When I was about seven, my dad took me to the local Remembrance Day memorial. Neatly turned-out elderly men were stood in equally neat rows while The Last Post was played. I wondered why everyone looked so sad. Dad said it was because their friends had been killed in the war; this day was to remember them. I wore a poppy then and I am glad that I did.
This week, other elderly men are standing in railway stations holding out boxes of poppies for passers-by. The poppy still means something to them and because of that, it matters to me as well, but its deeper significance of lament, remembrance, and the commitment called ‘never again’, is being lost. I think it is being killed off.
The nation’s official custodian of remembrance is the British Legion, which is now a very large, corporate-style charity. The poppy appeal is its main source of income. This year, girl band The Saturdays launched the appeal at a glitzy concert with their song Notorious: ‘I’ve been a bad girl / I’m a bad girl / I’m notorious’. A cloud of poppies fell from the ceiling while the crowd cheered. The Legion has extended the range of poppy jewellery this year. You can even play the Poppy Lottery and win £2,000 every week. The Head of Fundraising says he hopes to raise £37 million.
Displaying the poppy is no longer a matter of choice for some public figures and institutions. I have met TV presenters who are made to wear the poppy and producers who are made to make presenters wear it. I too have been asked by a TV crew to wear a poppy before an interview. I declined, not because the poppy is meaningless to me, but because I do not want to join the beaming ‘wear it with pride’ jamboree that has stolen its significance.
The poppy is a good example of an empty signifier: a symbol that only gains meaning from the story we give to it. To this end, we are offered the foggy rhetoric of noble warriors ‘who gave their life for their country’ and made ‘sacrifices for our freedom’. I have worked with veterans for a while and never heard them talk about war in this way. As one veteran put it to me: ‘Why do we call them “the fallen”? It’s not as if they just fell over.’ While I want to honour the courage of veterans who, amid the inhumane catastrophe of war, could still act out of humanity for others, these genteel euphemisms have more to do with forgetting than remembering.
When I was in my teens, Dad made me watch The World At War, possibly the best documentary series ever made. For one hour each week, he said I was not allowed to consume whatever ‘American crap’ was piped through on the other channel. I remember watching the footage of Coventry, Dresden, Hamburg and London on fire; soldiers dead in the mud of Burma; German and Russian soldiers frozen and starved to death in the snow; piles of bodies at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Although violence on such a scale is difficult for most of us to imagine, first in our remembrance has to be the abject tragedy of war – the overwhelming waste of human life. Harry Patch, the last veteran of the First World War, called it ‘organised murder’. The more fully we recognise war for the mass violence it is, the more it may provoke our deeper humanity to work for a just and practical peace, in which every person has and deserves the dignity of life.
This Sunday I will join a walk organised by Veterans for Peace, who do more than anyone else I know (and with a budget of nothing at all) to ensure we remember war properly. We will walk to the Cenotaph under a banner reading ‘Never Again’ and observe a time of silence.
David Gee of ForcesWatch
Veterans For Peace UK 
Let’s get the facts right!
The Royal British Legion and the Poppy that symbolises it stand as testimony to abject national failure!
The ‘heroes’ that the nation sends off to fight its wars (nowadays, wars of aggression – pure theft of resources and empire) are relentlessly and obsequiously celebrated as the object of national pride. Yet when they return home legless or otherwise disabled, unable to earn a living, they and their families must grovel for public charity in order to, at the absolute discretion of those who administer the Legion, enjoy some of the things that ordinary working men and their families can achieve.
Now let’s look at the figures.
In 2012 the RBL raised £290 Million.
Why is this not a government budget item? Why must it involve a national ritual of poppy-wearing and propaganda? Is it really done to obtain the money for returned soldiers and their families? Or is it some grotesque, national self-indulgence that exploits their circumstances?
I will say it! I think the latter!
That same year, 2012, the British government spent £694 Billion on “defence” spending.
The total revenue of the RBL was 0.04% of that figure.
QED
It’s a national disgrace for which every British citizen should be utterly ashamed.
Dear David,
Surely as a good Quaker, you may choose to wear the “White Poppy For Peace!”
The White poppy first appeared in 1933.
It is a symbol of humanity’s inability to resolve violent conflcits without resorting to killing and more violence. It is a sign of a commitment to work for a peaceable world where conflcits will be resolved without the use of force. The white poppy is meant to promote debate and rally support for opposition to war and its preparation.
Wearing a white poppy always gets people to stop and ask you what its meaning is and that gives one the opportunity to talk about peace and the futility of war.
Good luck with the match this Sunday.
In Peace, Fellowship and Friendship.
Millius.