Gargoyle - Your sentiments are admirable...and they are echoed in the very similar loyalty oaths of any number of states, past and present...from the United Kingdom, to Nazi Germany, to Imperial Rome, to Napoleonic France, to ancient Athens, to the Byzantine Empire, to Sparta, to the Japanese Empire, and on and on and on...

Such statements are often (if not always) used to cover over a multitude of sins and self-serving hypocrisies, rather like a nice coat of icing on a worm-ridden, stale old cake. They are also used to stir naive young people into offering up their lives into someone else's hand and serving as his tools of war, to slaughter some other group of people with a different loyalty oath.

It all sounds so glorious though...

"I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies."

So, if you believe that...then what will you do when the high officials and commanders of your own government agencies such as the FBI, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in truth the direst enemies of your country and your democracy and your ancestral freedoms? What then will you do? How then will you obey your American Creed?

No one was more loyal or more courageous in battle than the elite divisions of the SS, but they were still wrong...from the point of view of the general advancement of humanity on this planet. They had very bad leadership, and they were completely misled by it. Patriots, one and all!

If they had won, the history books would now be calling them heroes...

I look sceptically on loyalty oaths. I know what they are designed to do...rob people of independent thought and judgement, and turn them into obedient killers.

A good and moral cause needs no loyalty oath to motivate people in its defense.

- LH