Why I Refused To Wear A Poppy

Recently a middle-aged man liberal in both dress and approach subtly probed into my refusal of wanting to display the ubiquitous poppy flower, one that finds itself proudly announced on the fabric-heart of British countrymen and women at this time of year. He insisted that the tribute stood as a mark of remembrance to the fallen servicemen and women who valiantly gave their life for the just cause of freedom and democracy, to which I countered that the issue here was not one borne out of a callousness for human death, but rather for the clandestine system that propagated it. Since my younger years I have steered clear from discussions such as this, discovering that the latent jingoism instilled into the British public makes its exceedingly difficult to analyse with pure mind the ulterior symbolic representations that are being consecrated by the gentle pose of the petite opium descendant.

How I have come to regard the British poppy is as an emblem of British and Western imperialism, a stamp of direct negation for the thousands upon thousands of foreign innocents who lay slain in some hapless sector of the globe, people of dreams who now find themselves interred deep into the back pocket of forever with nothing but the bones and flesh that once stabled their very birth. True it is to say that to recognise the wanton death of a comrade, a soldier or fellow patriot is also to bear a more ominous shade over the ‘enemy’ responsible for bringing round that persons untimely demise. The enemy in my year of awareness is not the Nazi fascist or the Russian Stalinist as we are repeatedly taught both these to be endemic to the spirit of the poppy; it is indisputably the one who resembles me in all modes of physiology.

The neocolonialists of the North have not ceased to do what Hitler’s Third Reich simply failed in trying to achieve. These tireless appropriators of foreign resources and minerals are the same group who masquerade as bringers of fresh life, of new health-care systems and sustainable economies, yet entrenched in their pounding gallop is that dark thunder of depleted uranium, the one that nourishes their concrete will, their prayers and their gaudy hymns. Under certain inalienable rubrics such as Liberation, Democracy and Freedom the allied political make-up of the West have attacked, subjugated and dehumanised with genocidal fantasies those people who stand to obstruct their aspirations of theft, expansion and domination. Their tabloids are filled with fabrications that only aim to stimulate the animosity of a populace, to win support for further wars and to finally coerce the British public into financing the murder and malevolence that finds itself spread across the sands and cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. The ultimate goal being to qualify the death of these ‘terrorists’ as being justified and righteous, eluding any possibility of extrapolating the true nature of these wars - an economic and racial attempt to winnow and divide the core of a nation’s base.

Democracy is the arbitrary concept that statesmen use to appease the murder that looms over their daily consciousness. It’s the self-deceptive module that gets forcefully pushed and woven into an intellectually malnourished population, ultimately becoming the internal rhetoric of a duped sector whose lives drown inside the quantum blood of others; the blood that built its roads, its technology, its architecture, its education and its literature. It’s a stale attempt at trying to wake the human from inside the burrows of a machine and I for one will stand by my renunciation of European hegemony, of the cultural and spiritual appropriation from those who are deemed as developing by those exploiting their very development. I will have no issue bearing the weight of their silence, the impersonal tone of their insipid nature that will and does find me whenever I stand to argue my case. So when I state that a poppy is not a symbol of remembrance but the perpetuation of a specific brand of capitalism and Western White Supremacist elitism, I expect to be hailed as iconoclastic, to be tarnished as a radical of the anti-world, yet little would they know that my origins, my makeup of 40 sperm, lay in the blood-soaked earth that their very poppy bloomed from, affording me the right to refute its display as I myself stand as the poppy incarnated along with all its connoted tenets. This is equally true of all those members of the world who at some point found themselves constituting in part the stalwart body of British empire.

To the fallen men and women of Britain my only wish is that you could have seen your nation from the same periphery as those who renounce its ideology and charity. To have the critical means of being able to elucidate the very government that acted or still acts with such little compassion and regard for even the life of its own members, to reduce your collective memory to a red-papered artificial flower or wreath is surely a crime unto itself. The bitter truth is that this disingenuous and ill-preserved nature of the prevailing establishment was and still remains responsible for squandering your life and those of your combatants, in return for a mere sum that you, your relatives and your fellow citizens will never see. I only wish that you were able to find the human trapped inside this rampant machine and help lead him back towards the grand light.

The sporting of poppies will not put an end to the genocide that plagues our current disposition, nor will they help salvage the millions of lives that have been lost in the entire pretence of war, for in both philosophy and price it is safe to say that war only serves to destroy. Thus the most dangerous soldier is one who is naturally endowed with the ability to love a foreign world. One who recognises his own existence in the dilapidated life of those who suffer for his privilege. Whose weapons are gentle adorations beckoning to expose the cavities of horror every apparent hero lacks the courage to ever confront. Whose uniform comprises of the worn down earth drowning in ruined chance as he stands to bear all, marching forth alone with the carnage that murders the last still waters. And so from the private barracks of his own soul, he quietly wishes that an apology had the power to undo its crime.