poppies

Interesting article from Vincent Browne with regards to Remembrance Sunday, poppies etc. Thought the article might be of interest as there has been alot of debate on here over the last few weeks regarding this situation.

Whisper of infamy absent from remembrance

12 November 2006 By Vincent Browne
This afternoon, President Mary McAleese will attend what is called an ‘ecumenical service of remembrance and reconciliation’ in St Patrick’s Cathedral.

This afternoon, President Mary McAleese will attend what is called an ‘ecumenical service of remembrance and reconciliation’ in St Patrick’s Cathedral.

In a tribute to her hosts, the British Legion, she will probably sport a poppy, which is the fundraising device for the British Legion and is the emblem used to commemorate ‘the Fallen’ of the First World War. The poppy is associated with that war because of the poem, In Flanders Fields, written by Canadian doctor Major John McCrae.

It is a moving but troubling poem:

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,




That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

It was King George V who, in 1919, suggested the inauguration of a Remembrance Day in honour of the British armed forces who were killed in the Great War from 1914-1918. It was an understandable patriotic gesture on the part of a monarch who, at the outset of the war, had changed the name of the royal family from the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the house of Windsor.

He also relinquished the use of all German titles used by the royal family. For instance, his cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, became Louis Mountbatten, first Marquess of Milford Haven. The king stripped of their British titles his many relatives who fought on the German side in that war, although they did so because they were German.

That war was precipitated on June 28, 1914, when a Bosnian terrorist killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, in Sarajevo. This led Austria to declare war on Serbia.

That in turn brought Russia, an ally of Serbia, into the conflict.

Because France was an ally of Russia, France also became involved. Germany opportunistically thought it would get involved on the side of Austria - and this caused Britain, also opportunistically, to become involved, on the side of Russia and France.

There had been a naval arms race between Britain and Germany since 1906, and both sides wanted control of the seas. There was no cause, no rationale, no honour. Just imperial power politics.

In that war, between 10 and 12 million people lost their lives and another 20 million people were injured. It was the most barbaric war the world had known up to that time.

That so many were slaughtered is an abomination. There was nothing honourable about that war, no just cause. It was despicable from the outset and no individual bravery or heroism could dignify it.

That war deserves to be remembered in infamy, not renown.

Those who died on all sides were victims of evil, victims of empire.

But will a whisper of that infamy be uttered in St Patrick’s Cathedral this afternoon - or anywhere else where official Remembrance Day ceremonies take place? Will our voluble president utter even a word of dismay over the loss of thousands of Irish lives so ignominiously?

Among those who encouraged Irishmen to engage in that infamous enterprise was one of the newly-resuscitated heroes of our history, John Redmond. A Nationalist MP since 1880, Redmond was a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1910, he was elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary party.

It is glibly said of him that he was ‘passionately’ opposed to physical force. But that passion did not deter him from supporting the most shameful exercise of physical force the world had ever known at that time, World War I. His rhetorical defence of this position was based on the contention that the war was about the defence of small nations, in this instance ‘‘gallant little Belgium’’.

Belgium was then the most odious of all the colonial powers. It had subjected the people of the Congo to appalling ravages and cruelties. Pictures of mountains of severed Congolese hands are testimony to that cruelty. More than a million Congolese are estimated to have died in the enterprise to bring ‘civilisation’ to that part of the continent.

Out of that infernal venture, there emerged one story of heroism - on the part, incidentally, of an Irishman. Roger Casement was the first to expose the nature of ‘‘gallant Belgium’’. He later became involved in another relatively insignificant exercise of physical force, the 1916 Rising, which gallant Redmond thought was morally indefensible.

Redmond and his associates were responsible for encouraging more Irish people to engage in physical force than were ever to be engaged in any other exercise of physical force in history. Thousands and thousands of Irish people - and more than 10 million others - died for nothing on the fields of Flanders and elsewhere in that war.

Redmond and his friends encouraged people to fight and die for a cause that deserved the loss of not a single life. They did so for reasons that they thought were good, but many crimes against humanity were inspired by similar convictions.

Isn’t it curious that those who have recently denounced the commemoration of the 1916 rebellion on the grounds that it involved the loss of hundreds of lives are, in many instances, those who ‘commemorate’ the First World War, without regard for the essential infamy of that enterprise?

In Flanders Fields concludes:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

What quarrel, what foe, what torch, what faith, though poppies grow in Flanders fields?
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