Do you pledge allegiance to your nation's flag?

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In the USA, one of the things that we love to recite, even more than the Lord's Prayer or the Apostles' Creed, is the Pledge of Allegiance. We do this each morning, while standing, facing the American flag, with the right palm in contact with the left side of the chest.

I pledge allegiance,
To the flag,
Of the United States of America;
And to the Republic
For Which it Stands,
One nation
Under God,
Indivisible,
With liberty
And Justice
For all.

Just typing those words brings tears of patriotism to my eyes.

Do you Pledge allegiance to your country's flag? What are the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flags of other countries?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Kt_D4MegM[/youtube]

I haven't pledged since middle school, or maybe high school, but I don't recall having to pledge every day in high school...

I haven't done that since elementary school - I've never held allegiance to a piece of cloth, no matter how brightly-colored. I do feel that I owe allegiance to my nation, and to its ideals and its Constitution, but nowhere in the Constitution is a flag mentioned.

Yes, it was one more bit of ammunition for bullies, but hey, they already had so much ammo, what did one more metaphorical bullet matter?

I don't pledge allegiance to the flag.

Doesn't the idea of having to pledge allegiance to the flag every day stand against everything America was imagined for? When your country was made up in the 18th century, it was done so because the people colonising the colony decided that they wanted to be free from the boundaries of someone else's national identity and all the imperialistic frippary that went alongside it... and now you're pledging allegiance every day?!

As a Brit, we're not forced to do that in school or anywhere else and I'm glad. The Union Jack has only been around in it's current form since the early 19th century and in it's closest previous form since the 18th century, so for me the flag doesn't really sum up the identity of the nation any more than the Industrial Revolution (not a problem in America I suppose, having only been a 'country' for that long anyway). My allegiance is to the Queen and the country... the flag doesn't come into it.

As a prospective member of the armed forced, I'll be expected to swear an oath. I'll probably only say those words once in my life and they'll mean something. Reciting it every day just seems crass and desensitising - it's an oath, not a bloody poem.





[...And for the nation that coined the idea of church and state being seperate, they don't half go on about God a lot. ]

I complained to my son's school principal that when the school makes kids recite the pledge but they never taught what it means, in addition to not telling them that they have a choice about whether to pledge or not. they're teaching them that pledges are meaningless, so it's the start of teaching kids not to care about vows.

Some patriotic rituals have been hijacked and don't mean love of country. They are doing the rituals as a way of giving the finger to those who disagree with their hawkish politics.

I haven't done that since middle school.

I don't pledge allegiance to my country's flag.

Patriotism here happens only once every four years - during the Soccer World Cup.

It a piece of cloth... you can't hurt it or protect it!

I like our flag though, it has a cool history: It supposedly fell from the sky and hit our king while he was fighting a loosing battle. A voice from above said "No army carrying this flag in a just cause will ever lose!" weather this is true or not, it did rally our army, and we won an earthshaking victory that day.

True - when I enlisted, I swore the oath once, and recall it to this day. It had nothing to do with flags, or individuals - it was an oath to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me..." We even had classes in Basic to explain, for the hard of thinking, that this implied a duty to not obey unlawful orders.

(Which kind of leads me on to the case of an Army lieutenant, here in Washington, who's being court-martialed because he refused to deploy with his unit to Iraq. His defense is that it was an illegal war, therefore he didn't have to go. However, what both he and his supporters are missing is that the order to deploy is still a legal one - he's not supporting any illegal activities just by showing up. Now, were he to have deployed, then refused to actually do anything once there, because anything he did would support an illegal action and therefore the order to do so would be illegitimate, he'd have a point. But he didn't do that. Instead, he ran away from the base, and didn't turn himself in for almost a year.)

No. I don't know of any country in Europe that asks its citizens to pledge allegiance to a flag. I would object on general principles, because pledging allegiance to a symbol leaves far too much ambiguity over what the symbol stands for. The general trend is that pledges directly to a symbol then get used to pressure people into unthinking conformity or obedience for the sake of belonging to a group and the group's reputation.

That is an oath that makes a lot more sense.


And I think this is one of the differences between pledging allegiance to a symbol that can be made to stand for almost anything, and defending something much more specific, here the constitution.

I don't, I don't believe in nationalism.. Can be dangerous

Of course not. How can I feel loyalty to a piece of fabric? And if it represents my country/my government, they don't really have my loyalty at the moment either.

Or better yet, how can I pledge to a flag in a $10000 per person public taxpayer's school that fails to teach most of its students, while the high ranked ones veer from true intellect to global management hegemony? I'll pass.

UK: absolutely not

Ireland: yes

Your replu makes me wonder - I think that I'd happily pledge allegience to Oregon's flag. Oregon is doing some pretty cool things and its flag hasn't been hijacked by nutjobs who use patriotism to spread hate.