‘I fear wearing the poppy has become a symbol of racism’
YES, the boys and girls of the BBC and ITV, and all our lively media and sports personalities and politicians, are at it again.
They’re flaunting their silly poppies once more to show their super-correctness in the face of history, as ignorant or forgetful as ever that their tired fashion accessory was inspired by a poem which urged the soldiers of the Great War of 1914-18 to go on killing and slaughtering.
But that’s no longer quite the point, for I fear there are now darker reasons why these TV chumps and their MP interviewees sport their red badges on their clothes.
For who are they commemorating? The dead of Sarajevo? Of Srebrenica? Of Aleppo? Nope. The television bumpkins only shed their crocodile tears for the dead of World Wars I and II, who were (save for a colonial war or two) the last generation of Britons to get the chop before the new age of “webomb-you-die” technology ensured that their chaps – browneyed, for the most part, often Muslims, usually dark-skinned – got blown to bits while our chaps flew safely home to the mess for breakfast.
And perhaps I sniff something equally per nicious among the studio boys and girls. On Britain’s international television channels, Christmas was long ago banned (save for news stories on the Pope). There are no Christmas trees any more beside the presenters’ desks, not a sprig of holly. For we live in a multicultural society, in which such manifestations might be offensive to other “cultures” (I use that word advisedly, for culture to me means Beethoven and the poet Hafiz and Monet).
And for the same reason, our inter national screens never show the slightest clue of Eid festivities (save again for news stories) lest this, too, offends another “culture”.
Yet the poppy just manages to sneak on to BBC World; it is permissible, you see, the very last symbol that “our” dead remain more precious than the millions of human beings we’ve killed in the Middle East for whom we wear no token of remembrance.
Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will be wearing his poppy this week – but not for those he liquidated in his grotesque invasion of Iraq. And in this sense, I fear that the wearing of the poppy has become a symbol of racism. In his old-fashioned way, and he read a lot about post-imperial history, I think my father, who was 93 when he died, understood this. – The Independent