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Poppies: Patriotism and pyromania
 international |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press
 Friday November 11, 2011 19:33 by pat c
James Turley writes about the criminalisation of those who have burned poppies and elaborates on the imperialist agenda behind the whole remembrance charade. Those who fell should be remembered but not to glorify imperialism.
It is that time of year, again, when the world is colonised by plastic poppies. No establishment luminary will be seen in a public forum without one of these slightly naff trinkets pinned to his or her lapel; and thousands more people around the country will likewise sport the designated symbol of remembrance for the war dead....
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More troubling is the fate of three Northern Ireland teenagers, about whom little is known except their ages - two are 17 and one 16 - and that they were pulled up before Coleraine magistrates court, charged with ‘incitement to hatred’. The 16-year-old also faces charges relating to ‘improper use’ of a social networking site, thanks to his publication of damning visual evidence of the ‘crime’ on Facebook....
 Remember, remember ... the imperialist slaughter The poppy appeal is not simply about commemorating the dead, however. It is about our dead - it is about a hundred years, give or take, of British history, during which ‘our brave boys’ (and girls) have been massacred in two truly apocalyptic wars, as well as picked off in countless relatively minor scuffles provoked by the decay of the empire.
The poppy ideology is, in fact, a bait-and-switch; the very real generalised empathy of the population to those who paid for capital’s rapacious drive to war with their lives is mobilised to support the very same institution - the state - which feeds the meat into the mincing machine. Like all ideology, it is participatory: the annual ritual of pinning the poppy to your lapel seals the compact, just as a few words of mumbo-jumbo transubstantiates cheap wine into the blood of Christ. The British Legion’s orgy of emotional blackmail, which complements the whole thing - pictures of gravely wounded soldiers and bereaved families all over the tube - does not hurt, either....
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Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 2 1I really think the vast majority of people dont know that the money is goin to all the modern day veterns, lovely fellas like the paras who killed on bloody sunday, the sas etc. Is it worth havin a bit of a joined up awareness campaign on this??? It is one thing that gets on my goat this time of year. And there is nothin worse when some idiot tells me, that we have to respect other peoples tradition as if the poppy is a protestant/orange symbol, since when did imperialism become a tradition. Is facism a tradition, that should be remembered equally? The vast majority of people in those wars did not want to be there, and were there because of poverty, it was not a valiant liberation struggle but the carvin up of power amongst the elites of the world, simple as.
Anyone up for settin up an 'anti-war' poppy awareness stall where these brit legion fcukers are sellin these things
The real nub of this is that the poppy campaign is used to indirectly help finance the current imperialist war machine.
Money they might otherwise have to fork out for looking after the victims of their escapades is paid by the public instead, leaving their coffers free to finance the next invasion and the killing of more cannon fodder economic conscripts and many anonymous brown people and their families who have the misfortune to be living near oilfields and other natural resources or strategic routes..
I think one poster put it well on this thread:
https://www.indymedia.ie/article/94848
"I think the very last guy from WWI died recently...
the money you collect in your tin won't really do anything for him or his comrades. All it would do is help "externalise" the expenses of compensating ex soldiers from Iraq, Afghanistan etc who were "unpatriotic" enough to be shot but not to die. Don't you think governments have learned anything from corporate behaviour at all??
By wearing the poppy you help to support any recent imperialist military adventures that such sociopathic politicians choose to engage in. And sadly, it's obvious that all the things that the poor tommy or paddy thought he was battling in the awful hell of the trenches for, have been subsequently taken away from his children by their corrupt governments by strokes of the pen.
The poppy is truly the most cynical insult to the ideals of those who fought in the trenches"