On 7/5/2012 3:52 PM, Bob Engelhardt wrote:
Jim Wilkins wrote:
Lifted from rec.aviation.military:

Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you
Jesus Christ and the _American_ [my emphasis] GI
...

A bit chauvinistic , isn't it? Pretty much every country's soldier was
willing to die for his country. At least to the same extent that the
American one was. And it's easy to exaggerate how much that was. Rather
than "Yes, I'll _die_ for my country!" it was more likely "What the ****
am I doing here?".

No soldier ever died for his country. Soldiers die for what the
political leadership of the country claims to be in the national
interest. There is no such thing as "national interest"; only
individual organic entities can have interests. Each tree in a forest
has some biological interest in surviving, but the forest has no such
interest; the forest is nothing but the abstract name we give to a
collection of living trees.

Seldom, if ever, does the supposed national interest coincide with the
individual interests of a majority of citizens, let alone all of them.