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.  

She Flows Lava: On Why the Volcanic Feminism of Betty Hirst is More Effusive Than Dada

Heide Hatry: She Pees Fire (2023)  

heideihatry.com

 

 

I like Heide Hatry. And I like this image; it's always a pleasure to be reacquainted with Betty Hirst. But I really hate the new title assigned to the picture - She Pees Fire. 

 

That might work on an ad alerting women to the signs and symptoms of a urinary tract infection and in which humour is used to counter embarrassment concerning the body, but, in my view, puns should have no place in the world of art [1].  

The photo appears in the latest issue of Maintenant, an annual journal featuring contemporary Dada writing and art [2]. 

 

Unfortunately, I have concerns with this publication and its claim to provide provocative outsider ideas as Dada has done since its inception. For it seems to me that Dada - like punk - was materially embedded in the politics and culture of its time. 

 

To vainly attempt to appear avant-garde by invoking the spirit of something that erupted over a hundred years ago, just seems a little foolish and mistaken to me. It turns Dada into just another -ism (i.e., a practice and an ideology), rather than an Event, (i.e., something unique and chaotic). 

 

I might be mistaken, but I thought the artists involved with Dada during the years 1916-24 aimed to produce works that were completely original; to eradicate all forms of imitation, not found a new school or a tradition in which their ideas and techniques were simply learned and passed on.        

 

Anyway, leaving this debate aside for now, the new issue of Maintenant (#17) argues that war and peace are two-sides of the same coin and that what anti-war protestors should be demanding is not simply a cessation of all military conflicts, but a peacefire. 

 

By this, I think they mean a deconstruction of the binary that forges war and peace into a relationship of co-dependence and obliges us to think of the latter in purely negative terms; i.e., as the absence of war, or the temporary suspension of hostilities.  

 

Heide Hatry's She Pees Fire is a play on this term, peacefire, which, of course, is a play on the term ceasefire - so we have here a double-layered pun. But, as I've said, whilst mildly amusing, it's not a title I care for. 

 

I also fear it detracts from the power of the image, which, to me, reveals the volcanic potentiality of womanhood; she isn't so much pissing fire, as unleashing Hell - i.e., sending a stream of molten lava flowing into the phallocratic world order from out of the bowels of her being. 

 

It's certainly an effusive feminist image, but, ironically, I'm not sure it works to promote an anti-war message. Nor is it particularly Dadaist in character [3]; for it seems to me laden with symbolic meaning, rather than being nonsensical in character (i.e., it's an art-utterance, not just an absurdist prank intended to shock). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm all in favour of paronomasia if and when it is itself raised to the level of an art form, but I'm extremely wary of puns (and the kind of people who make puns); not because I find them threatening or seek a level of control over the meaning of language, as John Pollack, a communications expert and author of The Pun Also Rises (2012), claims, but because I think they are an easy and lazy form of wordplay - neither witty, nor particularly clever, and certainly not subversive.  

[2] Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, Issue 17, ed. Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges, (Three Rooms Press, July 2023). 

      For more information and to order your copy direct from the publishers, click here. Alternatively, British readers may find it easier to go to Amazon UK: click here. 

 

[3] One might remind readers that, for all of its supposed radicalism and revolutionary spirit, Dada was not without its problematic aspects, including what might be construed as misogynist tendencies. See Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, (The MIT Press, 1999).   

 

 

Is Anything Really Worth Fighting For?

"I know that for me, the war is wrong. 

I know that, if the [Russians] wanted my little house, 

I would rather give it them than fight for it: 

because my little house is not important enough to me." [1]

 

I. 

 

I said in a recent post with reference to the current situation in Ukraine, that it might have been a wiser diplomatic move on Zelenskyy's part to have attempted to appease Putin - making whatever concessions were needed in order to avoid war - rather than have flirted with the West and indicated his desire to not only join the EU, but NATO.  

