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.
