Wearing a Poppy

[kphoger]

Didn't even know today was a holiday, until I saw this thread yesterday.

Yep. I knew tomorrow was a holiday (never forget the 11K sacrificed to symbolism!) but today? Nah.

Yep.  Then there's that.  So I guess I do have off work after all!   

[Takumi]

Didn't even know today was a holiday, until I saw this thread yesterday.

Yep. I knew tomorrow was a holiday (never forget the 11K sacrificed to symbolism!) but today? Nah.

Correction: over 16 million sacrificed over "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans".  More than just Americans were there, kiddo.

You get out of here with your "logic"  and your "reasonable takes" !

[english si]

In recent years it has become more common to wear a poppy that is white (for peace) rather than red, though this still attracts controversy.

Because the virtue signalling with them is even higher than with the 'wear your poppy with pride' campaigns and such like? Especially as white poppy wearers are like vegans and don't shut up about how much more righteous they are for supporting white poppies instead of/as well as red poppies.

Also the money can go anywhere with no centralised control over what local vendors do with the money from selling them (it's different to the donate-and-receive approach of the red poppies) - they can keep it, they can fund 'peace' in ways that actually are funding war (sorry, I meant throwing off the yoke of oppression with bombs and guns to bring about peace), and they can actually support stuff that the white poppies are meant to be about like helping non-combatant victims/refugees and promoting peace. I imagine they mostly do the third, but unless they say so, I have no way of knowing.

Remembrance Day is not a bank holiday in Britain, though there is generally a moment of silence at 11 AM (eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

Though today, as a weekend, it's less firmly done - which I imagine is one of the reasons why it's not a Bank Holiday: people wouldn't be at work or in school and thus can ignore it as they are at home and no one is watching. I gather schools and stuff held silences at 11am yesterday. There's also the civic services on the nearest Sunday across the land, so as well as the 11th there's generally a silence on that Sunday and the main TV channels, all news channels, etc, will show the silence from the Cenotaph where the state focuses its remembrance. Ironically they are unsilencing Big Ben tomorrow for a short time to allow it to bong eleven times during that silence.

The silence is traditionally 2 minutes, but when I was young the one at school was 1 minute, and those two minutes aren't typically applied to with military precision, especially when not at some civic function with the kinds of people who complain about that sort of thing.

[J N Winkler]

Didn't even know today was a holiday, until I saw this thread yesterday.

For the Wichita Public Library, this is actually a double-width holiday this year:  libraries closed on November 10 because that is the observance day for the City of Wichita (of which the library is administratively a part), and again on November 11 for Veterans Day proper.  This ensures nobody has to work at the library on either the holiday itself or its observance day, though I get slightly uneasy about having the library closed (meaning ebooks are the only way to get something to read) for two consecutive days.

In recent years it has become more common to wear a poppy that is white (for peace) rather than red, though this still attracts controversy.

Because the virtue signalling with them is even higher than with the 'wear your poppy with pride' campaigns and such like? Especially as white poppy wearers are like vegans and don't shut up about how much more righteous they are for supporting white poppies instead of/as well as red poppies.

Besides the virtue signalling, I've had the impression some (especially on the right) see the white poppies as a slight against those who gave their lives to defeat oppressive regimes, as it obviously was not possible to beat Hitler while remaining pacifist.

[english si]

Besides the virtue signalling, I've had the impression some (especially on the right) see the white poppies as a slight against those who gave their lives to defeat oppressive regimes, as it obviously was not possible to beat Hitler while remaining pacifist.

I think it's less the not possible to not beat Hitler by war, but mostly the falling off the other side of the horse when it comes to the "all sides" nature of the commemoration and going around and talking about 'the victims of British aggression'. It's doubly bad as we're focused on WW1 (though not the Irish front that opened in 1916 and went on for decades after the armistice on the Western Front) and WW2, rather than wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, on Remembrance Day.

