“He who has the
ultimate laugh
Will without a doubt
Laugh alone with moistened eyes
And nothing to laugh about!”
From Kem Dikra Kem Chhe by Bachchoo
Boris Johnson, mayor of Lon-don, has asked Her Majesty to prolong the life of an “art installation” by a week.
The installation is a sea of red ceramic poppies planted in the moat around the Tower of London, Royal territory. The Tower of London is one of London’s chief tourist attractions and the sea of a million poppies is bringing them in in larger numbers. Each poppy represents a soldier who died in the First World War on the British side. The German dead are not commemorated here.
The poppies are planted on wire stems for the period of remembrance which precedes the anniversary of the Ar-mistice signed to end the war on November 11, 1918. The poppy moat commemorates a 100 years since the war began.
Outside Downing Street, where this cul-de-sac meets Whitehall is an obelisk known as The Cenotaph. It is the memorial to the fallen at which the reigning monarch and family together with the leading politicians of the day ceremonially lay wreaths each year.
On the other side of the Cenotaph from Downing Street is the building to which the monarch and grandees facing the monument turn their backs out of whose ground floor window Charles I was brought out on to a platform to have his head chopped off by order of the rebel Republican Cromwell Parliament.
The ceremony is atten-ded in full regalia, with morning coats worn by the princes and atten-ding politicians. Only once and memorably, Michael Foot, the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party, an avo-wed socialist turned up at the Cenotaph dressed in a worker’s “donkey jacket”. It wasn’t as the media immediately dubbed it, a snub to the martyred dead. Foot was symbolically trying to represent the class and ideology he was elected by his party to serve and was all but horse-whipped for it.
But enough of tourism and anecdote! The poppies in the repre-sentative fields of the fallen are ceramic in this hundredth year after the war began. In previous years and today poppies made of red crepe cloth were and are traditionally worn on the lapels of jackets and the fronts of coats or dresses by the populace who buy a poppy and thus contribute to a charity that helps sol-diers and their widows. Some people wear them in memory of dead ancestors. Some refuse to buy and wear them. Pacifists, for instance, refuse to support any-thing to do with war. Socialists reject this nationalistic symbolism on the grounds that it sanctioned the un-warranted slaughter of innocents sent out to die for king and country in order to perpetuate an unjust capitalist or imperialist order. I have myself, when offered a poppy by military cadets, schoolchildren who volunteer to carry trays of them to the streets in boy-scout or girl-guidish acts, been reminded of the 65,000 Indian soldiers shipped out from India and killed in this Great War. What were they fighting for? The continuation of the Raj? The repelling of a rapacious Germany or Turkey which would if they won overrun India and treat India as a conquered or liberated nation?
I said I thought about it but came to no conclusions and so over the last decades have never worn a poppy and so refused to participate in charitable British patriotism.
This year there seems to be an additional reason for not wearing the poppy. One young poppy seller in Manc-hester was attacked by a man who ignited the spray of an aerosol can in his face. The can acted as a small flame-thrower and the poor poppy seller suffered multiple burns to his face and scalp.
Though the perpetrator has not been apprehended (or “is absconding” as we would say) and no motive can be attributed to his criminal assault, very many people believe that it is a petty manifestation of the same motive that impelled two African convert “jihadis” to stab and hack to death Fusilier Rigby, a 25-year-old British soldier on the streets of Wool-wich in open daylight in May last year.
Now the charity that runs the poppy sales says there has been a falling off of sales despite the centenary of the war and they attribute it to potential contributors being afraid to wear the symbolic flower and risk being attacked for supporting the British armed forces in the smallest way.
This fear or reluctance may sound like the absurd exaggeration of a miniscule risk, but it has been fuelled by the warnings that the Prime Minister and the security services have issued against terror acts from British jihadis who return to this country from Syria or Iraq having fought with or been trained by the Islamic Caliphate.
There are groups of Islamicists in Britain, who make it their business to gather at the ceremonial reception into the country by relatives, friends and mourners of the coffins carrying the corpses of British soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan or elsewhere. These Islamists shout insults at the dead bodies and at the mourners but don’t risk being torn limb from limb on the streets by the attending soldiers, relatives or mourners as they are assiduously protected by the British police in the interests of free speech. They stand behind these police lines, do their jeering and go back to their home towns by coach.
Since the Isis crisis the British security services have picked up and decoded messages from jihadis who have returned to this country threatening to kill soldiers in the way that Fusilier Rigby was murdered. The threat comes from Islamicists who regard themselves as in the front line of their “jihad”, so it may be that the milder or rear-rank jihadis will content themselves with assaults on poppy-sellers and wearers. I am now going to go out and buy a poppy to test my theory.
