No More

Today on the TV you can watch a live performance around the Cenotaph, because it's that time of the year. You will watch, as if it were spectacle, the current elderly representative of a monarchy hopelessly entwined with the fascists of Europe. You will see politicians, who claim to represent us, lay wreaths of plants at the foot of a statue before returning to the business of depriving the heirs to the legacy of those they just 'remembered' and selling arms to other despots because profit.

So watching this morally bankrupt spectacle serves what purpose? Are we so far gone that we cannot see the rampant hypocrisy on display?

This spectacle will be, as it has been for decades now, repeated up and down the country. The great and the good, who otherwise care little for the lives of people around them, will participate in this process. For the most part they will be throwing their weight behind a moral ritual rather than living out any lesson one might learn from the sordid business of war. That lesson being: no more.

A simple lesson that is quietly ignored because the moral ritual absolves one of doing more. It's a process. It's also a process that is deeply embedded into the structure of our society: the ruling class demands it of us while dressing up kids in 'future soldier' t shits and having 'armed forces day' events where bouncy castles sit next to howitzers.

This is no longer a day to memorialise and educate people on the only lesson the survivors of the first world war wanted us to learn - "never again" - it is a tawdry festival designed to shore up support for the ruling class and its agenda. The British army - as an institution - isn't a heroic bastion of freedom, it is a reflection of the racism, self important superiority, and thuggery embedded in the establishment. When we conscript children - for that is what the 'recruitment' of a 16 year old is - we do not represent anything positive.

And you'll note that the same ruling class suppressed, through filibuster, an attempt to allow those same people the right to vote. This is so emblematic of the reality: they want your blood, they don't want you to vote with it. A nation can bleed all so the ruling elite can dine in luxury another day. A ruling elite that supported and endorsed men like Hitler when it suited them.

Never is the brutality of the ruling elite more apparent than in the casual threat that one must not discuss these issues at the time most apposite to do so. The message of the poppy is buried in the trite cliché trotted out by our masters that "now isn't the time". Just like every time there is a horrific mass shooting (using weapons of war) in the US and NRA apologists decry any attempt to speak out, right there and then, as being disrespectful. It is alleged to be disrespectful to the 'fallen', or those who 'gave their lives', to question how remembrance is now conducted.

That is disrespectful.

What are we remembering? Again the 'fallen' - nobody fell, they were butchered; their lives tossed aside callously and quickly. Again they 'gave their lives'; I'm sure they didn't! This is propaganda. It is an attempt to both pretty up the brutality of armed conflict, and to show the place the soldiery has in the eyes of the ruling class. Their lot is to lay down their lives, only it's sold as 'in the name of freedom'. What freedom: poppy fascism has risen to absurd levels as to render the poppy itself vacuous.

Or perhaps they mean the freedom for people to live under economic tyranny such that economic conscription is a reality. Now we have armed forces days and the presence of the military in schools. A creeping normalisation of war.

These are not the realities we are to remember. Instead we are taught to 'remember' as a nebulous concept. For some there will be a terrible reality; a loved on who never came home from a theatre that should never have existed. A child deprived of a parent. Such a waste. For most of us it will simply be the notion itself; we 'remember' because we are taught to. Giving thanks to some notion in the name of a freedom that doesn't exist because we are still oppressed by a ruling class that created the mess to begin with.

Al enshrined in a small plastic poppy that will be tossed in a trash can a week later. Joining the detritus of life that is slowly choking the world. Meanwhile the institution of the army - despite the best, misguided, intentions of some who join up - will continue to be a force for destruction in the world.

For me, the poppy is lost. The sentiment is real. No more war. But by wearing it that sentiment and my autonomy to voice it will be stolen to give succour to causes I abhor. Well, no more. Do not trivialise the sacrifice of those who genuinely fought for honourable intention against those no worse than our ruling class by giving in to their propaganda.