senor ding dong....Oh, but I can change your mind. Maybe not your opinion, but the part of your mind that rejects logic and reason. It's a gradual process, though. And I don't mean that as an insult, but here's an example. When I was a small child, as many children do, I thought my Dad was the greatest Dad in the world. It was an emotional, subjective assessment, rather than a logical and objective one. Now, as I grew older, and my capacity for deductive reasoning increased, I started realizing that, as much as I liked my Dad, objectively speaking, it's unlikely that he was the best Dad in the world. I made this discovery earlier than most, and wasn't surprised to find that my fellow thumb-suckers and short-legged peers all thought their Dads were the best Dads in the world. Since the time-honored "nuh-uh"/"ya-haa" process seemed like a less than scientific approach to resolving the matter, I came up with the best system I could think of at the time: Parental Trump Cards! We would all rate our Dads in various categories we all agreed were most important, ranging from income to frequency of spankings, write them down on cards, and see whose Dad came out on top. Now, admittedly, with the benefit of hindsight, this may seem a bit crude, but for my first venture into logic and reason, I thought it was quite inspired, and I'd like to think that the fact that I won had nothing to do with my system being stacked in my favor.
Now, there are still adults who would object to the suggestion that their Dad isn't the greatest Dad in the world, that their country isn't the greatest country in the world, that their army isn't the best army in the world, and so on and so forth, because parts of their minds have been deprived of the opportunity to grow. Although it's a long and difficult process, gradual exposure to reason, logic and a superior argument will "change" their minds to the point where they can understand the weakness of the arguments upon which they base their case. It won't change how they feel about their Dads, countries and armies, nor should it, but they will be able to assess those, and many other things, with a greater level of emotional maturity. Never under-estimate the potential of the human mind... even your own.
The point is, when someone condemns someone else for deserting the army, it's not that he's necessarily wrong, but when he does it on the basis of logic, which at the same time validates Nazi war crimes, then that logic is clearly flawed. It may be replaced with a more consistent, logical argument that leads to the same conclusion about desertion, or it may make him wonder about the fundamentals of the entire argument to begin with. Either way, we will have made some progress. You see, it's not about having to agree about anything more than the discussion being rooted in some form of reality, as opposed to wishful thinking and child-like simplicity.
