Today is Remembrance Day. The local God outpost is livestreaming their event. How very 2020. I won't be watching, what's the point? I don't wear a poppy. Why; because I don't support the war machine.
It's just like clapping for the NHS. Meaningless. What does it mean for me to 'remember'? I don't know anyone that was involved in war and what am I meant to remember? It seems like propaganda; we are annually envied to condition ourselves into believing in noble causes and justice. But that's not what happens in wars. What happens is people lives and communities are destroyed; perverted by ideologies and divided. We learn nothing precisely because all we ever 'remember' is the narrative the elite sells us while we compete for who's got the biggest poppy.
Tell you what: I'll commemorate the day we end war. It wasn't enough when they came back from the trenches with the brutal message 'never again' many shocked into silence, keeping the depth of the horror form their families. The government didn't care then, Germany was eviscerated and fascists rose to power, we know what happened. But they'll always reference ww2 as the just war, while ignoring the context and the course of events. Hitler was a vile monster, one whom the British ruling class didn't have a problem with (while conducting their own horrible imperialist actions) for the longest time. But my enemy isn't the German working class; it's the ruling class of all countries. All of whom are happy to bomb or sell guns and death to tyrants, exporting it globally.
That's what the poppy represents. Inevitably. Look, I get it. You have a grandfather or great grandfather who fought. You want to honour him. That's fine. But that's a private thing. What we have with the poppy affair is an industry; one intended to prop up the war machine. One that allows the government to avoid caring for those whose flesh it chews up on foreign shores to fight in its name. Not my name. I don't consent to your warmongering and your death industry, and I will not buy a poppy, borne on my chest which I puff out with pride, wherever I go.
Clapping was the same. For a time it was (I'm guessing) a grassroots symbol that people used to show simple kindness. But it achieved nothing. It become perfunctory. A duty, and in so doing nothing was learned or improved. If these acts don't achieve ends like this, then they are merely mechanical. They just serve a darker purpose: propaganda. Reinforcing ruling class values, allowing them to propagate more death and destruction. Currently our stupid leaders are risking a return to the Irish troubles; the years of funeral bombings and children being slaughtered. Fuck that and fuck them. These people are scum.
I will not wear your poppy as long as war is still a thing. That is the real message of those you blithely call heroes, whom you laud while leaving them to rot in the gutter. I will not subsidise your death and destruction if you can't even take care of these people. Those that came back from the trenches had a simple message and the poppy obscures that allowing it to be repudiated and ignored. All for the profit of the capitalist imperialist war machine, oppressing and exploiting.
That's why they call the Union Jack the Butchersapron.
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