Peace, troll, I'm actually a lot more conservative than you might imagine. Twenty-odd years a member of the Irish equivalent of the National Guard, but I could reconcile that with my pacifist leanings because I knew that, unlike the US forces, we would never be used in any role other than defence of the homeland, and even that was a remote prospect. It was really just a bit of good fun, and a valuable educational experience, while supporting the institutions of the State and providing a safe outlet for young lads with an interest in guns an' stuff at a time when they could have got into much more dangerous pastimes.

The pacifism came from early 1960s exposure to West Germans' reflection on their recent history, combined with a period in a German university in 1969-70 when US students who I used to hang out with were all on Vietnam draft deferments - in fact one (Bill Keele) got his orders to report to the Army school of Oriental languages while we were there. I sometimes wonder if he's still alive.

The lady from Israel is courageous, and I suspect that people in the US are not getting to hear much of her and those like her. At times like this, the asinine (sorry, JC) "those who are not with me are against me" mentality takes over and you're supposed to be loyal to your own side and shut up about the wrongs which they're doing. The great twentieth-century organisation whose motto was "My oath is loyalty" (Wie lautet das eigentlich auf Deutsch, Wolfgang?) was none other than the SS, and Germans are nervous about appeals to loyalty ever since.

A lot of damage is done by the way "history" is taught, not least in my own country. The Council of Europe (in Strasbourg) has done some excellent but little-known work on this -check it out at

http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operation/education/History%5FTeaching/

The CoE is unfortunately grossly underfunded, unlike the European Union for which I work and which some of our leaders would like to see becoming "not a super-State, but a super-power". An appalling prospect, I'd sooner see it a law-abiding super-State that just wants to get on with its neighbours than an erratic, two-bit vehicle for would-be statesmen in countries like France and the UK who still haven't learnt much from history.