weltweit
Well-Known Member
I will remember that for next time - and don't worry, you are going on the list
what no annual poppy bunfight thread?
- Thread starter Pingu
- Start date
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
this argument always does my nut. Do you just remember once a year, look at the rolls of dead and say your hail maries to the glorious dead? its a charade. Given how eager they have always been to feed working class people into some meatginder over bullshit I don't think bunging a salute to the cenotaph and wearing a poppy is sensible. It's their symbolism. Start accepting that and you've already lost. I'll observe the silence because I am polite and don't want to hurt the feelings of people around me. But like fuck will I wear a poppy. Some of those ww1 vets came home to nothing and were reduced to selling those things while wearing medals and sleeping a fucking bush. Or a Spike. Its gross.
once you start to take on the ritualism of the people who think you are simply a tool then you are one.
UrbaneFox
They've doubled in price
weltweit
Well-Known Member
The idea of having a remembrance day once a year is to keep war dead (and those who suffered) in our memories. If we didn't have the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the whole topic could be brushed under the carpet.
I don't have a problem wearing a poppy, for me it signifies more remembrance of WWII in which my dad was engaged, and luckily came through while many of his buddies did not.
You make a big deal of "them" as opposed to us, what do you think different could have happened when Hitler began his rampage through Europe, Britain was doomed into war, there was no escape and it was total war.
We have been lucky in that we grew up in a time of peace, our parents generations were not so lucky. Hence it is right to remember them.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
jesus this shit again? the 'peace' we grew up with? are you having a giggle? I grew up with PIRA in fine form while the falklands kicked off and so on. Thats not excluding the Omani conflict and various other british miltary projects. We have always been at war with Oceania.
The reason I can recall those things without looking it up is becuase the savagery of conflict, the knowledge of what they'd do if a prole became economically viable as a squaddie, is not some annual griefing for me. I'm reminded this year as every year that it was the british working classes who saw the threat of fascism long before the state did. The state and the press reviled the IB lads and ladies.
Its not about your one day solemn face once a year. All of this is part of a process.
The reason I can recall those things without looking it up is becuase the savagery of conflict, the knowledge of what they'd do if a prole became economically viable as a squaddie, is not some annual griefing for me. I'm reminded this year as every year that it was the british working classes who saw the threat of fascism long before the state did. The state and the press reviled the IB lads and ladies.
Its not about your one day solemn face once a year. All of this is part of a process.
It perpetuates a culture of pride in warfare. Those who have laid down their lives for the interests of the ruling class are more worthy than folk who died working in construction or fighting fires. It's lip service of course as in reality they're structurally shat upon just like the rest of us.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Part of what irritates me about so much of the attitude towards the poppy thing is that it seems to be the same as the whole "armed forces are heroes" stuff - somehow, we distance ourselves from people who are doing the dirty jobs, like getting killed in the name of some (usually purely political) agenda, and then pretend to worship them.
I usually buy a poppy so as to stick a couple of quid in to make my tiny contribution to the charity/ies that do a decent job of looking after these people and their families - a job which, if we were the just society they are supposed to have died for, would be being done by the State, not left to charities and private organisations to do while ex-services types are more or less left to get on with it by their former employer.
As far as I am concerned, the moralising and posturing are a distraction and a sideshow, and play right into the politicians' game of creating some kind of false dichotomy between us caring about the people who die in our name and us somehow being expected to buy into the narrative that everything they are sent to do is noble and just.
I usually buy a poppy so as to stick a couple of quid in to make my tiny contribution to the charity/ies that do a decent job of looking after these people and their families - a job which, if we were the just society they are supposed to have died for, would be being done by the State, not left to charities and private organisations to do while ex-services types are more or less left to get on with it by their former employer.
As far as I am concerned, the moralising and posturing are a distraction and a sideshow, and play right into the politicians' game of creating some kind of false dichotomy between us caring about the people who die in our name and us somehow being expected to buy into the narrative that everything they are sent to do is noble and just.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
I don't recall being conscripted, sent to a distant land to fight in my 50 odd years, I have been lucky so have you.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
so thats no, you can't support your 'peace' argument so move the goalposts to include conscription.
and you can fuck off with this as well.
and you can fuck off with this as well.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
worse in some cases. My 'not grandad' fred ended up as test subject for a flu vaccine at porton down. It wasn't flu vaccine. Fuck knows what went on but that was some proper abuse of trust by the MoD.
At least if a non state employer had pulled that shit you'd have more chance of some recompense.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Bollocks, there were two "world wars" engulfing Europe and much further afield, we haven't seen the like of in our lifetimes, for which I am grateful. I am not claiming there has been no conflict since, because there has been, both with UK involvement and further afield, but nothing on the scale of WWI or WWII and nothing requiring UK conscription.
That will be scant comfort to people in Syria or Ukraine and others who are caught up in wars today, but the UK has been spared large scale conflict for a couple of generations.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
this is why you are a penis on the matter
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Do some historical research on 11/11. This wasn't originally a "top-down" project by the state to remind us of sacrifice, it was originally a grassroots movement by local communities - those same local communities that subscribed to memorials in their local churchyards or market squares - to honour those they'd lost. It would never have been "brushed under the carpet", because local communities remember. They remember because the honoured dead were their relatives.
