It's time for my annual Remembrance Day post. I've drawn from several essays, including my own, to make my case against a tradition that is moving away from its original message of peace and, of what we should be remembering; the horrors of war and "Never Again."
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First are some excerpts from an excellent essay I came across several years ago. I cannot find it any longer on the web, but I thankfully had copied the text and saved it in a document along with other essays denouncing the sadly changing message of Remembrance Day:
"...A human life is a human life. When we stand on Remembrance Day, when we wear our poppies, we remember the soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice for the misguided political maneuvering of their masters. Government officials and community leaders make speeches passionately thankful of the sacrifices made by these soldiers that their predecessors once sent to their deaths. Yet one rarely hears of the suffering faced by far more, the innocent men, women, and children who have their lives torn apart by the feuding of powerful men. Civilians are the true casualties of war. Nearly 10 million civilian casualties in the First World War, 50 million in the Second... To what end?
We sit here, living our lives, ignorant or indifferent to the hundred million innocents who have perished in the past century alone, their hands never having held a weapon. Yet we rally together wearing poppies and hearing speeches about those men our governments have either forced or hired to be trained in the art of systematic murder for political gain. Remembrance Day is but a tool, used to desensitize the public to the brutality of war and to cover the true cost in a gleaming coat of patriotism and poppies. Those who are disinclined to acquiesce are derided and publicly scorned for their lack of patriotism, their loyalties questioned. They must hate freedom.
We ought to be standing together in solemn reflection of the horrors and death caused by war and thinking in unity but one thought: never again. If this were the theme of Remembrance Day, the collective voice of the national population could alone prevent politically motivated conflict. But instead, we lionize those who’ve been trained to kill and have massacred people across the world on behalf of the government."
- author unknown
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"The poppy was once a symbol to remind us of the senseless massacre of millions upon millions of people in muddy fields far away from home. The poppy was supposed to say never again to the horrors of a spat between politicians murdering a generation. What it is now is a symbol of militarism, and standard used to recruit children to don a uniform and go off and get themselves killed. It means the opposite of what it is supposed to.
I admit I’d stopped wearing the red poppy about six or seven years ago. I am not sure if it was because my eyes opened to what it symbolizes these days, or whether it was because the poppy itself had become twisted into a mark of jingoism. The trend certainly seems to have grown stronger in recent years.
Policing of wearing the poppy has grown absurd: public figures face attacks, all the way up to death threats, for not wearing one.
Meanwhile, opinion pieces glorifying the deaths in the First World War seem to be on the rise, with pundits and politicians alike acting as though it was anything other than a meaningless mass killing...
And now it all becomes clearer than ever. They want us to forget what happened and pretend – as they did a hundred years ago – as though wars are nothing more than a jolly good lark.
Instead of the symbols, the reminders, we should focus on actually remembering. On remembering, one sees the brutal senselessness of this slaughter."
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From https://www.saltwire.com/prince-edward-island/opinion/josh-underhay-never-again-never-forget-161987/ :
"Remembrance Day means many things to different people. Some folks still actively serve, some know a friend or family member who served, and some even know someone who died. Emotions and discussion around it can be varied.
But I have to be honest. Here is how it affected me.
As I stood before the tomb, covered with poppies, replete with pageantry, surrounded by Instagrammers, photographers, but also veterans, and all sorts of people, I could only picture one thing.
Some poor soul dying alone in the dirt.
The reality of the dark side of all this is that this soldier, this civilian, died with no glory. Deaths from war happen far from parades, from flags flying, and from politician’s speeches. It happens around the world from the offices in which the decisions are made.
I walked away from the monument and I felt overcome with emotion. Normally I'm a pretty chill person. Today I was overcome with rage at the injustice that allows young men and women to be butchered in the name of politics, of racism, of 'good intentions'.
For me, Remembrance Day is far from the glory of war.
It is a funeral.
The act of remembrance is an act of acknowledging the horror of senseless death. Our men and women who serve and have served deserve the best. They deserve the best of support after they come home having served, many with PTSD, injured, maimed, if they come home at all. Civilians around the world deserve peace and the dignity of life. We all deserve a peaceful world.
