REMEMBRANCE DAY

The mark of our conscience. The sign that we acknowledge and pay respect to those who have died in past wars. This tradition instigated by the first World War, the great War, The War To End All Wars. If only that were so.

If only people who lay those wreaths down, Prime Ministers and Generals alike, could remember what Remembrance Day means, and not just when it is. It means something bigger. It means a recognition of the obscenity of war, so that it may never happen again.

How do they feel? These veterans in their berets and their lapels full of newly cleaned medals, to see a man, thirty, forty years their junior, drag a country unwillingly into a war?

The young today have no respect for the old. And even less respect for themselves.

These days, a lot of casualties of war don�t even know who or where or sometimes what killed them. The dead know only one thing : that it is better to be alive. But the survivors, they know more. They know the depths to which humans can sink. Sometimes they find the bottom, and then they keep digging.

But it�s worse than that. Young men and women, deprived from economic ghettos, have decided the only way out is to pick up a gun and join either a gang, or the army. And they�re being sent off to war and murdered to justify a lie. Sending a country to war is the worst thing a President or a Prime Minister can make, but to do so, knowing full well that whatever reason you tell them isn�t the real reason? That�s a war crime.

But I�m getting off subject here.

With the advent of technology it seems to be far easier these days to start a war and to kill people. It�s just pressing a button. The news is just a TV show. It�s only people dying.

And so, the Cenotaph, the second Sunday of every November, a solemn crowd gathers to remember the dead. Tony Blair, chief architect of the murder of thousands, kneels and wipes his crocodile tears away, as a nation watches.

Oh, the hypocrisy. Not even I am capable of hypocrisy like that.

But what about us? What about those of us that want to remember the dead, that can never forget the horror, the obscenity of war, yet feel an enormous guilt by wearing a poppy? Those who feel that by wearing a poppy we are, in some, endorsing by complicity, the vile, repugnant lies of warmongers and generals?

I�ve heard people posit that if anything, the US and the UK don�t get involved enough in foreign affairs. Oh, the arrogance of The West, that we somehow know better than you, poor little meek muslims, that we know what is Best For You, and that we will bring you civilisation or bring you death. Death it is then, because we are uncivilised as a race, The West, uncivilised. We just have a more dominant economic base. And heaps of arrogance.

I wonder how we would feel if say, Iran started carpet bombing us in the belief that we needed regime change. Then again, the President did get less votes than his nearest rival, and he still won. Looks like democracy isn�t working anymore.

And in a democracy there is a choice. Where are the White Poppies? There are white poppies in the fields, and white is the international symbol of peace.

There are no white poppies. In 1927, The Women�s Guild first proposed a white poppy as symbol that indicated that war must never happen again. Surprisingly, The British legion refused to manufacture it : and when The Women�s Guild made their own, The British legion refused to accept a donation from the sales.

Where are the Poppies that represent us? The millions who marched against war? Those who see war as barbaric and seek not to remember just those who died, but those who would fight for peace? Those who believe that there is always a better way than war, always a place for calm and not conflict, always something better in this life than murder and suffering?

White Poppies should be on sale. To acknowledge those of us who wish to mourn the conscripted dead, murdered in their millions, and those of us who violently oppose war and conflict in all it�s forms. We, the people have spoken. But is Tony � or anybody � willing to listen?