I wouldn't die for a flag.

I will die for a life ... but don't we all?

Or maybe not as many as should :-)

I might wear a black poppy, for all the fighters who continue to die fighting fascism. I might also wear white roses, for those who spoke out against fascist militarism. I will decide ... and to better decide, I will train with the military.

Because although the Nazis lost, the fascists won.

Maybe history is a matter of progress, and maybe its one damn thing after another ...

But I think people fight more for (and from) the past than the future.

And this is necessary, because although many evils have been defeated in the past, many have yet to be defeated in the future.

Trite but true.

If you don't fight evil, you may as well not be alive.

All people disagree on is the nature of evil.

How philosophical!! Or ethical? Or perhaps political?

There clearly needs to be training for people who want to fight evil.

This is a problem when our government is more accountable to 'evil as usual' than to promoting progress. Though its the nature of governments to value stability over sustainability. Which focuses attention on the concept of progress as both instability as well as being a directed and predestined goal.

Some might call it terror. Its certainly an existential challenge. On the other hand (IMO), if life wasn't so weird it wouldn't be worth living.

How should we evaluate such risks? Should we value the risks of social upheaval over the normal business of exploitation? How can 'normal' people evaluate their own normality?

This to me is why both the concept of stable normality and the concept of radical change are both matters of faith, and also why anarchism to me is a matter of spirit, though in the more doctrinaire forms appearing as a matter of religion .. or the secular political religions.

How then can anyone understand ANZAC day?

it can't be nationhood because Roger Douglas , Lange and cronies, and our corporate elite combined to undercut and poison the concept of a nation during the 1984 to 1987 period.

They laid the foundations for the transfer of our cultural and legal identity from a potentially autonomous nationhood of Maori and tau iwi to a branch office of Corpse International Inc.

We were heading towards nationhood, trying with some success to acknowledge the viciousnes in our heritage of colonialism, when we were sidestruck by an even more vicious, fast moving form of colonialism. This latest form of colonialism is based on the commodification of a real economy into a virtual gambling den, where financial elites and ideologies determine the lives and deaths not only of humans, but of whole ecolgies.

Such is evil. So what price or cost should be put on evil? That question is not raised in our establishment forums. Instead we are (not) asked to consider our involvement in pacifying Afghanistan.

Nothing in the occupation of Afghanistan justifies the evils which we have experienced in NZ/Aotearoa and now seemingly are happy to export. Nor do we in NZ/A seem willing to look at things the other way around, and consider whether a socialist/anarchist expeditionary force should occupy these islands, execute Roger Douglas, and bring a modicum of sustainability to these shakey isles.

I think Neil Roberts was right in saying: "We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity." Neil was re-presenting a statement from the introduction to a book, 'The Open Veins of Latin America', that detailed the horror of the predatory western european occupation and exploitation of what became Latin Americas.

Today, after continual capitalist attempts to imnpose a fascist hegemony over these nations via the US, new hope is dawning. I wish Neil could witness these events ... these events brought into being through the blood of millions and into which ocean Neil also contibuted from afar. As might we all, bearing in mind the sacrifices we remember on ANZAC day, and those yet to come.

Steve L