The Peace Poppy Charity spent a lot of the 70s and 80s saying that red poppies were Unionist on the Ulster question as (unsurprisingly) only Unionists wore them and they were an alternative. While they insisted they were non-political, people turned them into an anti-Unionist symbol - hence why Thatcher: who had lost friends to assassinations, and nearly was murdered herself, by the IRA, found white poppies repugnant - it was personal.

[kkt]

The wearing of poppies was because poppies grow in Flanders, which was a sector of heavy deaths for the British and commonwealth troops.  The poem "In Flanders Fields" further reinforcing the wearing of poppies was by John McCrae, a Canadian.  It is not surprising that poppies as a memorial have more meaning to the British, Canadians, and other commonwealth countries.

[roadman]

In recent years it has become more common to wear a poppy that is white (for peace) rather than red, though this still attracts controversy.

Because the virtue signalling with them is even higher than with the 'wear your poppy with pride' campaigns and such like? Especially as white poppy wearers are like vegans and don't shut up about how much more righteous they are for supporting white poppies instead of/as well as red poppies.

Also the money can go anywhere with no centralised control over what local vendors do with the money from selling them (it's different to the donate-and-receive approach of the red poppies) - they can keep it, they can fund 'peace' in ways that actually are funding war (sorry, I meant throwing off the yoke of oppression with bombs and guns to bring about peace), and they can actually support stuff that the white poppies are meant to be about like helping non-combatant victims/refugees and promoting peace. I imagine they mostly do the third, but unless they say so, I have no way of knowing.

Remembrance Day is not a bank holiday in Britain, though there is generally a moment of silence at 11 AM (eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

Though today, as a weekend, it's less firmly done - which I imagine is one of the reasons why it's not a Bank Holiday: people wouldn't be at work or in school and thus can ignore it as they are at home and no one is watching. I gather schools and stuff held silences at 11am yesterday. There's also the civic services on the nearest Sunday across the land, so as well as the 11th there's generally a silence on that Sunday and the main TV channels, all news channels, etc, will show the silence from the Cenotaph where the state focuses its remembrance. Ironically they are unsilencing Big Ben tomorrow for a short time to allow it to bong eleven times during that silence.

The silence is traditionally 2 minutes, but when I was young the one at school was 1 minute, and those two minutes aren't typically applied to with military precision, especially when not at some civic function with the kinds of people who complain about that sort of thing.

For the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, our local transit system in Boston would stop all trains and buses on all lines at 8:46 am, the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center, for a one minute observance of silence.

[02 Park Ave]

I wore a poppy.  I knew a fellow who had been gassed in the Great War.  I wore it in honor of him.

Back in the Fifties every radio station in the US went silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

[english si]

I knew a fellow who had been gassed in the Great War.

WW1 seems increasingly removed from us nowadays, without connections like this. Especially as we lost the last handful of those who saw warfare in the trenches early this century, with Harry Patch (the last, though he hated that he'd outlived the others) dying in 2009 just after the second-last, aged fittingly with all the ones (like 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month): 111 years, 1 month, 1 week and 1 day.

He especially disliked the attention he got for living so long - he didn't feel he warranted honoring over his brothers-in-arms - he'd take the honours, but stress that he wasn't taking them for him, but as a stand in for all those who weren't there to receive it. He got the Légion d'honneur with all the other survivors on the 80th anniversary, which was bumped from Knight to Officer a couple of months before his death. He got a Belgium knighthood on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele, which he fought in. He got a televised funeral at his local cathedral with various dignitaries (though they did try and obey his wishes so no gun salute as he didn't like guns, nor that much pomp - it was 'just' the Dutchess of Cornwall, rather than her and the Prince of Wales). He got several poems and songs about him, all of which honour him by being immensely sad about friends lost to futility and the horror of war.

3 years ago, I spend 3 hours (it took that long as there were loads of people, and loads of poppies) shuffling around the Tower of London in near silence (along with the other umpteen thousand there that morning) where a poppy had been placed for every British/Commonwealth Soldier who killed in the war. It was unbelievably sad with a moat full of hundreds of thousands of poppies.