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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

How useful is it really? I think it only serves to conflate the will of the people with the will of the elite. I certainly don't want to be associated with everything the US has done in my lifetime.

Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?

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Yes, for most people it's much harder to name the person who proposed it, and those who carried it out. Heck, we anthropomorphize cars, animals, and the weather... on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's good much less accurate, but it usually makes the story easier to tell and more memorable.

>How useful is it really? I think it only serves to conflate the will of the people with the will of the elite.

When people think at that level of abstraction they don't care about the "will of the people" of the other country, they care about what the other country can do (does) to theirs, and that's mostly based on the will of its elite.

So it makes sense to ignore the "will of the people" when considering a country friendly or not.

>Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?

Well, the persons are often replaceable or insignificant the elite has people doing its work in politics etc, but it's not like some specific person is the embodiment of being the "enemy" of another country the elite wants to attack.

But the problem is the equivalisation of the state, the country and the nation. These are three different things. Australia and the United States are friendly: the states are friendly.

Not so long ago, the United States went to war: the state went to war. Iraq went to war: the country went to war.

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