Regarding Remembrance Day
Regarding Remembrance Day
Thoughts on a Custom
I wear a white poppy, when I have one, on Remembrance Day. I do not bemoan those who wear the red, and certainly not the purple, but I prefer the white. When I consider the fallen of war, I first consider the innocent who have perished. They are foremost the civilian children and animals that perish in conflict. Earlier today, I posted a veteran’s anti-establishment quotation to my Instagram stories and considered captioning it: “Today I remember the innocent insects that died during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Remembrance Day is reserved popularly for veterans. Some grow defensive when we wear the white poppy or suggest honouring those outside of military service. It is a strange affront to gate-keep a custom for one group of victims. Yet, we do not so often think of the fallen troops as victims but as heroes. We fail to recognize them as both, or neither. The men who bombed Dresden were not heroes (yet victims) while the men who perished on the beaches of Normandy were certainly victims (and heroes). If we cannot recognize the exploitation of our troops, how can we ever develop the compassion to honour the innocent fallen: those for whom war is not a choice or a duty but a tragic circumstance of their livelihood?
Last night, my youngest brother voiced his irritation with the duality of Remembrance Day as it is observed by our culture. He and I are part of a different generation that has grown up surrounded by violence, educated well in history, and looking forward to an uncertain time. We have access to the entire world and an awareness through our media of the horror and tragedy of warfare. For us, the more we have learned about the past, the less we have been swayed by any veneer of honour, valour, and duty. We see suffering and moving parts. We also lack a dearth of veterans who discuss or defend their experiences (for better or worse). All victims of war deserve remembrance, but the purpose of remembrance should not be what the individuals did but why they felt they had to do it and what it did to them.
War is terrible. There is no way to overstate how awful war is. It does not matter what the intention of one side or another may be. The interests of warfare afford men the excuse to commit barbaric acts against themselves. There is no good war. There is necessary war, perhaps, but there is no good war. It destroys nations, places, families, people. Everyone knows someone who has been undone by war. They are moving parts in a machine game played by sycophants who will never see a battlefield. When we remember the fallen, we do not honour a sacrifice; we acknowledge a murder. There is no good war, and the only good soldier is a defector. The rest are just survivors. All are victims.
I was considering the role of heroism in our acknowledgement of veterans. Of course, there are heroics in warfare and conflict both by civilians and servicemen. Specifically, I was recalling the efforts of the young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy to navigate a troubling incident that happened to his PT command. The incident was immortalized by John Hersey for The New Yorker and served Kennedy’s subsequent mythology well during his presidential campaign. The Hero Mythology of War benefitted greatly from World War II, a rare war where one can justify much through the apparent dichotomy of the conflict. The Nazis and Imperial Japan were undoubtedly evil and had to be stopped. It does not matter that the Allied Powers had their own dubious qualities. They were not massacring whole villages, enslaving ethnic populations, and committing genocide on an industrial scale (but wasn’t it only because they weren’t doing it on an industrial scale that we don’t consider their foundation equivalent to the Axis’ efforts?). It is simple to accept the heroism of those WWII veterans without questioning the nature of their deployment.
This is not the case for World War I or Vietnam, and certainly not for the War on Terror. These are not decisive or perceptually simpler conflicts. They are great tragedies with global consequences. We need not discuss much about these conflicts here but World War I directly fomented World War II and saw the introduction of a modern warfare that devastated the Hero Mythology of the time. There is no honour in facing down machine gun fire or being gassed in a trench. Vietnam was another matter entirely. Grotesque warmongering led to the butchering of civilians and the collective trauma of an entire military apparatus for nothing. The fallout of Vietnam is seen notably in the anti-war movement of the time and the stereotype of the PTSD-afflicted veteran from that war. Then, the War on Terror. The Forever War. It is the war of a hegemony. Not an honourable thing to be subject to: the War on Terror is a machine that turns death into money. It is a giant war game played by rich men with the impoverished and uneducated of the world and of their own nations. War is exploitation, always.
When I think of Remembrance Day, I often think of In Flanders Fields, the poem recited for the occasion. It is a reticent poem on war. It does not advocate for a solution or do much to confront the honesty of war. It is a discarded poem written by a Canadian physician and lieutenant-colonel for a deceased friend and fellow soldier. It was written in a moment of grief and advocates for an undying rage against one’s enemies. Ironically, it was written earlier during World War I, after a battle during which the Germans launched the first chemical attack against French and Canadian soldiers. Later, such poems are not written about this war. There is no idealism, only disillusionment.
When I think of war and poetry, I do not think of In Flanders Fields, but of Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains:”
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
It was published in 1918, just after the German Spring Offensive and during the Spanish Flu pandemic. It is a more realistic expression of a wartime mind. In Flanders Fields was written in 1915, for reference. There are few artists in the past century who made it through wartime and came out the other side writing poetry about the honour of war. Tolkien invented modern fantasy in an effort to describe how vile war can be. Vonnegut catalyzed science fiction discussing the horrors of Dresden and the struggle of trusting humanity after the savagery of war. Cinema took care of Vietnam and portraying the devastation of that conflict on the cultural psyche. The War on Terror is an ongoing historical pursuit explored in the arts. Amongst it all on the pro-war side of culture is less focus on individual heroes, but on the ideals justifying conflict: democracy, stability, deterrence, justice, etc. There are no heroes. There is no honour. There are only ideas and dead boys.
I am not against anyone who identifies with the classic cultural normativity around Remembrance Day but I believe it should be understood broadly that our relationship to war must change. There is no honour in warfare and there never has been. These are outdated mythologies and we are a species that must let our stories evolve to meet our reality. We do not fight with blades. We live in a time when a ‘broken arrow’ can destroy a city. We live in a time when robots murder children on behalf of ethnostates. This is not the warfare of our ancestors’ mythology. It is no longer our tribe or nation at risk when we make war but the entire world.
Honour the fallen but do not glorify their sacrifice. It is not glorious. It is a tragedy. We must use this day to call for peace, to avenge the fallen relentlessly through peacemaking. That is the honour they deserve. The poppy is meaningless if we are not taking direct action against warfare. Our ancestors deserve to be remembered for a purpose and not only for their sacrifice under exploitation. We live as a consequence of their sacrifice. We ought to do something more with our circumstances for the good of all people. Today, we wear the poppies and attend services. Perhaps tomorrow we will hold our politicians accountable and dismantle the industries that support war worldwide. It is the least we can do for the many who have perished in the line of duty and otherwise. It is the least we can do for ourselves and for our children, lest they one day wear poppies and remember us.
Today, we remember every fallen victim. Tomorrow, we work to give peace a chance.