Poppy Watch

[armaghniac]

Are we are better placed now than we were in the 70's during the troubles? We are still governed by London but we have a voice in how we run things (albeit a small one)

Fair enough. But this week with the various forms of poppy carry on it is clear how just how little progress has been made. Parity of esteem, my aЯse!

[4father]

Did Germany want peace by occupying those countries? Could they have maybe been talked out of it? I've missed that part during history lesson.

Many a corner boy was thrust into the war here by people unwilling to get their hands dirty or caught for that matter, were they prawns used by people?

Are we are better placed now than we were in the 70's during the troubles? We are still governed by London but we have a voice in how we run things (albeit a small one) If we move into a republic (not that they want us) will you be happier

I've a family to look after, their lives are far more important to me than this hate filled country. So I don't have a view on it, know too many families that have lost dear ones for nothing

Yep, I was a 'corner boy' turned revolutionary.  Did 7 years in the Kesh for being part of what was a genuine revolution.  The difference with colonial army's is that many of them are mercenaries, conscripts or people with no future at all so they join the army for a job or to play real Call of Duty.  Genuine revolutionaries on the other hand do things out of love, love for their people.  Just my outlook as a 'corner boy' whether you agree or not.  I'd also a family.  Did that make me a bad person?  Maybe I'm a bit older than you just (I don't know if i am by the way), maybe my family and my neighbours were more victims of the British army than your family or neighbours were, I don't know.

While I believe that Nationalists are more confident and assertive about their political views now than in the 70s, nothing has changed much in terms of the revolution.  The revolution died in my opinion not long after the hunger strikes.  If you are a fenian, you still face the same inequalities that fenians did in the 70s (hard to believe but true) in terms of education, employment, business etc.  Our 'small' voice is indeed that, a small insignificant voice governed by the treasury of Whitehall.  And no, I wouldn't be happier if we just move into the republic.  To quote a hero of mine and a visionary whose words are as relevant today as they were when he was active: "If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords..." but that's a different debate. 

I don't mind if you are apathetic, you are not unlike lots of other people but some of us are political.  This is where you and I would probably disagree until the end of time.  I care very much about my family and I feed them etc just like you but I also care about families who are victims of colonialism and capitalism here and around the world. 

It seems Thatcher's message has worked on some Irish people but thank god there are enough people that it will never work on.

[Hardy]

Lillies? Prawns?

Jesus Christ!

[Tony Baloney]

Lillies? Prawns?

Jesus Christ!

I was prepared to let "prawn" go unmentioned. You have no heart.

[Milltown Row2]

Lillies? Prawns?

Jesus Christ!

I was prepared to let "prawn" go unmentioned. You have no heart.

Predictive text on my phone FFS 

Anyway back on the computer. You my have that view 4father and I'm not here to knock your views. I know a lot of revolutionaries who have various views on this.

Living on the Falls road during the troubles, I seen it first hand, neighbours killed, family shot at and friends who lost love ones. there were periods were the street was being raided daily.

As i said before there were many a corner boy who i went to school with, who joined for different reasons to the one you did.

You being older than me means?

But people wearing poppy's Should not annoy you or anyone else for that matter

[4father]

You being older than me means?

I wasn't doing the, "i'm older than you, i know better".  I don't know what age you are (i've an idea now), I was just trying to put it into perspective that I may have grew up in a different era from you, that's all.

But people wearing poppy's Should not annoy you or anyone else for that matter

I didn't write that people wearing poppy's annoyed me anywhere.  It doesn't.  I wrote what I disliked about Poppy's.  I completely understand people wearing them.  But if you don't mind, i'll decide what annoys me and what doesn't.

[Rossfan]

But people wearing poppy's Should not annoy you or anyone else for that matter

I didn't write that people wearing poppy's annoyed me anywhere.  It doesn't.  I wrote what I disliked about Poppy's.  I completely understand people wearing them.  But if you don't mind, i'll decide what annoys me and what doesn't.
[/quote]
Some murderin of apostrophes going on.

