This week’s furore over poppies on football shirts has a vein of irony running through it and not only in the fact that some of the most vigorous moral outrage came from the English Defence League (who mounted a roof top protest at FIFA’s Zurich headquarters).The less obvious irony here is that England’s opponents in Saturday’s game are Spain. Why? Because in a 1986, Spanish Republican veterans (who had also fought with the British Army from 1939-1945) asked to join the Remembrance Day commemorations in London.
In a gesture that one might assume would be met with mutual respect on the part of Britain’s noble and esteemed veterans, the Spanish asked to lay a wreath in Republican colours with the dedication:
To the memory of the Spaniards who gave their lives in the fight for freedom 1939-45.
The British Legion refused permission and the group had to lay their wreath the following Sunday.
Unlike the British Legion, FIFA have reversed their decision after a slew of ‘authority figures’ and ‘celebrities’ frantically asserted that the poppy is not a political symbol but an innocent gesture of remembrance - a gesture that appears to be less a matter of freedom of choice every year.
What this poppy cult actually represents is a very specific kind of remembrance or, rather, the remembrance of specific things but not others. ‘Lest we forget’, Spain was forced to endure fascism for another 30 years after the Allies apparently defeated it, but even when it was over, there was to be no remembrance just a ‘pact of forgetting’.
History may well be written by the victors but in a world where we have access to information on any subject at our finger tips, there is no excuse for the annual act of collective denial that Remembrance Sunday has become. The poppy is absolutely a political symbol not least because a State that actually cares little for the welfare of its cannon fodder is also able to imply a moral imperative in subscribing to the yearly exercise in selective memory it represents.
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According to Rachel: 'The poppy is absolutely a political symbol not least because a State that actually cares little for the welfare of its cannon fodder is also able to imply a moral imperative in subscribing to the yearly exercise in selective memory it represents.'
It is perhaps also worth remembering, as I understand it, that in the 1930's this rememberance day event was used by the Peace Pledge Union, Neville Chamberlain and the pacifists, to promote the case for appeasement. In other words the poppy then was used to remember the horrors of the First World War and as a symbol by those who wanted peace.
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