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The White Poppy And Remembrance.
Make peace, not war
“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
― George Carlin
I have never worn a red poppy in my entire life, and I am glad I can make that statement to you. I feel no shame or lack of patriotic spirit, for these are some of the very emotions that caused the calamity in the first place. Some rejected the propaganda and were prepared to conscientiously object. In a true democracy, that decision should never have been punished but accepted as the very highest example of free expression: a decision by a citizen not to fight in a war.
Yet I have no doubt I would have fought with everything I had to stop Hitler. But conversely, I do not doubt that I would never have fought in the First World War. A war between the royal families of Europe which involved the manhood of each nation-state as pawns in bloody and incestuous games of Empire, mostly in the mud of European fields and rat-infested trenches. A war of such atrocious attrition that it should have been the death sentence for all crowned heads of Europe.
Just over a hundred years ago men — mostly — were prepared to die for their King, Queen or Tsar. And die in a new way. A new modern way of being torn apart by shells fired from long-range guns. To wait in trenches to be murdered from the air or to — en masse — at the blow…
