Response to some blogpost on remembrance day

They died because the state conscripted them, because the state started a war. None of these dead individuals started a war.
Keeping this country free? That's propaganda. It's one state vs another. The rulers fighting over control of each others people. Queen and country equals the state not you or I or our families friends and communities.
Particularly sickening the state lies to the people making them believe that under this control they are free and they should gratefully lay down further freedoms to protect their current rulers from some other rulers. The 'british' state recruits disproportionately from Ireland and Scotland, areas that same state first subjugated then exploited and left as state dependent economic wrecks where some people's only hope of an income is to sell their life to the state in some irrelevant desert the other side of the planet that never directly threatened them.
So they should be thankful they don't live in an overbearing police state with invasive surveilance and ever tightening limits on free speech? Think about how free you actually are before you lambast others for a difference of opinion.
Scotland has not existed since English forces invaded. Same in Ireland. British forces are not protecting Afghanistan from some threat to its very existence.
I'll be wearing my poppy to remember the tragic and needless death of each and  every individual on both sides at the hands of a state machine.