COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY HADLEY FREEMAN IN THE
GUARDIAN
‘Even the humble poppy
can't escape the culture wars”
First, the poppy is not so humble, and it is most certainly
not innocent.
It symbolizes the virtually meaningless deaths of 20,000,000
people in the Great War.
They died for little more than deciding which branch of a
royal family would dominate on the continent of Europe. All the other claims
and slogans are just words.
The war settled so little and did it so badly, that the
whole business arose again in just over twenty years.
The poppy further symbolizes the deaths of more than another
50,000,000 just a bare quarter century later in the greatest human catastrophe
in all history.
Culture wars? That is a very dated fad concept, and indeed a
rather tiresome one.
The fact is that it is the normal reaction of the human mind
to gradually forget about terrible things.
The annual wearing of poppies works desperately against
that, while to a certain extent glorifying war and actually kind of prettifying
it.
Forgetting is just a practical response to allow life to go
on.
Deliberately trying to keep terrible things alive is simply
perverse, if not morbid.
The World Wars obviously will always be in our history
books, and that is where they should be.
A century, just about, after the end of WWI, poppies are
overdue to become history themselves.
For anyone who believes the myth that by remembering in this
fashion we can in effect make it so it will never happen again, all I can say
is that is utter foolishness.
The Great War itself proves that. Just over twenty years
later, Europe was at it again, and in an even bloodier war.
And just look back in recent history with George Bush's and
Tony Blair's illegal and brutal invasion of Iraq.
Annual poppy wearing did nothing to prevent a horror in
which about a million died, a couple of million were made refugees, tens of
thousands were left shattered, and poisons like depleted uranium dust were
generously deposited to keep killing for years ahead - all in the destruction
of what had been one of the Arab world's most advanced societies.
