Poppy(Asterisk)
I didn’t wear a poppy this year. It wasn’t a positive statement of something political. It was more that I couldn’t wear the badge I wanted to wear.
Poppy (Asterisk). Poppy*
The trouble with symbols is that they accrue meaning, and have one ‘ranking’ meaning at any one time, that overrides intention. Although each individual who wears a poppy has their own motivation, in society it is inevitably tied to the prevailing meaning. (For example, if I wear a cross necklace, if the prevailing meaning has become a fashion icon, it doesn’t matter what my faith-based motivation is — it will appear to partake in that other meaning, intended or not).
The poppy has accrued a lot of different meanings. I’ve heard arguments that the very origin was to nobilise the First World War, but I don’t recall in my early lifetime any ideas but honest remembrance (if a rather Anglo/white-centric one) of the suffering, death and horror of war.
I have worn a white poppy, when I was at high school and the old-fashioned headmaster made it very clear he saw not wearing one as not patriotic and not obedient. In a belief in peace but also a repudiation of the link between poppies and patriotism, I wore that white poppy and explained to myself to anyone who asked. (A deviating symbol invites said conversations, but not the mainstream one).
More so this year than those times at high school I’ve noticed discourses in the press and online about what it means to wear the poppy, and linking it to patriotism, to the sort of heroism we see in the movies, to rewriting the history of the Empire and of the nobility of war. I can’t maintain utter pacifism, but I see very few wars that were the better choice. Even when it is the only reluctant but desperately necessary choice, I can still think the Allies committed war crimes in the Second World War, that many people revise that war as a justification for forcing nationalistic conformity and racism (that was the Axis. That was who the Allies were fighting).
But when Tommy Robinson marches with Polish fascists calling for the expulsion of Jews and the Holocaust of Muslims, whilst wearing a poppy, how can I wear the symbol without clarification? When people online insist that to not wear the poppy is a betrayal of people fighting for political freedom? When the right wing press use it principally as a tool to excoriate the BBC? When Army Recruitment offices put up displays of it, or someone decorates a tank with it? How can I walk down a street without having some sign attached of what it means to me?
I want to remember the wars. I want to remember my family whose participation in them I know about. I want to remember my family whose participation I do not. I want to remember, as my grandfather asked me, the Malaysian Emergency, Britain’s Vietnam, and the other forgotten conflicts where people were sent and risked their lives (or had their lives risked). I want to remember the Holocaust, Verdun, the Somme, Dresden, Hiroshima, Stalingrad, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, Normandy, Dunkirk and the vast incomprehensible evil, horror and loss of those times. I think it essential not to forget.
But what if the poppy has become the icon of wilful forgetting?
What if the war memorial crosses start to proclaim In This Sign Conquer, rather than Lest We Forget?
So that’s why I wanted to share this. To invite us to consider how we remember war, its horror, the individual stories of courage and sacrifice, without giving way to glorifying the military or embracing nationalism. Join me in embracing the Poppy*