Still, it's a bit late for such a policy now that Russia has invaded and major Ukranian cities, including the captal, are being bombarded even as I write. And I'm aware also that appeasement is a dirty word in the political lexicon these days - not least here in the UK, following our experiences in the 1930s with Hitler (give him an inch ...)

 

However, there's really no need for the Ukranians to martyr themselves and I would advise that they capitulate and seek terms with Russia as soon as possible. For there's no shame in surrendering to a massively superior force and, again as I said in the post prior to this one, discretion is the greater part of valour.

 

I don't think this makes me a coward; for it often takes much greater courage to live and refuse to die. 

 

And neither does it make me a pacifist in the conventional sense: I don't have a moral objection to war and certainly don't subscribe to an ideal of peace, love, and the brotherhood of man. I am simply of the view that, in this case, non-violent resistance and civil disobedience makes better strategic sense than armed conflict and self-sacrifice.  

 

 

II. 

 

My thinking in this matter has not, then, been shaped by the likes of white worms such as Bertrand Russell and Mahatma Gandhi. 

 

Rather, it's been influenced by D. H. Lawrence, who, whilst writing in favour of combat in the old sense - "fierce, unrelenting, honorable contest" [2] - abhors the thought of war in the modern machine age; "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon fodder" [3]. 

It's a beautiful thing, says Lawrence, for a man to die "in a flame of passionate conflict [...] for death is to him a passional consummation" [4] and his soul can rest in peace. But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a kanapki is something obscene and monstrous. 

 

Thus, the Ukranians should refuse to die in such a manner and refuse to fight an abstract invisible enemy whom they will never meet face-to-face on the battlefield. If the Russians are that desperate to occupy territories in the East of Ukraine, then let them ...   

 

Ultimately, it might be the case that the only thing really worth fighting for, tooth and nail, is not your spouse, your children, your country, your fellow citizens, your money, your property, or even your life, but that bit of inward peace, that allows you to reflect with a certain insouciance ... [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell (9 July 1916), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.625-628. Lines quoted are on p. 626. 

      I have slightly modified what Lawrence writes, replacing the word 'Germans' with 'Russians'. In this crucial statement of Lawrence's views on what is and is not worth fighting for, he continues:

 

"If another man must fight for his house, the more's the pity. But it is his affair. To fight for possessions, goods, is what my soul will not do. Therefore it will not fight for the neighbour who fights for his own goods.

      All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won't pretend any. Neither will I take part in the scrimmage, to help my neighbour. It is his affair to go in or stay out, as he wishes." [626]

 

      See note 5 below for a reference to a later poem in which Lawrence returns to this theme. 

      And cf. with what Birkin says in chapter two of Women in Love when asked whether he would fight for his hat should someone wish to steal it off his head; "'it is open to me to decide, which is a greater loss to me, my hat, or my liberty as a free and indifferent man'". See the Cambridge edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, p. 29.         

 

[2] 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), pp. 158-59. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 159.

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] I am paraphrasing here from Lawrence's verse 'What would you fight for?' in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 431.

War - What is it Good For?

 

Russian tank entering eastern Ukraine (24-02-22)

Photo by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos

 

 

Well, if nothing else it reminds us that violence is one of those things which, as Byung-Chul Han says, never disappears; not even in its negative, fully visible and all too real form, which, as the Ukranians are now discovering, is "explosive, massive, and martial" [1]. 

 

Those who (naively) believed that the age of military conflict was over have been given a brutal wake up call by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Armed Forces. 

 

The invasion of Ukraine may only prove to be a temporary set back to the process of globalisation and the utopian dream of a world without borders, etc., but, on the other hand, maybe this would be a good time to reconsider violence in all its externalised macrophysical manifestations ...

 

 

Notes 

 

I know that many readers will think of the No. 1 single by Edwin Starr (Motown, 1970) when they read the title of this post, but what they might not know - unless they happened to work at Pendant Publishing back in the mid-1990s - is that this was originally the title of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1869) and it's this little known fact that I was recalling here. 

 

[1] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (The MIT Press, 2018), p. vii.