In Memoriam
Post date: 12-Nov-2010 15:32:31
As a child, long before I testified to the Islamic faith, I wore a paper poppy throughout October and stood in silence as the boom of cannon blasts signalled the start and finish of an obligatory silence in November. However, when I had a choice like many in the 60s I put money in the collector’s box but stopped wearing the poppy which had come to be seen as a symbol of nationalism and a glorification of war. Around that time the cannons stopped booming and when the 11th fell on a weekday only the Alf Garnetts, or so they were portrayed, anachronistically stopped work, shopping or playing. After all in that modern world the dead were dead, most of the begging disabled ex-soldiers that I saw as a child had died and the survivors were well cared for by the National Health Service. This remained the mood of the nation, fuelled by the callous nature of youth, until Tony Blair decided to grab his place in history and provided the nation with a fresh supply of war-graves, widows and amputees.
Armistice day commemorations were conceived in the 1920s as a civil response to the cathartic shock and lingering horror of the soul-numbing slaughter of WW I. Government quickly endorsed these ceremonies because focussing on individual loss diverted attention from the priests of imperialism who had orchestrated the mass sacrifices on the muddy pyramids of Europe with an efficiency that would have surprised the Aztec and Inca. Millions of sacrificed warriors who had been given the choice of a certain and shameful death before a friendly firing-squad or the possibility of surviving the enfilading machine-guns of the enemy with honour. The need for some religious recognition of so much death was reluctantly added piecemeal to Armistice Day with Christian services of remembrance being held on Remembrance Sunday which replaced Armistice Day completely for many years until the Blair Government needed to revive it.
Generations of graffiti were removed from war memorials (why aren’t they called victim memorials?), drunkards were moved away from them and a woman was taken to court for urinating upon one after other indecencies nearby. All very much within the British tradition of dealing with the victims of war since ‘Remembrance’ as a shared public experience is very modern. Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff is far more typical of tradition when he sneers at his cannon fodder scarecrow army and asks “Honour, who hath it? He who died a yestern.” So what are we looking at when we see a paper poppy burning? We saw a group of louts, acting within the British tradition of loutishness and bad behaviour, attacking something that represents, for them, the ‘establishment’. Nothing new under the Sun that never set upon the British Empire so who did it offend? Not the fallen who did not die to make the poppy sacred. The aging former part-time hippies who wore military decorations as bling? Perhaps the guilt of not remembering what was done by the dead and to them has come full circle and, we have found someone gross enough to blame for our standing in silence as the true horrors happened.