White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

And to show just how persecuted they are, they chose to launch their campaign from outside the House of Lords (one of only two legislative assemblies in the world – the other being in Iran – where religious leaders get guaranteed statutory representation), by bringing up again old stories about people being told that due to health and safety considerations they are not allowed to wear jewellery in the workplace:

“Their campaign highlights a series of cases involving Christians who have lost claims for discrimination.

They include Nadia Eweida – a British Airways worker from London – and Shirley Chaplin – an NHS nurse from Kenn, Exeter – who both lost high-profile discrimination claims over wearing crosses at work.

Lydia Playfoot, 19, from Horsham, West Sussex, was told by her school three years ago to remove her purity ring – symbolising chastity – or face expulsion. She took her case to the High Court but it ruled that her human rights were not breached by the school’s ban on jewellery”.

Now, notwithstanding the cross-wearing cases being cases where what was banned was the wearing of jewellery rather than the wearing of crosses, at least in those instances the people might have had reasonable grounds to put together some kind of case that they might have been able to argue for some kind of exception, similar to the ones Sikhs have argued in respect of turbans, bangles, and ceremonial daggers in certain circumstances.

But since when has it been a Christian duty to wear a ring to symbolise a teenager’s intention (rarely actually kept to, in fact) to not have sex before they get married? On that basis, practically anybody could make up any silly religious obligation – maybe that every Wednesday morning they are obliged at 10am to stand up and sing a certain hymn, wherever they happen to be, and cry ‘persecution’ when they are told by their manager to stop!

The fact is, the organisers of the ‘not ashamed’ campaign represent a certain minority strand of Christianity.

For them, as evangelicals, what constitutes being persecuted is not being stoned to death, being imprisoned, being spat at in the street, being prevented from taking an active role in civic life (as really does happen to Christians in certain middle-eastern societies). The evangelical world view has themselves as being entirely right, and anybody who doesn’t agree with them entirely as being entirely wrong – and anybody who stands in their way of proclaiming how entirely right they are and everybody else should be like them is a persecutor.

So thus, in my workplace – a local council building – where there is a very active Christian Fellowship group which meets fortnightly, and where my best friend wears a discrete but still quite visible cross to work each day, that isn’t enough for the evangelicals. For them, I suspect the likelihood that they would be prevented from placing evangelical Christian literature on everybody’s desk on a weekly basis would constitute ‘persecution’.

God help them if they ever did find themselves living and working in Yemen, for example.

Of course, there are some cases where Christians are discriminated agaist:

“We should not of course overlook those Christians in this country who do face discrimination. But the people discriminating against them are often other Christians.

For example, when certain groups lobbied successfully for religious exemptions from this year’s Equality Act, they effectively ensured that Christian organisations will be allowed to practice homophobia when recruiting staff. As most people applying for jobs with such organisations are Christians, those who are most likely to lose out as a result will be gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians. Christian Concern are certainly not standing up for the rights of those Christians”.

Indeed.

I’ve never been able to understand how certain sections of Christian
believers, including some politicians, can be so little worried by
people killing each other, but so exercised by people loving each
other.

“LONG-serving workers at Birmingham chocolate giant Cadbury are being rejected – because the company claims they cannot spell. Dozens of so-called ‘temporary’ staff, who have been employed at the Bournville factory for up to 14 years, were forced to sit literacy and numeracy tests and told not to return to their jobs if they failed”.

Basically, this story was about how Cadbury’s recently sacked a whole raft of ‘temporary’ (some of whom had been working there ‘temporarily’ for 14 years) staff for not being sufficiently literate or numerate; they were all forced to sit literacy tests, and those who failed the tests told not to bother coming back to work.

The excuse given by Cadbury’s for this was ‘health and safety’ – apparently not being able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and be able to calculate in one’s head the square root of 51 constitutes a health and safety risk in the modern confectionary industry. Whether this is the case or not, compare the behaviour of the modern Cadbury corporation with the beliefs and actions of its pioneers, George & Richard Cadbury. As well as the whole innovation of setting up the factory-in-a-garden and the building of Bournville Village in the first place, they were also prominent in the Adult School Movement, whereby workers were given paid time off twice a week to attend night school classes to improve their, erm, literacy and numeracy, and also allowed to study other subjects at the Day Continuation School (sited in what is now part of UCE BIAD, next to the Quaker meeting house).

I think this behaviour is worth a boycott of their products. It’s a shame really that doesn’t leave much left for a correct-thinking leftist liberal such as myself to eat in the chocolate department, what with also boycotting Nestl� and all for their socially irresponsible corporate behaviour. Looks like I’ll just be left with Green & Black’s.