That's a pisspoor reading of his history, even for you. If Chamberlain and his coterie had gotten their way, we'd have stood outside of a European war at least until 1942, possibly all the way. Chamberlain's government had already broken their guarantees of military aid to Czechoslovakia, and would have done so with Poland too.
We haven't grown up "in a time of peace". We've merely grown up in an absence of total war. The two are very different things.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
On ice? Philistine cunt!!!
i was at a do quite recently where some chap from a reasonably fashionable regiment - who therefore should have known better - asked for a Whisky and coke.
suddenly, i felt very old. though, in truth, not as old as the Torygraphs made-up General, who if he ever existed, was already on a pension during the Hundred Years War.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
one that always riles me. We're told the people of the place welcomed uncle adolf with open arms and a big parade. Some did for sure. But there was a lot of people thrown to the nazi wolves
gimesumtruf
pedant fodder
Poppy:- A bit like standing to respect the Queen, I just think I'm being badgered into doing things that make me feel uncomfortable.
I'm given a side to pick and if I don't pick their poppy side I'm accused of being someone I'm not.
I'm given a side to pick and if I don't pick their poppy side I'm accused of being someone I'm not.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Indeed, that is pretty much what I meant, an absence of total war.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I don't wear a poppy and I've never worn one and if anyone wants to make a fuss about that, fuck 'em.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
I will wear a red poppy when the World War is over. The World War is not a two film franchise with an eagerly anticipated third instalment, it is a continuing horror of a soap opera with no end in sight (yet)
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
so was mine. She still has a scar on her face from glass blown out due to a bomb raid. Never got evacuated.
thats the thing, everyone knows someone who suffered. And on a wider point how much did working class society end up ridden with PTSD because of it all? How much badness and misery was handed down by people who had never got over the war? Thats why I don't do poppy day, its just like everytime I look at it I see the power and ingenuity of the war machinery involved and think 'you could have done something useful with that m8'
same with the cold war. We'd have a martian colony by now if all that energy had gone into not fighting over a scrap of land. Such waste.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
i have some sympathy - i don't like public sentimentality, and i certainly don't like being badgered into expressing public sentimentality. i dislike intensely what has become a parody, a witchunt requiring 'proper rememberencing', often from those who - imv - wish to be the centre of attention. personally the whole poppy cult seems to be to be a complete missing of the point...
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Indeed, it would have been brushed under the carpet had it been down to officialdom. The population were extremely angry after the First World War, both at the scale of loss of life, and at the ineptitude that led to it. With the Russian Revolution well underway, and serious upheaval throughout Europe, our lords and masters would have liked nothing more than to brush the whole business under the carpet, ignore and forget about the appalling sacrifices made, and get on with grinding the faces of the poor into the dust.
It's a miracle that popular feeling surfaced as a desire to remember the fallen, rather than in insurrection, but yes, the State can stake no great claim to the remembrance movement, and the fact that they continue to grandstand in front of it demonstrates to me that they're no more in tune with the will of the people now than they were a century ago.
To answer weltweit's remarks, wars provide, by their nature, opportunities for people to perform extraordinary acts of courage, and it is gratifying that we can still remember some of those people and their acts 100 years afterwards. But that's no thanks to exactly the same kind of people then who are lording it over us now, and it's bad enough that they attempt to ride the bandwagon, without us having to be grateful to them. Remembrance should, in my view, come with a broad seam of anger, at the donkeys who start wars and lead men into battle, and at the bastards who are only interested in the sacrifice of others when it serves their own ends.
Slogans like "total war" are irrelevant - if you're the one the shells are falling on, that's total enough war for most people. Conscription, too, is largely irrelevant - the military-industrial complex's product line is such that we don't have the same need for conscripted armies of cannon-fodder - but that's not something to be "grateful" for, as if we should somehow be relieved that, by an accident of technology, most of us shouldn't expect to have to fight and possibly die to make some kind of geopolitical point. It doesn't mean that the likes of Cameron et al would not shove us into the front line with an out of date rifle and leaky boots just as soon as it suited them to.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I'd disagree here exy. Its a way of expressing that war never went away but people I know stopped being called up to go die for their shithouse aims. Its an understanding that the war never did end, we've spent the majority of the post war period seeing that war continue. The russian revolution scared the shit out of the western booj.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Maybe I should have been a bit more specific - I don't mean the concept is irrelevant, but when it's bandied around to say "we much be grateful - we had total war, and we don't any more", it's pointless. And probably misleading - as you say, the war never really stopped.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I'm reminded of how in the era of the napoleonic wars the role of soldier was seen as scummy. You steal from people, you murder kids. You are not good.
When or where that transformed into St. Tommy whose grave must be gunuflected to, I do not know. Crimean probably. When the first telegraph from the front came in
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
I'm not sure it's really changed all that much. Tommy coming home from WWI didn't get a particularly rapturous welcome from society at large, and WWII wasn't much better. Looking across the pond, returning servicemen from Vietnam were positively ostracised, as if they personally were responsible for the failure of their state's adventurism.
Governments laud the soldier when they're trying to browbeat the population into signing up (or morally blackmailing sons/lovers/brothers/"pals" into doing so - WWI was an obscene example of this), but large numbers of demobilised men coming back into a depressed economy, full of PTSD and ideals about what they've fought for, are a lot less welcome.
Similar threads
- Poll
