The ‘Poppy Olympics’: How we have lost our way when it comes to remembrance
Nemanja Matic is a midfielder for Manchester United. He’s also Serbian and has deep-rooted traumatic memories of his home village being bombed by NATO forces as part of the wider offensive against what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999. He’s also currently front-page news, not for his sporting prowess or the usual antics for which footballers so often occupy column inches. Instead, he has been forced to explain his decision not to wear a poppy on his football strip for a weekend match against Bournemouth.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. As quickly as Halloween comes and goes, ‘poppy season’ begins in earnest, with all the misinformed ‘pride’ and self-righteousness that has long since largely replaced the dignified remembrance of yesteryear. Cue the exaggerated outrage of the mob on Twitter at a newsreader daring to not wear a red poppy, the relentless slew of exhortations by DM to ‘keep the poppy going for our veterans’ and the fatal lack of understanding of the causes of the catastrophically destructive conflicts of the past.
100 years since the end of World War I, free-thinkers find themselves held hostage to those vying to become frontrunners in the annual Poppy Olympics – the Poppylympics if you will.
So pervasive is the borderline bullying of the poppy extremists that even non-Brits dare not shun the red flower. Tune into ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ on a Saturday night and witness how the professional dancers, regardless of their country of origin, are all bedecked with poppies of various sizes and varying degrees of bling, presumably, in many cases, because ‘it’s just what ‘we’ do’. The fundamental question we should be asking ourselves is this: is blind ‘respect’ actually all that respectful? Does it truly honour the fallen to hawkishly perpetuate a distorted, jingoistic version of the past while cajoling those who, for whatever reason, choose not to wear a red poppy?
For many years now, I have opted for a white poppy. In doing so, I seek to honour the memory of all who have lost their lives in armed conflict, while promoting the pursuit of peace as the most desirable path for humanity. In rejecting an excessively nationalistic perspective on remembrance, I am better able to take a broader view of the legacy of war; after all, were the civilians of obliterated Dresden any less innocent than those of Coventry?
The issue of how we commemorate our war dead goes to the very heart of our national psyche and the consequent collective decisions we take. One hundred years after the end of World War I, there remain people who lament what they perceive to be our diminished status as a nation; by this, they mean the process of decolonisation and 20th-century European unity that has rightly seen the disappearance of Empire and the rise of international cooperation. This worryingly revisionist interpretation of British history glosses over the machinations of global powers vying for dominance that unleashed the unprecedented horrors of the First World War and instead glorifies the deaths of hundreds of thousands of largely working class young men on the battlefield in a turbo-romanticised rendition of remembrance that does a disservice to the fallen.
The tragic truth of the matter is that remembrance has largely been hijacked by the sort of thought fascists that we like to believe we defeated in the conflicts we recall at this time of year. A red poppy on the lapel (or your car grill for that matter) does not in and of itself demonstrate the bearer’s respect for the war dead any more than the absence of one is an expression of disrespect, nonchalance or ingratitude. Frankly, the stubborn obsession of many Brits with the UK’s history of conquest, empire and dominance makes us the geopolitical equivalent of an emotionally stunted child and it’s high time we stopped allowing this warped lens to dictate our present and future.
Follow Lee on Twitter (@xixianykus)