[4father]

Sorry, that wasn't taught in the Kesh too well. 

[Milltown Row2]

You being older than me means?

I wasn't doing the, "i'm older than you, i know better".  I don't know what age you are (i've an idea now), I was just trying to put it into perspective that I may have grew up in a different era from you, that's all.

But people wearing poppy's Should not annoy you or anyone else for that matter

I didn't write that people wearing poppy's annoyed me anywhere.  It doesn't.  I wrote what I disliked about Poppy's.  I completely understand people wearing them.  But if you don't mind, i'll decide what annoys me and what doesn't.

Of course nobody will ever be happy about what they wear. Be it a poppy or a Lilly. I choose to wear none.

The topic was poppy watch and it was evident that most on here wear annoyed at them

[Dougal Maguire]

I'm delighted to see our good friend 5ive Times is still alive and kicking

[thejuice]

Having lived in England for a number of years now, its much different over here. Every town has its memorial. The RAF flying shows attract large numbers and documentaries about the wars run 24/7 on the Military History channel.

What on earth do you expect on the Military History channel? Porn?

That wasn't my point. Its more that fact that such a channel exists and that it actually has an audience.

[fitzroyalty]

Although I'm not dying about the poppy I can't stand people that don't wear it in the right position!

[lynchbhoy]

I'm delighted to see our good friend 5ive Times is still alive and kicking

thought Five times was an ok chap myself.
like a lot on here there are people that you will fall out with and just not get on with.
A lot of times you regret that.
Its very easy to fall out when communication is written and can be misinterpreted.

[mylestheslasher]

Robert fisk on the poppy in todays UK indo.

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel roomtowitness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.

Bright red they were, with that particularly silly greenleafout of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snowhas maintained hisdignityby not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earthpolicyof the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion,the King'sLiverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and withoutthat ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long blackwiresnaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave melots of booksabout the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47years before I stood, amid real shellfire,inthe real Sarajevoand put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had foughtfora world that betrayed him,that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it –he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What hemeantwas that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiouslywearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patrioticand Britishwhen itsuited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confronttheirbrothers and wives and lovers and parents. At home, I still have a box of photographs of his mates, all of them killed in1918.

So like my Dad, I stopped wearing the poppy on the week before Remembrance Day, 11 November, when on the 11th hour of the 11 month of 1918, the armistice ended the war called Great. I didn't feel I deserved towearit and I didn't think itrepresented mythoughts. The original idea came, of course, from the Toronto military surgeon and poet John McCrae and was inspired by the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed on 3 May 1915. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Betweenthe crosses, row on row." But it's a propaganda poem, urging readers to "take up the quarrel with the foe". Bill Fisk eventually understood this and turned against it. He was right.

I've had my share of wars, and often return to the ancient Western Front. Three years ago, I was honoured to be invited to give the annual Armistice Day Western Front memorial speech at the rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres. The ghost of my long-dead 2nd Lieutenant Dad was, of course, in the audience. I quoted all my favourite Great War writers, along with the last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, and received, shortly afterwards, a wonderful and eloquent letter from the daughter of that fine Great War soldier Edmund Blunden. (Read his Undertones of War, if you do nothing else in life.) But I didn't weara poppy.And I declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate. This was something of which I was not worthy. Instead, while theyplayedthe last post,I lookedatthe gravestones on the city walls.

As a young boy, I also went to Ypres with my Dad, stayed at the "Old Tom Hotel" (it is still there, on the same side of the square as the Cloth Hall) and met many other "old soldiers", all now dead. I remember that they wanted to remember their dead comrades. But above all, they wanted an end to war. But now I see these pathetic creatures with their little sand-pit poppies – I notice that ourmasters inthe House of Commons do the same – and I despise them. Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.

[Hoof Hearted]

The BBC have obviously relaxed their laws, or else Mark Sidebottom has said f**k yous, i will wear what i want