The 11th November is often referred to as Remembrance Day, Armistice Day or Poppy Day and commemorates the end of WWI in 1918. The day is synonymous with the red poppy, distributed by the Royal British Legion or its similar counterparts in other Commonwealth countries.
This year marks the centenary of the start of WWI in 1914. While many countries have committed large amounts of money to mark this event, the decision to commemorate to such an extent is not without its critics. Robert Risk for example talks here and here and also here about the need to re-evaluate the glorification of war and that real peace must come from looking forward rather than back.
Fisk abhores the donning of poppies claiming: 'Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.'
On asking his late father why the 'Great war' took place, his father replied: 'All I can tell you, fellah,' he said, 'was that it was a great waste.' And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see 'so many damn fools' wearing it. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents.' http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-do-those-who-flaunt-the-poppy-on-their-lapels-know-that-they-mock-the-war-dead-6257416.html
Al Jazeera, the Qatar based broadcaster, also provides interesting commenatry of the merits of war remembrance and the seemingly blase nature of today's poppy wearer.
'It's not really clear when the UK poppy enforcement started to get so bombastic, but it is preached to anyone in the public eye: Politicians, TV presenters, celebrities, and footballers are all required to wear one. Failure to do so brings a tide of criticism: for being 'disrespectful' to the soldiers who sacrificed their lives, and for being somehow unpatriotic and 'anti-British'.
It's a claim that is at once nonsensical and also indicative of the true purpose of what British TV Channel 4 presenter Jon Snow described as 'poppy fascism': this insistence upon public figures - and the general public - wearing the designated red flower. Nonsensical, because why should red-poppy-wearing be the only permissible form of remembrance? And how thoughtful a commemoration is it, anyway, if you're only doing it out of peer pressure?
If you think Snow's description of poppy-wearing coercion is overdone, take a look at the flood of abuse that, just as one example, the ITV news presenter Charlene White received last year for very politely declining to wear one - on the innocuous grounds that she sees no sensible reason to single out and promote one charity over the several that she supports (British television presenters aren't allowed to wear the emblems of any other charity).
Then there's the torrent of sanctimonious scorn that erupted when the Guardian's art critic suggested that the Tower of London's hugely popular commemorative installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each Commonwealth soldier who died in WWI, filling the tower's dry moat, is 'fake, trite, and inward-looking - a UKIP-style memorial'.
Amid the outrage, armed forces charities accused the paper of trying to 'politicise a memorial' - as though the remembrance of young men sent to their slaughter hadn't long ago been politically hijacked by an establishment dedicated to glorifying nationalistic wars.
And this hijacking is the reason that enforced red-poppy-wearing is so jarring. For it is a frightening sort of remembrance that demands to be defined through an entirely one-note nationalism over war - especially the first world war; the war that didn't end any wars. This great battle in which 16 million died, was an appalling blood bath fought over imperial interests, during which almost a million soldiers from Britain and its empire were condemned to senseless, gruesome, nightmarish deaths by a callously incompetent ruling elite.
There are of course countless ways, personal or public, to respect fallen soldiers - not just the British among them - or to think about war and bloodshed; about all the futility and pain and all the lives cut short. What the Guardian's art critic and ceramic poppy disparager Jonathan Jones was suggesting, as he explained in a later piece, was that the Tower of London's too decorous, too glossed-over display doesn't do justice to the subject; that we 'need to look harder, and keep looking, at the terrible truths of the war'.
Others, too, have proposed alternatives to the mass-imposed red flower. On Remembrance Day this year, Veterans for Peace will hold an alternative service, carrying a wreath of white poppies to acknowledge civilian lives lost in war. An organisation of former fighters now opposed to war, Veterans for Peace will wear t-shirts bearing the message: 'War is organised murder' - the words of Harry Patch, who was the last British survivor of World War I until his death in 2009.
That there have always been alternate streams to the red poppy path - the white poppy movement, for example, dates back to 1933 - suggests that the current red poppy mania isn't intended as remembrance so much as a kind of cultish determination to impose a particular reading of history. Wear a poppy, don't wear a poppy - that's a personal choice, but it's really none of your business what anyone else does. And if you can't tolerate such a tiny freedom, then you probably need to think a little bit more about what it is that your red-poppy-wearing is respecting.' http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/11/poppy-fascism-2014119527667210.html
While the commentaries do not propose forgetting about past wars altogther there is a strong argument that if true peace is a desired goal, that looking forward must be prioritised over looking back.
And when looking back involves the wearing of poppies becasue it is 'the right thing to be seen to be done' is it time, in respect of those fallen soldiers, to put the red poppy to rest?
What role does the poppy really play in remembering and in the strive for peace?
On this day of remembrance - what do you think?
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