Jesse's right Not that Jesse, Jesse Ventura. Ventura is resisting signing into law a requirement that school children recite the Pledge of Allegience.
In a radio interview Monday, the free-associating governor was discussing his opposition to a bill requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance when he began comparing it to the indoctrination practiced by two notorious regimes, the Taliban and the Nazis.
Here is what he actually said:
“Patriotism comes from the heart, not repetition in the mind.’’ Ventura said. “I’ll equate it to how outraged all of us were when you see these films of these Taliban kids being asked to say over and over, you know how they rock back and forth, and then they expound their hatred for the United States, even though they don’t even know us?
“And then if you look at Germany in World War II, what did they do there? They had those brown-shirted youth corps, and all that, that were asked to, you know, hail the Third Reich and all this stuff.
“To me, patriotism again comes from — you volunteer patriotism. Patriotism comes from your heart, not asking government to say, we’re going to make our people patriotic by what we say.”
Forced repition of words in order to breed a mindset is exactly what the Nazis and the Taliban practiced. The fact that the ideologies they were enforcing is so different from our own is irrelevant, the methodologies would be the same. Gov. Ventura is right, patriotism comes from within. It must be learned; it cannot be forced.
Posted by Rich at May 22, 2002 1:39 AM