS like that.)

So far it's just a display and repetition of the ritual of flag worship so many of us were taught as children.

The part that gets to me is the second line:

~ and don't you forget it! ~
Hmm. What's the point of that exclamation? The flag and the snippet of the pledge by themselves could just be a show of patriotism, probably of the generic militaristic type, maybe referring to the US government's recent rounds of imperial adventurism, maybe not.

Either way, the "and don't you forget it!" part suggests that this particular patriot thinks someone has forgotten or is about to forget something important, presumably something about American history or American traditions ...

I rather doubt that this particular patriot knows that the Pledge of Allegiance originated over a hundred years after the founding of his nation-state and long after the last of the Founders had passed on. (I'm counting the late 1780s as the founding, not the mid-1770s. Different founders and very different arrangement. The pledge was first published in 1892.)

I doubt he knows that the author of the pledge, Francis Bellamy, was a national socialist -- someone whose ultimate goal was international socialism, but who believed that people had to be collectivized in progressive stages, rather than all at once. Bellamy believed that the so-called Civil War had been critically important to the process of centralizing and collectivizing loyalty, thus "the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches."

In other words, the pledge is to the flag of the second republic, not the first -- to Lincoln's republic, not Jefferson's. Maybe to my neighborhood patriot's. Not to mine.

The Pledge of Allegiance is directly opposed to the revolutionary ideas of the 1770s, to Jefferson and Mason and the antifederalists who presaged the end of liberty as the necessary consequence of the One Nation centralization that Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln and Bellamy all stood for.

I doubt that my neighborhood patriot knows that the original pledge had no mention of God (and certainly not of GOD in ALL CAPS), nor that it took 50 years for the central government of this "One Nation" nation-state (the US Congress, 1942) to officially recognize the pledge, and another dozen years before someone decided that the whole flag-worshiping thing sounded like pagan idolatry and so had the words "under God" added to distinguish 1954 Cold War America from the Godless Communism of the enemy.

"One Nation Under God" -- What a perfect little summary of the governments and ideologies (i.e., the criminals and conspiracies) that carried us from the Civil War to the Cold War.

All of which leads me to ask:

What exactly is it that he wants to make sure I don't forget?

---

By the way, if you're wondering whether the national socialism of Bellamy and his followers had anything to do with the national socialism of Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party, well, yes and no. The socialism of the American nationalists (where here I mean the self-labeled socialists, not the mere mercantilists such as Hamilton and Lincoln) was egalitarian and friendly to Marxism, even if they disagreed with Marx on strategy. (Similar to the same-goal-different-strategy Fabian socialists in Britain. (Though some might argue that the Marxists' long-term goals were different.))

In contrast, the socialism of the Nazis had two origins: the right-wing (anti-egalitarian) socialism of Bismarck, and the national socialism of disillusioned German Marxists, who swapped out egalitarianism and the withering away of the state, and swapped in nationalism and the omnipotence of the state. So the lowercase national socialists got along fine with Marxists, while the uppercase National Socialists treated them, well, somewhat less than gently.

Still, the Bellamy salute has to make you think:


The way young Americans originally pledged their loyalty to the US
government before Hitler made the gesture unpopular.