Donal Fallon: ‘Poppygate’ has gone too far – Britain must respect people’s right not to wear the symbol

by Banania2020

22 comments

  1. I grew up in Britain and the changes I’ve seen with regard to this in the last 25 years is insane. You always saw plenty of people wearing poppies and a remembrance day parade, but it now seems to have turned into some sort of cosplay event. It has coincided with the last of the generation of people who fought in the world wars dying, people who never shouted loudly about their experiences.

    If I’m ever home around this time now I will see people actually dressed up in uniforms as if they are in Belgium in 1917, and people decorating as if it is Christmas. I refuse to believe that many of these people, and those who shout loudest about anybody not offering Maximum Respect, have seriously learnt any of the lessons that the world wars offered us. This is why the poppy has now extended to any troop who has “served their country”, even if meant shooting brown people in the desert or civilians on the streets of Ireland.

  2. I’m 43 years old and I have no memory of this being a thing when I was young. Like the rest of the country I watched a lot of British TV and read British newspapers and magazines but I don’t remember wearing poppies being a big thing.

  4. Whether I wear one or not has nothing to do with these so called patriots .. its an anti war stance to wear one not a I support war . I think it was one of the tory rags that started this and they should be made to come and explain themselves.
    I’m British and I won’t be told by a newspaper what I should and shouldn’t do . Fuck them

  6. Curious commentary on the culture of a foreign country.

  7. Expecting foreigners to wear something in remembrance of something from your culture is absolutely bizarre. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

  8. What I really don’t understand is the impulse to make people wear the poppy. I mean, doesn’t it lose all meaning when it’s mandatory? I know I’m preaching to the choir here …

  10. Wearing the poppy I am remembering all of those who died, the many fellow Irishmen, as well as those Africans, Indians and of other races too.
    In the Second World War in particular they fought for the very sort of freedom to assert a right mot to wear the poppy on principle and argue against it.

  11. I didn’t get the issue?

    You should respect the culture of where you are living and earning your living.

  12. The true irony being they’ll beat their chest over wearing the poppy but also regurgitate american talking points and the worldwide trend of slowly lurching towards fascism, the very thing they are wearing a symbol in opposition to.

  13. The fact that the generation of servicemen who were conscripted to be sent to their deaths in WWI are long dead, and those who fought the Nazi in WWII are a tiny group of people over the age of 95 has a lot to do with how embracing the general population are of the poppy campaign.

    My great grandfather was a dock labourer, unemployed after trade union men in Cork got blacklisted. He went to war because of poverty, like many others. I fail to see how someone who served the British Army in the North, or the Falkland’s War were victims of the same institutional conditions that made fighting and dying a necessity.

    Obviously the armed forces still prey on working class communities, but there seems to be a general feeling that many veterans could have saved themselves serious physical and mental injury by simply not joining a force that was openly engaging in neo-colonial conquest and enforcing apartheid.

    That has naturally placed the poppy as a wedge issue that the rising far right have jumped upon, and visual symbols are always significant in these things. The British establishment have no idea how to deal with this, largely because far right sympathies are deeply entrenched in it. They even made the cookie monster from sesame street wear a fucking poppy, and I wish I was joking.

  14. I was born in 1960 and remember lots of WWI and WWII veterans who would not wear poppies. The main reasons I heard were loathing of General Haig who had sent so many of their generation to pointless deaths before founding the poppy thing, and a belief that veterans’ needs should be addressed through general taxation, not charity. There were also some who we would now recognise as suffering from undiagnosed complex PTSD and found the whole business so retraumatizing they’d be housebound until it was over. They didn’t like the Daily “jingoism and blackshirts” Mail either.

  17. I went to a school in Dublin, mid 90s. We had a rememberence service every November. We’d have a mass, take wreaths of poppies and place them at the memorials in the school for the students that died in The Great War (big plaques with names and the day they died) 

    It never seemed odd to me, nor was there any hint of Britishness about it. Frankly, it was a great reminder of how young those lads were and how lucky we were not to be in the same situation.

    That aspect is gone, British Nationalists have pissed on it, and in the process tied themselves up in knots. The football clubs also, Irish players aren’t the only ones who will have a recent memory of the British army on their land.

  18. I grew up in London, never wore a poppy, was never an issue. If asked, I just said I was Irish, and we don’t really wear them. Even during the 80s and 90s, when we were getting racist abuse, as well as physical and verbal assaults on our own doorstep, no one cared so much about the poppy. Nowadays it’s become a mental illness.

  19. It’s just become a symbol of toxic nationalism here. We saw a lot of this during the Brexit years. Ultimately, it’s a veneer of respectability over ignorance. I doubt more than 1% of the population here in the UK could name any of the beaches’ landing sites in WW2 or even tell me what country Flanders is in.

  20. Why would anyone want to wear something to commemorate that fascist army that murdered Soo many in Soo many countries

  21. Whats making it worse is that David Lammy forgot to wear one yesterday at Prime Minister’s Questions in Westminster. Now this morning his deputy minister is wearing a poppy with a Union Jack and what looked like mistletoe.

    Labour UK trying to outreform ReformUK.

    Interestingly, on the local news, UTV presenters always wear poppies while on BBCNI its more optional.

  22. My Grandfather on my mother’s side was in the Royal Navy in WW2. Fought against the Italian fascists in the Mediterranean. Personally I don’t think he would give a shit that I don’t wear a poppy.

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