From my vantage point here in the west of Ireland my connection to what happens in Britain is simultaneously both distant and intimate.
It is impossible to watch any British TV programme at this time of year without noticing the ubiquity of the Poppy.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but the wearing of the Poppy by people on British TV seems to be happening earlier and earlier.
Why this is I can only conjecture.
What is it that is being remembered?
Is it the appalling death toll of war?
Or is it also something else?
In psychotherapy there is a well-known phenomenon called “the presenting problem.”
The therapist has to clear away the presenting problem and assist the client in locating the real source of the angst.
In my own clinical practice clients almost always self refer with a “presenting problem”.
Often the real issue is rooted in their childhood. This loss or trauma that they have suffered the client may not be fully aware of, however it generates emotions that mug them in everyday life.
Carl Jung said there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
I watched with interest historian Dan Snow’s own personal journey back to the Somme and the role-played by his great grandfather General Snow.
It was both fascinating and painful to watch the eminently likeable Snow discover his great grandfather’s clear culpability in the biggest loss of British life in any conflict on a single day in history.
Britain marched into the First World War a global superpower. The new Kaiser on the block was challenging Britain’s hegemony in Europe.
Britain limped out of the “war to end all wars” shattered and dependent of aid from the US.
When round two came around in 1939 without Lend Lease then the formal involvement of the USA Britain could not have survived the onslaught of the Nazis.
Although the Poppy is a symbol of all those who have died in Britain’s wars, be those conflicts large or small, the Poppy is about the Great War.
The dead whose names are etched on war memorials in Flanders and across the lands of the British Empire are remembered and honoured by those who wear the Poppy at this time of year.
I cannot help, but think that this is the presenting problem.
What is really being mourned is the loss of global power.
Britain’s global unipolarity died on the Somme.
It was the end of the British century.
It would be forty years after the Somme before a US president admonished British Prime Minister Eden over Suez.
Eden’s own life as a soldier and a statesman is the reason why the Poppy is a symbol of national mourning.
He had an elder brother called Timothy and a younger brother, Nicholas, who was killed when the battle cruiser HMS Indefatigable blew up and sank at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
During the First World War, Eden served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and reached the rank of captain. He received a Military Cross, and at the age of twenty-one became the youngest brigade-major in the British Army. At a conference in the early 1930s, he and Adolf Hitler observed that they had probably fought on opposite sides of the trenches in the Ypres sector.
Since 1945 Britain has been unable to, independently and without US assistance, do anything other than the most limited of military actions.
Today Britain is back in the North West frontier, but this time under US command.
The British Army, the same army that mobilised millions of men to take on the Kaiser and Hitler can only permanently deploy a brigade-sized force.
In Afghanistan British solders have died because of the lack of appropriate vehicles and helicopters to airlift wounded men back for swift medical aid.
Britain’s soldiers will continue to die in Afghanistan for as long as they are ordered by their US superiors to do so.
The descent of Britain from global superpower to broken society in less than a lifetime is both simultaneously tragic and fascinating.
Perhaps the English hostility to a greater European integration is that a clearly defined European polity is the end of the pretence that Britain, on the world stage, is a major power.
No doubt my Cumann na mBan Mayo grandmother would have gorged on schadenfreude.
I understand why old Julia would have loved to have lived long enough to see the nation that produced the landlords and the Tans so humbled on the world stage.
I can understand her view, but part of me also sees the human sadness in Britain’s irreversible decline.
One day the British will turn towards Europe and re-connect with that part of themselves.
That process may well take the rest of this century.
In the meantime they mourn the loss of their global dominance.
Forgive me Julia I believe that you and all your clan were correct to fight the “Brits” in 1920, but your grandson’s hometown has shifted from Workshop to Workfare. The transition from Highland Light Infantry to heroin is complete.
Now that is a loss worth mourning.
talman
PROTEST AGAINST BRITISH IMPERIALISM
WALK OUT OF STADIUM ON 10 MINUTE MARK
CONTINUE PROTEST – MEET AT WALFRID STATUE
The SPL has decided that all Scottish Premier League clubs should support the Poppy Scotland Appeal. Celtic PLC without proper reference even to its own board, supporters groups or employees has decided to comply with the SPL’s recommendation and has produced a special strip embroidered with a red poppy to be worn by all players in today’s match against Motherwell.
For Celtic to support such an enterprise is extremely insensitive to the huge fan base that the club has in Ireland. In recent times many of our supporters in Ireland have suffered directly at the hands of the British Army, an army whose soldiers we are expected to applaud and commemorate today.
This is an insult to our supporters in Ireland and to all of the many thousands with Irish heritage and ancestry that follow the club. How can the Celtic PLC board expect our supporters to lend support to an army that has plundered and murdered many of our own people?
Bloody Sunday, The Ballymurphy Massacre, the murders of Aiden McAnespie and Peter McBride – these are just a few of the atrocities committed by British troops in Ireland.
