A Post for Poppy Day

A remembrance poppy [1] 

 

 

One of the things I don't like about the poppy-wearing period in the UK [2] is that it has become overly politicised and increasingly something that feels invested with the bullying spirit of the mob. 

 

The writer Phineas Harper is entirely correct to say that red-poppy propaganda also elides the horror of conscription and thus contributes to a "collective amnesia that sanitises history" [3], disrespecting those who were coerced into military service (i.e., forced to fight and die for king and country). 

 

Further, it fails to acknowledge that many of those Brits killed during the Second World War, for example, were not members of the armed forces but civilians. 

 

In fact, along with the 384,000 soldiers killed in combat there was a civilian death toll of 70,000, "largely due to German bombing raids during the Blitz: 40,000 civilians died in the seven-month period between September 1940 and May 1941, almost half of them in London" [4].

 

Finally, like Harper - and as mentioned - I find that the tone of the national conversation around remembrance has significantly altered; less mournful and more jingoistic:   

 

"Remembrance should be a serious, sober, freely chosen tradition, not a cosmetic game of frogmarched performative allegiance. Staged patriotic fervour has nothing to do with sincerely honouring the memory of [the fallen ...] and, perversely, risks tipping remembrance into unreflective sabre-rattling bravado - glorifying war rather than mourning it." [5] 

 

In part, this drift from serious forms of remembrance into patriotic parody is due to the fact that those who actually experienced the horrors of the First World War are now dead and even those who lived during the period 1939-45 are now far fewer in number and any elderly ex-servicemen - as we used to call them before the Americanisation of our language [6] - who do dare to go against the official red poppy line are discreetly ignored or patronised on breakfast TV [7].  

 

Does this mean I'm a pacifist, or that I'm going to be pinning a white poppy on my lapel? 

 

No: I don't have a moral objection to war per se. But, for the reasons outlined above, I do find wearing a red poppy problematic. 

 

And, like D. H. Lawrence, I do detest the thought of war in the modern machine age; "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon fodder" [8] and I wouldn't want to be seen to be lending support to this in any way.  

 

Notes

 

[1] Made by disabled ex-servicemen and sold in the UK and other Commonwealth countries in support of the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal, this artificial flower - inspired by the poem 'In Flanders Fields' (John McCrae, 1915) - is worn in memory of military personnel who died in war.   

 

[2] This period lasts from All Souls' Day (2 Nov) until either Armistice Day (11 Nov), or Remembrance Sunday if that happens to fall on a later date (12-14 Nov). 

 

[3] Phineas Harper, 'I wear a white poppy because Remembrance Day's staged fervour does little to honour my grandad', in The Guardian (8 Nov 2024): click here.  

 

[4] I'm quoting from the UK Parliament report into military casualties and the civillian death toll during the two World Wars, available online: click here.   

      

[5] Phineas Harper, The Guardian (8 Nov 2024): click link in note 2 above.   

 

[6] This is another thing that irritates me; the fact that commentators in the media and figures from various official bodies and institutions are increasingly using the term veteran, rather than the traditional British term ex-serviceman. 

      The irony of adopting an Americanism to refer to our former military personnel seems lost on them; one suggests that they click here to watch an amusing Sacha Baron Cohen sketch from Da Ali G Show, season 3, episode 2 (HBO, 2004).   

 

[7] I'm referring to the case of Alec Penstone, the 100-year-old ex-serviceman who appeared on Good Morning Britain (ITV, 7 Nov 2025) and who, when invited to give a message to viewers watching at home, said that the sacrifice made by his friends and comrades wasn't worth it as the country is in a worse state - with less freedom - now than when he fought for it. One of the interviewers, Adil Ray, clearly embarrassed by this, asked him 'What do you mean by that?' as if he had said the unsayable or was so old and senile that he didn't know what he was saying. To watch the interview on YouTube, click here.   

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 159.  

      Those who are interested in knowing more about Lawrence's rather romantic understanding of combat in the heroic age before it became an affair entirely of machines and abstraction - when men still possessed natural courage and fought up close and personal with their enemy and didn't kill from a distance by simply pulling a trigger or pressing a button - might like to see the post titled 'In Praise of Fighters: At the Gym and on the Battlefield with D. H. Lawrence' (18 Sept 2020): click here.  

