Aux armes, citoyens

I'm watching Casablanca, and it is all kinds of awesome.

However, even if... no, especially if I were French, I wouldn't want to sing La Maseillaise. Probabbly because of all that water-the-fields-with-blood stuff. The Internationale is better, though still a bit militaristic for my tastes¹.

Give me But For Honest Poverty any day.

---

Don't even get me started on the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That's a distillation of every kind of darkness in the human soul, right there.²
2. I wrote this comment shortly before discovering that is is "the unoffical anthem of the Republican Party".

EDIT: So it turns out also that the fore-runner for a distinctively English anthem, Jerusalem, might be referring to Oxbridge when it talks about "Dark Satanic Mills". Esau and Thomas I am, I am.