The White Poppy

Tuesday is Remembrance Day. Inevitably, I have received an invitation from a leftist friend to buy and wear a white poppy instead of the traditional red poppy. The idea is that the red poppy glorifies war; a white poppy protests war, calling instead for peace.

Today I attended the annual prayer service at the cathedral for Remembrance Day. I missed any reference to war being a good thing. The closest they came was a passage from Ecclesiates: “a time for war, and a time for peace.” Which of course is true. The atmosphere was solemn, not celebratory; like a funeral. The theme, as the name of the day implies, was remembering the dead. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.” The climax of the ceremony was a lone bugler playing the Last Post, as is traditional at a military funeral.

Remembrance Day endorses war in about the same way attending a funeral endorses death. If the deceased died of cancer, does honouring him mean you are endorsing cancer, and wishing more people die of it soon?

It is true that Remembrance Day does not claim their deaths, or their lives, were meaningless. It points out that these young men, some only teenagers, died in a good cause, and honours their courage and self-sacrifice.

Suppose this is wrong? Suppose those who volunteered were just fools, or psychopaths, and those who were conscripted were just cannon fodder. It would still be disrespectful to say this at their funeral. Right or wrong, they gave their lives.

Wearing the white poppy is equivalent to this. In my mind, it is like the Westboro Baptist Church picketing the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq, or the victims of Sandy Hook. It is offensive to make a funeral political.

I wear the red poppy, and I stand and applaud the surviving veterans who attended the ceremony. I feel contempt for those who wear the white poppy.

Remembrance Day

 

Today is Remembrance Day. 

It was instituted first, of course, to remember those who died in the First World War.

Since then it has become fashionable to consider their sacrifice pointless. The First World War was all a blunder, a folly. The Great Powers sleepwalked into it. It achieved nothing but the exhaustion of Western civilization, and a bigger war twenty years later.

Some will say that of all war; their only issue is that we must never resort to violence. Some will wear white poppies today, implicitly condemning the choice of those we remember to volunteer and risk their lives. Some will wear purple poppies tomorrow, suggesting that, while their deaths are lamentable, they were no better than dumb animals.

This seems to me an appalling lack of respect or empathy for millions of young men whose lives were cut short.

It is true of course that all war is terrible. It is always mass murder. It is true that the world would be better off today had the First World War never happened. 

That is not to say it was of no consequence, or there was nothing worth fighting for.

Germany in 1914 was already imbued with a racialist, nationalist, modernist and anti-Christian philosophy that later became more fully expressed as Nazism. Austria-Hungary was trying to annex a small neighbour. Germany was in violation of treaty and of international law in invading Belgium. There was, as almost always, a right side, and a wrong side. This is why we have wars; otherwise everything could indeed be settled by negotiation.

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with those who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Wear the poppy.

Remembrance Day

 

Remembrance Day Reflections

 

For Remembrance Day, a friend of mine, who declares herself a pacifist, posted a photo of her father, who fought with distinction in WWII and returned with severe PTSD.

The post garnered a couple of comments worth comment:

“Unfortunately War is a direct result of Greed, without Greed there would be no Wars !”

“Yes, but maybe not just greed - maybe also simply a lust for power too, and a belief that your beliefs/God/way of living is THE right way and all other ways are evil and must be stomped out.”

Sounds good; not so. Here is an example of the need to educate one’s conscience.

War is caused by greed? War is expensive. Most times nations lose money by going to war. No doubt war is good for the armaments industry, the “military-industrial complex”; but not for most businesses For most businesses, it will mean a shortage of labour and labour becoming more expensive as workers are drafted. It will mean being cut off from suppliers and markets; often it will mean a destruction of physical plant. More generally, businesses thrive on predictability, reliable profitability, and suffer from any instability. War is the ultimate disruptor of business.

“War is caused by greed” is Marxist delusion. The subtext there is, get rid of capitalism, and you get rid of wars. Seductive to anyone who does not consider themselves a rich capitalist: provides a convenient scapegoat. Better yet if the capitalists are Jews.

“A belief that your beliefs/God/way of living is THE right way and all other ways are evil and must be stomped out.”

Live and let live, right?

On that basis, should the northern states in the US have left the South to their preferred way of life? Of course, it involved the enslavement of others. Whose business was that? If Hitler had not attacked Poland, should the world have looked on in silence as he exterminated all of Germany’s Jews? When he did invade Poland, was Chamberlain right, and Churchill the guilty party, for not letting Hitler well enough alone, and instead starting a World War?

This pacifism is the same idea as that there would be general peace in society if we just abolished all laws and defunded the police. Why mess with Ted Bundy’s or Charles Manson’s recreational opportunities?

This is the atheist argument: get rid of religion, and there will be no more wars. This is seductive, because religion tells you there are things you want to do that you should not do. So there is always a lobby for getting rid of religion.

But one of the things—the main thing—that religion tells you not to do is to harm your neighbour. 

Wars are caused by the same thing that causes all interpersonal conflicts: someone has violated the categorical imperative, to treat others as you would be treated. Wars are caused by selfishness, usually on one side and not the other.

And pacifism is immoral; in a way, the worst immorality. None so guilty as the innocent bystander.

Armistice Day

 

It’s a hell of a way from yesterday

And all behind is burning;

We frog-march on to invisible dawn

From whence there is no turning.

Each human heart is blown apart

Six ways before September;

The whores of chance damn backward glance

And delicate lads dismember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;

The bloody track leads back from where they nailed God to a tree.

Love a thing, and watch it die,

And only death’s forever.

In wave-swept graves, in parts we lie,

And death, too, is surrender. 

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;

Who was that raving charlatan we hanged on Calvary?

