Bah! The season of humbug and sycophancy is upon us. No, not the looming presence of Christmas but the even nearer Remembrance Day.
The whole thing is a politically correct sycophant’s delight. “Oh, you’re not wearing a poppy?” – so you’re not patriotic and don’t care about those who were sacrificed in two world wars. Work for TV? No poppy, no job, it seems – even football pundits are made to wear poppies! If those who were sacrificed died for anything it was to free us from such tyrannies.
I’m not unpatriotic. Nor am I ungrateful to those who were sacrificed: much as I abhor the idea of war I concede it is occasionally necessary. I likely wouldn’t go as far as my father: a conscientious objector in WWII, who played just as valuable a part in the war effort by working on the land and in hospitals. And certainly not as far as my grandfather: a conscientious objector in the Great War but who volunteered for the RAMC as a stretcher bearer at the front; probably a whole lot more gruesome, and no less dangerous, than the lot of any cannon fodder squaddie. (I’m much prouder of my grandfather for this than if he’d towed the line and been cannon fodder.) But Remembrance Day, and everything associated with it, makes me sick.
While we’re here let us remember three other things about Remembrance Day:
- Many of the fallen in the Great War were sacrificed by testosterone-fuelled and blinkered senior officers (eg. Kitchener) who could not see beyond the old horrors of trench warfare. Yes the Great War was a war of technological change (tanks, aircraft etc.) but stagnant trench warfare wasn’t, as I understand it, a necessity. The senior officers were aided and abetted by the politicians who needed the war to protect the oil interests which Britain had in the Arab world. (See AN Wilson, After the Victorians)
- Remembrance Day is all about the two so-called world wars; there is no remembrance that I’m aware of for the fallen of the Boer War, the Crimean War, the Falkland’s War or the Battle of Hastings.
- There is also precious little recognition of those who didn’t fight but still contributed much (like my father and grandfather), nor for the many civilian fallen. Did these people not contribute and sacrifice much too?
Yes by all means let those who wish remember the fallen. But, as with all belief systems, don’t ram it down other people’s throats after the style of so much of Christianity. (Oh, I thought Christianity was supposed to be anti-violence?!) What is maybe worse is that the whole charade is so backward looking; it focuses on the past and almost yearns for the “good old days” to return – forgetting that the “good old days” were once known as “these trying times”. It’s like someone grieving for their dead child or spouse: sooner or later one has to come to terms with it and move on; go forward. But with Remembrance Day we don’t move on – it has been set in stone as forever sacred and gets an extra coat of gilding every year with poppies going on sale ever earlier (it’s become Remembrance Month, not Remembrance Day).
Stop it! Let go! Especially now there are effectively no survivors of those who fought in the Great War. Sadly though I suspect to be able to let go of the Remembrance Day sycophancy we will have to kill off the British Legion first; now there’s an organisation looking for something to do if ever there was one, and in Remembrance Day they think they’ve hatched a golden goose egg. By all means remember if you need to, but cut the sycophancy and the tyranny; let’s move forward.
None of this means I’m not grateful to those who fought (and in many cases died) to give me the freedom to write this. I just find the whole thing very sick and would rather we look forward as most of the fallen (having secured us “a better life”) would I’m sure have wanted. So I will not be wearing a poppy, making a donation or observing two minutes silence, whatever the day. Remembrance should be a question of individual conscience not some politically-imposed public tyranny. Bah! Humbug!
