YES
William Tilston
Before launching into the ideals behind poppy-wearing, let’s first consider the material good that the Poppy Appeal achieves: this year it has already raised £40 million. This money is spent on the rehabilitation of injured servicemen and women, the care of aged veterans, the comfort of the bereaved and the re-settlement of younger veterans in daily life. The poppy is therefore the cornerstone of a charitable campaign, and so perhaps this role automatically justifies its presence on our chest each November.
However, some are wary of the latent patriotism behind the idea that members of our armed forces are owed a debt of gratitude for their services. Moreover, some believe that charitable donations could be better used elsewhere. Those who oppose the wearing of poppies would point out that the issue here is that through wearing poppies, we perhaps unfairly prioritise the recollection of war deaths over other kinds of death.
Each year, a huge number of us don poppies to remember the war dead. However, there is no equivalent movement to remember the millions who have died in pandemics or natural disasters. In supporting the wearing of the poppy for remembrance, we must justify this particular recollection of the war dead. After some thought, it is not difficult to distinguish how death through disease and through war should be remembered differently.
Both are tragic, but in the case of death through disease, it is a case of tragic ill-fortune: those that die have been unfortunate enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Admittedly, there is ill-fortune involved in dying in war, but there is also a difference: I believe that soldiers all enter war and thus knowingly expose themselves to danger and display courage in the face of great adversity. This difference makes servicemen and women deserving of our respect in a way that disease victims are not, and justifies the special memorial they receive in our wearing of the poppy.
However, there are also wider social factors that necessitate our use of the poppy, and indeed all the memorial imagery we have in our country that in particular recalls the war dead, and them alone. War memorials are designed to produce two sequential responses. The first, obviously, is to remember the dead. The second response follows from the first: we remember the dead for reasons of respect as outlined above, but also so as not to forget the horrors of war. The style of our memorials produces this latter reaction poignantly — the stone monuments of our towns, carved with countless names, and war cemeteries, with their seemingly endless tombstones, shock us. The number of individuals listed reminds us of the impersonalised and statistical nature of death in war. Of course, death takes on this nature during pandemics too, and yet such memorials do not exist in these cases.
However, the essential difference is that war is a human creation in a way that disease is not. Disease is a terrible thing, but aside from medical research, there is little that we can do to prevent it. War, on the other hand, is a solely human phenomenon. In the poppy then, and in all war memorials, there is a reminder of the suffering that war causes and an encouragement to learn from past mistakes.
The poppy’s widespread nature is demonstrative of the significance of this idea, since within all of us is the potential bitterness and hate to create dehumanised ‘enemies’, a potential that allows us to forget the value of human life and to wage war.
The poppy therefore is more than just a means of remembering the war dead, but is part of a framework to remind us what we are capable of, and to be wary of that fact.
NO
James Elliott
There seem to be few British institutions that are as sacred as “Remembrance”. At least, with other “national spectacles” such as royal weddings, babies or funerals, you are permitted the luxury of abstention. Not so with “Remembrance”, where failing to wear a poppy in the weeks building up to November 11th leaves you open to accusations of “disloyalty” or “lack of respect”, although to whom I’m never quite sure.
A friend of mine was even challenged by college Porters over the weekend as to why he was not wearing a poppy, while the requirement for Muslims to “prove” their allegiance to the British state through headscarves decorated with poppies is positively sickening.
“Remembrance”, according to 92 year old World War Two veteran Harry Leslie Smith, has lost all original meaning, not that its original intent was particularly progressive. His Guardian article argued, “The most fortunate in our society have turned the solemnity of remembrance for fallen soldiers in ancient wars into a justification for our most recent armed conflicts.”
Remembrance has undoubtedly become a near-compulsory celebration of British militarism, imperialism and the whitewashing of two world wars, in which the reality of the British Empire’s crimes are eclipsed behind a curtain of unadulterated nationalism.
Worse, the remembrance symbolism is now being used to talk about arguably illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost to no good end.
Last year, when student officers at the University of London Union decided they would not take part in Remembrance Day services for reasons very similar to my own, they found themselves blasted by Labour MPs and had their names dragged through the gutter press. This culture of compulsory remembrance (without criticising imperialism or militarism) has become pervasive.
I should make clear, taking a blast at the official “Remembrance” ceremonies and the ideology of its official propaganda is not to take a pop a those who fought in the wars. On the contrary, it is to save and preserve their memory, place it in historical context, and to understand what made such tragic loss of life occur.
I was fortunate enough to attend a school where a number of teachers refused to wear poppies for political reasons. Rather than celebrate “the glory of war”, they would spend the lessons around November 11th teaching us about the inter-imperial conflicts that led to the First World War, or reading us Wilfred Owen’s poetry.
One line from Owen is worth revisiting at this time, where he lectures the reader on what he might think, had he been there in the time of the Somme, fighting an ugly fight for a useless end, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”
The Latin verse translates roughly to “it is good and sweet to die for one’s country”, which for me seems to be the fundamental assumption upon which Remembrance is based, and it is a thoroughly lousy one.
I will choose to commemorate the dead of both World Wars, and those from conflicts since, by challenging militaristic government policies, and opposing such illegal wars. The sight of politicians who took Britain into war in Iraq laying wreaths at the Cenotaph is stomach-turning to say the least.
Some will be wearing a poppy this month to justify and celebrate these ideologies, while the vast majority who wear one will be reproducing these values unconsciously. I, on the other hand, shall not.