There’s no escape from sorrow, boys,

Between here and high heaven;

Just pray for once the guns may pause

On the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, as bells toll eleven.

-- Stephen Kent Roney

 

Many Ingenious Lovely Things Are Gone

 

Pop!

Remembrance Day is coming in two days. Remembrance Day, and the First World War, have always been special to me. The First World War is when the dream of inevitable progress died, when civilization lost its way. It has not recovered. 

W.B. Yeats, for me, captures it best, in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:

We too had many pretty toys when young: 

A law indifferent to blame or praise, 

To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong 

Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays; 

Public opinion ripening for so long 

We thought it would outlive all future days. 

O what fine thought we had because we thought 

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, 

And a great army but a showy thing; 

What matter that no cannon had been turned 

Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king 

Thought that unless a little powder burned 

The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting 

And yet it lack all glory; and perchance 

The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Yet by 1919 this confidence was shattered:

[We] planned to bring the world under a rule, 

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole….

Learn that we were crack−pated when we dreamed.

We, who seven years ago 

Talked of honour and of truth, 

Shriek with pleasure if we show 

The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from the same time, covers the same ground. Hell had broken loose.

Although I never knew it personally, I yearn for the beauty and sense of honour and order of the old Austro-Hungarian culture, or the Ottoman, or the Imperial Russian, or the Britain of the huge pink maps. Of course they had their own deep flaws, but the foundation was sound. Since then we have lost our civilizational anchors and our pole star.

I gather I am not alone; this seems to be the attraction to “steampunk.” 

It might have meant something, the terrible sacrifice and the cataclysm of the First World War, if it had indeed been “the war to end all wars.” That last hope was seemingly shattered by World War II.

But perhaps, in the end, it was the war that ended wars. Since 1945, we have not had another big one. If we take the Second World War as the continuation of the first, left unfinished, after a truce of twenty years, the prolonged holocaust ended with the atom bomb. And since then, terrified as we all are of the atom bomb, it has kept us on our best behaviour. Because any war between nuclear powers would now be mutual assured destruction, nobody has since started a big, total, war, and nobody is going to start one with another nuclear power. Although there is a risk of miscalculation, if more countries had nuclear weapons, we might have fewer wars. We seem to be replacing war with technological and economic competition: first with the “space race.”

If only we could now bring back what we have lost….

The Guns of August

On the theme of Remembrance Day, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is perhaps the finest history book ever written, in terms of prose style.

I recommend it for a sense of the opening moves of the Great War.

Public Service Announcement

Knights of the Air

Remembrance Day has always been special for me. It is the one holiday most likely to inspire my sense of my own Canadianness.

I think this book has a lot to do with it. It may have been my favourite non-fiction read as a boy. The stories of Billy Bishop, Bill Barker, Raymond Collishaw, Roy Brown, and the like--real Canadian heroes.

If you happen to know any boys, it would make a great gift this Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day Gallery

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day/ Armistice Day has always been special for me. One of my favourite reads growing up was Knights of the Air, about Canadian aces in the First World War. “In Flanders Fields” was the first poem I memorized.

Here are a couple of my war poems, in honour of the day:

Armistice Day

"We are the dead"

It's a hell of a way from yesterday,
And all behind is burning;
We frog-march on to invisible dawn
From whence there is no turning.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
Who was that raving charlatan we hanged on Calvary?

Each human heart is blown apart
Six ways before September;
The whores of chance damn backward glance
And delicate lads dismember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The carrion chorus sounds above Megiddo's bloody sea.

Love a thing, and watch it die
And only death's forever;
In wave-swept graves in parts we lie
-- And yet, each year, remember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The bloody track leads back from where we nailed Him to a tree.

There's no escape from sorrow, boys,
Between here and high heaven;
Only pray the guns may pause
In the eleventh month, on the eleventh day,
As bells toll eleven.

Korea, Summer, 1951: A Canadian Who Did Not Survive Remembers

August in Asia is hotter than death;
Christ, that a cold rain could fall!
Like the rains that I knew where the jackpines grew
In Canada, when I was small.

Every rock, every brick, is as hot as a wick,
And wickedly ripples the air;
If I could I would go where the sweet Chinooks blow,
For I know of no night fevers there.

I don't that much mind that I die here or there;
When you're dead, you're just dead, as a rule.
But please don't cremate me, deep-freeze me in state--
Damn Sam McGee, let me die cool.

Korea, Summer, 1951

Korea, Summer, 1951: A Canadian Who Did Not Survive Remembers

August in Asia is hotter than death;
Christ, that a cold rain could fall!
Like the rains that I knew where the jackpines grew
In Canada, when I was small.

Every rock, every brick, is as hot as a wick,
And wickedly ripples the air;
If I could I would go where the sweet Chinooks blow,
For I know of no night fevers there.

I don't that much mind that I die here or there;
When you're dead, you're just dead, as a rule.
But please don't cremate me, deep-freeze me in state--
Damn Sam McGee, let me die cool.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Remembrance Day

We are the dead

It's a hell of a way from yesterday
And all behind is burning.
We frog-march on to invisible dawn
From whence there is no turning.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
Who was that raving charlatan we hanged on Calvary?

Each human heart is blown apart
Six ways before September
The whores of chance hex backward glance
And delicate lads dismember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The carrion chorus sounds above Megiddo’s bloody sea.

Love a thing, and watch it die
And only death's forever;
In wave-swept graves in parts we lie
And yet each year remember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The bloody track leads back from where we nailed him to a tree.

There's no escape from sorrow, boys,
Between here and high heaven;
Only pray the guns may pause
In the eleventh month, on the eleventh day,

As bells toll eleven.

-- Stephen K. Roney