Wall-to-wall Remembrance Day coverage in the media today, which is as it should be in the centennial year of the start of the Great War, falsely labelled at the time as "the war to end all wars". If only.
Amid all the public ceremonies, large and small, it's hard not to notice that private honouring of the fallen is being rapidly supplanted by orchestrated displays of mass emotion, the sort of thing we've become depressingly accustomed to since the death of Princess Diana. It's no longer enough to emote and remember in quiet dignity: you have to emote and remember in ways that meet public approval.
Over in the UK, there's a bit of a fuss about a "poppy hijab" that some Muslim women have been wearing to show their respect. Some non-Muslims wonder why it's necessary for anyone to do anything beyond the traditional pin-on poppy, while some Muslim women feel that it's a distortion of the purpose of the hijab. As Muslim activist Sonia Ahmad puts it,
“My hijab is a visual sign of my religiosity and devotion to Allah and not a walking talking billboard on which to showcase my patriotism and undying loyalty to Britain. No other religious group is pressured to prove their allegiance in the same way.”
No other religious group, maybe, but the pressure on everyone to conform is growing by the year. Just ask soccer player James McClean, of Wigan Athletic, who declined to wear a poppy on his shirt for a recent game. McClean grew up in Derry, and his personal memory of the armed forces concerns the Bloody Sunday massacre of unarmed civilians, rather than brave Tommies going over the top at Passchendaele. For his pains, he's been subjected to a torrent of abuse and threats via social media.
I find myself on McClean's side here, though for different reasons. My father was a genuine war hero, decorated by two countries for his bravery. He took part in the Dieppe raid, the invasion of Italy, and the assault on Walcheren Island toward the end of the war, when he was badly wounded and left for dead when his ship had to be abandoned. He carried shrapnel around in his body for the rest of his days. And he never wore a poppy. He grew up between the wars knowing that the whole poppy tradition had been established by General Lord Haig, a man who sent hundreds of thousands of men to certain death on the battlefields of Flanders and was looking for a way to expiate his guilt. My father wanted nothing to do with it, and I see no reason to disagree with him.
On the op-ed page o the Toronto Star today, there's a rambling piece by one Heather Menzies that includes what must surely be the most crass comment ever made about war and remembrance. Says she,
"War is a violation of the human body and spirit, and of the earth, in a way that is as devastating as climate change".
If you were looking for a way to trivialize war and insult the memory of the fallen, you couldn't come up with anything better (worse?) than that.
As I've written here before, the only proper way to remember the fallen is to work to find ways to stop adding to their numbers. Prime Minister Stephen Harper led the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa today just weeks after committing Canadian soldiers and materiel to the war against ISIS/ISIL. He's clearly calculating that there are votes to be had in portraying himself as a tough war leader when elections roll around next year. I'm not sure if that's hypocrisy, exactly, but it's damned close to it.
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