Notes on Charlie Chaplin's Closing Speech to 'The Great Dictator'

Charlie Chaplin as the Jewish Barber and 

Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1941)

 

 

I. 

 

There's probably only one thing worse in the modern political imaginary than a great dictator and that's an evil tyrant. But even the former is bad enough in the eyes of those for whom power should belong to the people and not held by a single individual who, it is believed, will be invariably (and absolutely) corrupted by its possession. 

 

Any positive associations that the term may have had were lost once and for all during the 20th-century. Thanks to figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao [1], dictators are now viewed by those within the liberal-democratic world as violent megalomaniacs who oppress their peoples and bring death and chaos in their wake [2]. 

Having said that, it seems they can also inspire laughter as well as moral hand-wringing and hypocrisy, as illustrated by the 2012 film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, The Dictator (dir. Larry Charles) and, seventy years prior, the equally unfunny work of satirical slapstick that many regard as Chaplin's masterpiece, The Great Dictator (1940) ...

 

 

II.  

I don't know why, but I've never liked Charlie Chaplin: this despite the fact that, according to Lawrence, "there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face, than there ever was in Valentino's" [3]. For even if this gleam of something pure makes beautiful, that doesn't mean it makes good and true; and it certainly doesn't guarantee to make humorous. 

 

Chaplin is mostly remembered for playing an anonymous tramp figure - a character whom I regard as the antithesis of the bum as hobo-punk given us in the songs of Haywire Mac; for whereas the latter celebrates his life on the road and railways, the former is keen to improve his lot and dreams of one day living a comfortable middle-class existence.

 

But in the feature-length anti-fascist film of 1941 - which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in - he plays both the nameless Jewish Barber and the Great Dictator of Tomainia, Adenoid Hynkel (a parody of Adolf Hitler that some find hilarious and uncannily accurate, others, like me, a bit lazy in that it perpetuates the idea that the latter was just a buffoon and an imposter).

 

Probably the most famous scene is the five-minute speech that Chaplin delivers at the end of the film [4]. Dropping his comic mask and appearing to speak directly to his global audience, he makes an earnest plea for human decency and human progress, encouraging people to rise up against dictators and unite in peace and brotherhood, whatever their race or religion. 

The thing with such romantic moralism is that it flies in the face of history and relies heavily on emotion and rhetoric for its effect, rather than argument - ironically, in much the same manner as fascist propaganda. 

 

"We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery We don't want to hate and despise one another." 

 

Is there any evidence for this ultra-optimistic belief that the "hate of men will pass"? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

I would dispute also that our cleverness has made us "hard and unkind" and what we need is to think less and feel more; again, such irrationalism and anti-intellectualism is ironically central to fascism.

 

Perhaps most interestingly, Chaplin echoes Oliver Mellors with his diatribe against "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts". But even Mellors knew that such people now make up the vast bulk of humanity, not just those who govern; that it is the fate of mankind to become-cyborg with rubber tubing for guts and legs made from tin; motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes sucking the vitality out of us all [5]. 

 

Chaplin rightly foresaw that the age of the great dictators would soon pass - in Western Europe at least - but has the triumph of liberal democracy resulted in a life that is free and beautiful and where science and progress "lead to all men's happiness" ...? 

 

Again, I don't think so. 

 

And, like Mellors, I increasingly find comfort not in the dream of a new human future, but in a post-human world: 

 

"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species, and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else." [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post on these three great dictators (and one mad poet), click here. 

 

[2] Unless they happen to be allies, in which case they are said to be strong leaders providing stability in their region of the world, but we won't get into that here.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.

 

[4] Click here to play this scene (I would suggest having a sick bag at the ready). Even some fans of Chaplin's concede that this spoils the film as a work of art. 

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 218. 

      This is similar to how Rupert Birkin felt in Women in Love; see pp. 127-128 of the Cambridge Edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Penetration, 'Don't Dictate', (Virgin Records, 1977): click here for the studio version and here for a fantastic live performance of the song at the Electric Circus, Manchester (August 1977).