Poppies: Patriotism and pyromania

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Friday November 11, 2011 19:33

by pat c

James Turley writes about the criminalisation of those who have burned poppies and elaborates on the imperialist agenda behind the whole remembrance charade. Those who fell should be remembered but not to glorify imperialism.

It is that time of year, again, when the world is colonised by plastic poppies. No establishment luminary will be seen in a public forum without one of these slightly naff trinkets pinned to his or her lapel; and thousands more people around the country will likewise sport the designated symbol of remembrance for the war dead.... .

More troubling is the fate of three Northern Ireland teenagers, about whom little is known except their ages - two are 17 and one 16 - and that they were pulled up before Coleraine magistrates court, charged with ‘incitement to hatred’. The 16-year-old also faces charges relating to ‘improper use’ of a social networking site, thanks to his publication of damning visual evidence of the ‘crime’ on Facebook....

Remember, remember ... the imperialist slaughter

The poppy appeal is not simply about commemorating the dead, however. It is about our dead - it is about a hundred years, give or take, of British history, during which ‘our brave boys’ (and girls) have been massacred in two truly apocalyptic wars, as well as picked off in countless relatively minor scuffles provoked by the decay of the empire.

The poppy ideology is, in fact, a bait-and-switch; the very real generalised empathy of the population to those who paid for capital’s rapacious drive to war with their lives is mobilised to support the very same institution - the state - which feeds the meat into the mincing machine. Like all ideology, it is participatory: the annual ritual of pinning the poppy to your lapel seals the compact, just as a few words of mumbo-jumbo transubstantiates cheap wine into the blood of Christ. The British Legion’s orgy of emotional blackmail, which complements the whole thing - pictures of gravely wounded soldiers and bereaved families all over the tube - does not hurt, either....