I recognize myself in "the anti-state cynics who can't believe that any country could possibly choose to risk life and limb". I still have to meet a country for a drink, watch his limb, and listen to him talk about his life with his collective mouth. In the history of political thought, this is called social organicism. Auguste Comte, the French 19th-century scientist, believed that individuals were only "organs of the great social Being" -- limbs of the great country, as it were. Danten believed that society (substitute "race" in the case of Hitler) could scarifice an organ (read: an individual) when necessary for social health purposes, just as an individual decides to have a cankered limb cut off. Emile Faguet, the famous French literary critic of the turn of the (other) century (and extraordinary writer),
LOL-ROTFed about this "zoological conception of society": "You believe you are a man," he wrote, "but you are only a foot."

Pierre Lemieux
http://www.pierrelemieux.org