[Halk]

Interesting... I can now strongly agree and disagree with Moejoe!

While I heartily agree that blindly following what the 'nation' says is, indeed, not a good thing, I have to hope he's joking about not taking up arms.

People who refused to fight in WWII should have been rounded up and put on a boat headed for France. Fighting for your country is a very simple way of explaining what was actually happening.

Adolf Hitler had risen to power at the top of a wave of Populism and Nationalism. (Incidentally the very same type of populism that's going on against bankers, politicians in the UK and B.P. in the US.) It is very easy to select a group of people and blame them for the problems. However... had people not fought against Nazi Germany then they'd simply have been free to create the society they wanted to create. I personally don't think it's acceptable to stand by while my neighbours are dragged out of their houses and executed. Indeed it's fairly likely that my grandparents would have been killed since that generation of both sides of my family was quite involved in the Masons.

Having said all that, it does raise some rather large questions... just exactly is a cause worth dying for, and what isn't? Clearly Nazi Germany had to be stopped. I would hope that most people are sane enough to agree with that. What about removing the heads of oppressive regimes by invasion? A much more grey area. I think it's clear there's a lot of questions to be answered that couldn't possibly be covered in this thread, so I won't continue with that.

Going back to flags though, and Moejoe's gross oversimplification of saluting a flag... I'll attempt to explain it.

The flag is intended to represent the nation. The nation is the collection of people (or collection of families, of communities or collection of towns, cities, etc) who have joined together for a common purpose. There is nothing wrong with that at all. Joining together for a common purpose is exactly the cause of civilisation, and the reason we have language, literature, "extelligence" etc. It all becomes grey again when not everybody agrees on everything. We're straight back to the same issues as the paragraph above! But certainly it's nothing anywhere near as simple as Moejoe puts it.

Edit : Dodging the draft is nothing at all to do with socialism.