Remembrance Sunday is not a Culture War. It’s about Never Again
In recent times Remembrance Sunday has been extended to include a range of imperial wars Britain has started or fought in. Certainly the working class soldiers who signed up because there were no other jobs deserve to be remembered.
However in also in recent times Remembrance Sunday seems to have been extended over weeks and become part of a Culture War.
I often have worn a poppy on the Sunday (reasons below) but I don’t now. It’s not about silly culture war games-see Laurence Fox, it’s about fascism, a matter of life and death to numbers. I take that seriously and always have done. The poppy obsessives don’t.
Interestingly the most pointed comment I’ve heard on this came from Alan Franks the vicar in the Archers who noted that he wore a poppy because it represented the fight against fascism
The below dates from a few years ago now but remains relevant.
I’m no fan of wars (although not a pacifist) but there are reasons to remember those that have taken place (and those that still are). Not the politicians and generals who order them and promote them but the ‘poor bloody infantry’ who have to fight them. Sometimes there is a good reason for the fight and a good reason to remember it
Simon Jenkins* no doubt has a point about an obsession with the second world war and Nazis to the exclusion of other history – that of colonialism and imperial wars for example. It is hardly time, though, to forget all about the second world war. My late father fought at Monte Cassino in 1944 and saw some of his comrades die there. A lifelong socialist, he would invariably wear a poppy on Remembrance Sunday. He wasn’t interested in Tory flag-waving. His concern, as when he was to be found on Anti-Nazi League protests in his later years, was to make sure that the industrial scale of murder represented by the Holocaust was both never forgotten and never repeated.
Keith Flett
Guardian 10th November 2017
*Simon Jenkins piece
Leave a Reply