I come away from this with a renewed determination to work towards peace. I will denounce the voices that call for conflict, who call for division and difference to be solved through bullets and blood. I support our military, the men and women who serve, and think they deserve not to be used as pawns by those with dark agendas.
I support civilians everywhere who fear the sound of jets overhead, of bombs, and who themselves seek refuge of conflict, repercussions of which come back to decisions we make in wealth and privilege, and at the ballot box.
I will remember those who died. I will remember those who called for their deaths.
Never forget. Never again."
- Josh Underhay
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I will finish with three blog posts of my own from previous Remembrance Days:
The World Wars and their aftermath are long gone. Or are they?
The annual “red poppy” campaign resumes in full swing each November. You’ll find red poppies adorning lapels everywhere. The campaign raises money for needy and/or disabled war veterans in Canada. I have no problem with that.
However I must take issue with the ceremonies of Remembrance Day wherein we pay tribute to those who lost their lives supposedly fighting for my freedom. The Royal Canadian Legion describes the red poppy as a “visual pledge to never forget all those Canadians who have fallen in war and military operations”.
If I am to mourn those who died due to the madness of war, then I mourn every soldier who died; regardless of which “side” they were on.
World War II was over eighty years ago, and no participants are alive to remember and explain the incomprehensible mess known as World War I (and its armistice from which Remembrance Day originated, lest we forget). Yet we continue with this ceremony — replete with pipe and drum corps, color guards, police, soldiers, medals, flags, and banners — now also honoring the veterans of Korea or Afghanistan or some other dubious or idiotic military endeavor.
I refuse to support “our” troops or to take place in a military ceremony commemorating “our” fallen comrades, lest “we” forget. I refuse to oppose those dirty rotten “others”. This “us” vs. “them” mentality is what brings about war in the first place. Is it not obvious that this is the source of all conflict?
As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, "When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
On the other hand, the poem In Flanders Fields exhorts us to “Take up our quarrel with the foe...”
What foe?
All persons on this planet are my brothers and sisters. We are undeniably tied to everyone and everything. When we fight someone else, we fight ourselves. We create enemies that don’t really exist.
To put an end to war forever, we need a new direction. But where do we go? Who do we turn to? The UN? NATO? Our elected “leaders”? Organized religion? (God help us). No. None of these have ever demonstrated the ability to bring about lasting peace, and they never will.
We need to realize our connection to each other; and not just realize it intellectually, but actually feel it and live it. It must be a full time occupation. We must abandon our egocentric thoughts and behavior in favor of an identity with the Whole of existence. This is the only thing that will prevent large scale conflicts altogether. Only you, the individual — who, in reality, is not an individual but a part of the Whole — can create peace. It must come from within.
Only peaceful souls can effect a peaceful world.
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I seem to recall that the message of Remembrance Day many years ago was “never again.” What happened to that? Why has that slogan been discarded? Sadly, I think I know the reason. Here we are, a century removed from World War I, with global conflicts constantly taking place wherein thousands are slaughtered or maimed for reasons very few can fathom. To say “never again” seems a little silly, doesn’t it? An appropriate aphorism for Remembrance Day comes from George Santayana — “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." There is a more chilling, and I’m afraid more apt statement from him — "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
War is dreadful, and I mourn the fallen soldiers on both sides of a battle; not to mention the “collateral damage" of massacred innocents. Supporting troops is one thing. Supporting decisions by so-called leaders that would have young lives cut short for a political agenda is another. On the positive side, we live in a relatively peaceful country where sabre-rattling is not a trait we are known for. Even so, we shouldn’t believe that all causes are noble. They are not. Or that all wars are just. They rarely are.
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Here’s an idea: Let’s replace “In Flanders Field” with “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen as the poem for recitation each and every Remembrance Day.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.|
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Latin phrase that ends that poem translates as, “It is sweet and proper to die for one's country.” The poet presents it as a “lie.” It is a lie to be sure, but even more, it is a silly and frankly disgusting quote from the Roman poet Horace. Sweet and proper to die? For one’s country? How insane!
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