Poppy

[rocket_scientist]

How many of you wear one at this time of year?

 

I don't personally. Never will.

[manc_don]

Personally, I do. Out of a mark of respect for those who have fallen. I discount recent conflicts though.

[RicoS321]

Personally, I do. Out of a mark of respect for those who have fallen. I discount recent conflicts though.

 

Do you have a badge under your poppy stating this?

[Tyrant]

You won't catch me wearing one.

 

If it was purely for those who fought/died in WWI and WWII I almost certainly would. It's fast becoming a symbol for right wing spastics.

[manc_don]

Do you have a badge under your poppy stating this?

 

No I don't, but I don't think I need to answer my opinions to all and sundry. I get where you're coming from but it's not something that bothers me.

[RicoS321]

No I don't, but I don't think I need to answer my opinions to all and sundry. I get where you're coming from but it's not something that bothers me.

 

Nor should it. Apart from the fact that wearing the poppy (unless you made your own) isn't about remembering the dead of WW1 and WW2, it's about raising money for charity to help veterans of all wars. In other words, you can't really wear the poppy without donating to the cause of more modern wars (all WW1ers are now deed, and WW2ers are dwindling, and the majority probably no longer in need of financial support) - they're financially inseparable. Not that I have a problem with giving money to soldiers of modrin war, even though I disagree with the acts of war in themselves. If poppies were free, I think that'd be better.

 

Also, and I'm not denying you're authenticity here Manc, it's become so polluted by folk who wear it to be seen to be wearing it, that I think it's lost any meaning. If I'm really honest, I don't feel any great emotion or sense of feeling toward the dead of any war before I was born - despite enjoying many a book about lots, and getting riled by some of the stories. I suppose I feel that - by wearing a poppy - I'm hijacking someone else's emotion. Like being at a funeral of someone you met once in the pub ten years ago.

[rocket_scientist]

It's gone full circle madness.

 

Sienna Miller got slated for NOT wearing one on Norton's show.

[Tyrant]

It's gone full circle madness.

 

Sienna Miller got slated for NOT wearing one on Norton's show.

 

 

It's the offence culture min. Folk canna fucking wait to be offended by something. I find it really fucking offensive.

[manc_don]

I don't think I'll buy it forever, Rico. Not sure when I'll stop but there'll definitely be a time. I'm guessing when as you rightly say that the WW2 veterans have passed. The fact that there have been a few conflicts since that I disagree with that are now supported by the purchases of them lessens the financial attachment I had to them, but I think I'd still wear one out of respect. Granted it will probably leave me open to criticism but everyone has their own ways of paying their respects.

[Jute]

Odd that some think that Soliders/airmen injured in conflicts since do not deserve support however as that includes soldiers who fought in Korea (some on national service so basically conscripts) and Falklands. Are they less deserving of financial support if injured?

 

 

[Goldie03]

I read 2 brilliant articles online today about the poppy debate

 

Earlier this year I went to Hamburg with my daughters to visit my uncle's war grave - he died 3 weeks before the end of the second world war age 22.

 

So I sometimes wear a poppy to remember him and my great uncle who was killed in France a couple of months before the first world war

 

I agree with what Manc said but this year I'm not getting one - I was actually thinking there should be red & white ones - to show remembrance for the 2 world wars but also that it should be a symbol of peace

 

 

[rocket_scientist]

There's a number of issues here. Isn't there always?

 

WWI and II included many citizens, conscripts to the cause. The "wars" since have been trained squaddies, citizens who chose to take the state pay for that role.

 

The survivors were scarred for life, the suffering they endured all over the world - notable examples being the Burma Railway and the Jap PoW camps - including watching their own dying right next to them, often in the most brutal manners.

 

Remembering the conscripts is valid and noble. Remembering the war dead from Iraq and Afghanastan equally so. They were "fighting" in our name after all.

 

But there are fundamental differences between then and now. Not just the composition of the armed forces and therefore the war dead but the justness of the fight. The Falklands may have been the last British cause, however justified that may have been, a nothing island off South America but the conflicts since where UK people have died are all actions in support of the U.S. global hegemony project, one that is doomed to fail because of its core unjustness.

 

What fucks me off is the rhetoric when Cameron the Cunt bangs on about them being noble and brave etc., the same shite insincere sentiments when he talks of the hard working families etc.

[rocket_scientist]

The scale is another huge difference.

 

Millions died in the great wars. Hundreds and a few thousand in the ungreat conflicts.

 

It's like Cameron by lauding the war dead makes no distinction and therefore seeks to validate the unjust and illegal wars by including the relatively tiny number of recent war dead with the gargantuan numbers of private citizens conscripted to die fighting Nazi Germany.

 

I'm no war historian but surely those UK citizens who died in the Far East were only there to support "the special relationship" after the Japs hit the septics at Pearl Harbour? A special relationship that we've been paying for ever since, not just in cold hard billions of cash but with our integrity and our souls.

[RicoS321]

Odd that some think that Soliders/airmen injured in conflicts since do not deserve support however as that includes soldiers who fought in Korea (some on national service so basically conscripts) and Falklands. Are they less deserving of financial support if injured?

 

Nobody suggested they didn't deserve support. My suggestion is that they deserve different support (from the state for a start). That the two need to be separated. Given that I don't know anyone who died in WW1/2 - my grandparents were involved in WW2 in some capacity - I see remembrance as a tool to remind us that wars don't need to, an shouldn't, happen. In fact, that was what I was taught at school. As Rocket suggests, the poppy is effectively hijacked for use in later - avoidable - wars. Hijacked by a duplicitous prime minister (Cameron, and Blair before obviously) who is simultaneously stoking up support for a bombing campaign in Syria.

 

Basically, I don't think it's enough just to remember. All that remembrance money going to monuments and funds to help the continuous stream of needless deaths is just perverse. The remembrance funds should be used to prevent more war - that would be the best legacy of WW1/2 and the best way to stop future deaths. Surely that's the point in the poppy? Could you imagine us going to war in Iraq if the previous ten years' poppy funds had gone into anti-war lobbying? Or, through education, we had an armed forces who were able to stand up and question the conflict that they're being asked to fight in; a mass conscientious objection, because they have been empowered to do so. That'd be worth buying a poppy for.

[rocket_scientist]

Jon Snow doesn't wear a poppy, a rare if not the only TV person who doesn't.

[RicoS321]

Jon Snow doesn't wear a poppy, a rare if not the only TV person who doesn't.

 

He also has a history of being a serious journalist and can think for himself unlike yer average news reader.

[makembounce]

Anyone who doesn't wear a poppy should be shot and then dismembered.

 

If it wasn't for our war heroes we'd be speaking Achtung Baby.

 

Schnell, schnell everybody into the shower.

[minijc]

I don't wear one, might do next year when it's a bit more hipster.