Isn’t it usually the white poppy that gets called “political”? Now at last – in 2016 – the political nature of the red one has been recognised!
Of course, the government is aghast at the suggestion – although the Prime Minister only said in Parliament on Wednesday (2.11.16) that she did not “believe” the red one represented a political message. The Peace Party “knows” it does!
She then pointed out that the poppy did not relate to any one historical event. Indeed! It relates to far too many “events” – a new word to obscure the one nobody wants to mention – war.
The P.M. then went on to talk about “our players” wanting to recognise and respect those killed in war. One wonders how she knows that (no evidence appears with her statement in the following day’s “Metro”). It is clearly the establishment that wants the rest of us to support the military and to back it up when it decides to use the methods of war again in the mistaken idea that violence can solve conflict.
The old cliché is then trotted out that members of the military “give” their lives in war. Those lives are, in fact, TAKEN by governments that have FAILED to resolve conflicts by all the myriad means of non-violent conflict resolution that are now available.
The P.M. says that those lives lost were to ensure “our safety and security”. We’ve only to look at the numbers of civilians killed in Britain in the First and Second World Wars (84,000) to realise that war does NOT make anyone safe or secure. Current Middle East wars continue to demonstrate that safety and security for civilian populations can never come from the use of violence and the military to solve problems.