No poppy for Pelagius

Close observers of this blog may recall my reluctance to toe the poppy line. Last year I looked at the case of Jon Snow, the eminent broadcaster who announced he would only wear one on Remembrance Day itself, and was pulled  from his job at Channel 4 as a result.

I am not the only one who has noticed the total poppy hegemony that operates from around the last week of October to the 11th November. Every news presenter, every politician, everyone, it seems, has to wear one. Perhaps it won't be too long before a non-wearer will be offered a kind of white feather, given to those disloyal  blackguards who refuse to take part in a nation's grief at the glorious dead.

If asked why I don't wear one I would summarise my feelings as "it glorifies war" and I am perfectly well aware of the counter argument, viz "It's not glorifying war; it's paying tribute to those who gave their lives for our freedom" or something like that. But it's all cant.

In an absolutely brilliant piece in The Independent  on Thursday, Robert Fisk explained his reasons for not wearing one. Essentially, he challenged a number of fondly held myths about warfare, and he should know. He's lived in Beirut for over 40 years and has literally been part of the conflict throughout that period. He pointed out that for the most part there's nothing glorious about death on the battlefield, and that those deaths are usually ordered by people far removed from the theatre of war who have no real interest in who dies or how. Tony Blair, Bob reminds us, always sports a poppy, yet he presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, as well as thousands of plucky grunts whose major concern was for their fellows in the foxhole, and not for any "higher cause".

He also wondered why the recognition only seems to go back as far as the first world war (which was fought in the belief that it was the war to end all wars, and as AJP Taylor observed, the politicians were prepared to fight more wars to prove that). What about older conflicts, like the Boer war or the Napoleonic wars? What about those glorious dead?

Finally, a point of my own. Let's look at Lord Kitchener, that iconic hero, tragically lost at sea in 1915 at the height of his powers. How did he establish his reputation? In no small part to the Battle of Omdurman, where a small British force devastated the mighty hordes of fuzzy-wuzzies to ensure our influence in that part of Africa for a generation. But what really happened? The "horde" that Kitchener attacked was in fact a vast rabble of men, women and children, many of them slowly starving to death, straggling across an arid plain, when a highly trained array of cavalry charged in with sabres flailing, followed up by an infantry with rifles, a technology unknown to the Africans. The result was an enormous massacre of the largely innocent. Glorious dead preserving our freedom? Give me a break.