This is not about the fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers who were conscripted to fight in two world wars. This poppy day is about the British Army in the here and now – and is being given extra impetus this year because of the falling recruitment figures as a result of its involvement in unpopular conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our protest is not aimed at individuals who wear the poppy, it is against the idea that Celtic as an institution should be backing British imperialism in any way shape or form.
We believe that the poppy appeal has long passed its original aims to commemorate the fallen conscripts of two world wars and has now become a focal point to rally support for the modern professional volunteer soldiers of the British Army and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
An honourable compromise could have been reached if the club had opted to wear the White Poppy which symbolises peace and opposition to all wars, but it seems that other political agendas are now at work in our club.
The Celtic Chairman John Reid is fond of telling us to “leave your politics at the door” yet this former minister in the British war cabinet continues to bring his own British imperialist and unionist politics into our club. Dr Reid should follow his own advice.
It is a disgraceful turnaround in the history of our club that we should even consider endorsing a celebration of the British Army. Celtic was founded by Irishmen who opposed British military involvement in Ireland and whose lives were devoted to this club, the Irish community in Scotland and the struggle to free their homeland from British rule.
It’s time to reclaim our club from those who would prefer to wrap it in the Union Jack rather than the Irish Tricolour.
Printed & Published by Celts Against Imperialism
Supported by Cairde Na hEireann, TAL Fanzine, Green Brigade
November 13, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Ryan
Jake,
Were you there on Saturday? It seems as if you were due to your almost 1st hand account of proceedings.
But then again, I doubt that you were. Why would anyone want to go to a place that they have dubbed ‘Septic’ Park. How very mature.
In your post you make out that Poppies commemorate only WWI & II. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought it was for all the poor sods used as pawns in great territorial crusades of the past and present day.
I think you will find if you bothered to listen to anyone of the protesters you would find that evry single one of them would not decry the great sacrifice made by young men and women in the ‘Great’ wars.
Sacrifices made so that people would be free to air a voice of discontent at warmongering UK politicians who have advocated illegal occupations and brutal slayings past and present, NOT the general British public as you may love to believe.
Humans can deal with grief in a manner of ways. If you want to have a minute’s silence then absolutely fine. It is very hard for an Irishman or sympathiser to grieve for every British pawn killed in action outside the Great wars.
If you can’t comprehend that basic fact, then fair enough. Just don’t expect everyone to adhere to your blinkered viewpoint.
As an aside, this is an issue which has divided Celtic fans almost as much as any ‘songs’ issue. To continually lump all Celtic fans together as some sort of ‘United Front’ outside of football matters is absurd, presumptious, dangerous and downright slanderous.
November 13, 2008 at 9:43 am
jake
In December 1915, when I was seventeen and a half, I ran away from home to join the 4th Battalion East Surreys. I was under age so I had to lie to the recruitment sergeant. I said I was eighteen years old and my name was Sydney Harrison. I told the truth later though, because if I’d been killed as Harrison, nobody would ever have known what happened to me.
Arras was the first time I went over the top. We played football together as we went over. That was the tradition in the East Surreys. I remember the ball dropping at my feet and I passed it to Captain Maxwell. ‘That was a good pass you made young Withers!’ he shouted before he thumped it towards the German lines.
I got wounded at the end of that battle. I was temporarily blinded in one eye but it could have been worse. At the end of the battle, I lay bleeding in a trench. There was blood coming out of my eye, pouring out all over my face. My head looked blown in. They thought I was dead and they were going to bury me. I was in a half-conscious state and I can remember a soldier getting hold of me and saying “Here – this blokes alive!’ That man saved my life, by calling that out. I’d have been buried alive in Arras, if it hadn’t been for him.
Above, the words of Cecil Withers from the book “Last Post – The Final Word From Our First World War Soldiers”. Cecil recounts his time on the Western Front as a teenager fighting for our country.
Last weekend 65 senior football matches were played in Great Britain. Prior to kick-off at 64 of them, fans of opposing clubs put aside their rivalries and stood silent in tribute to those brave men and women who gave their lives in service of our country. In the 65th senior game the mould was broken. Ce ltic Football Club spat in the face of common decency by instead hosting a minute’s applause in recognition of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Think about it. Applause. For 20 million lives destroyed.
Those of a Ce ltic persuasion couldn’t even bring themselves to admit who they were honouring. The Ce ltic Park Master of Ceremonies told the 55,000 crowd the minute’s applause was to remember “the Ce ltic players who died in both World Wars”. He further stated that the clapping of hands to show respect for the dead is “the Ce ltic way”. It most certainly is.
Of course the increasingly incompetent Lex Gold of the SPL must shoulder part of the blame for the shame that this has heaped upon Scottish football. The option of a minute’s applause as an alternative to the traditional silence should never have entered his distorted mind. In the name of decency it simply shouldn’t have been an option. Let’s not mince words here. This option was devised to save Ce ltic Football Club acute embarrassment.
In decrying Gold, let’s not lose sight of who the real culprits are in this blackest of days for Scottish football. Ce ltic Football Club. Their directors and Chief Executive could and should have insisted they follow protocol. Their Chairman is a former Secretary for Defence for God’s sake. They could and should have shown they cared and turned their backs on the hate-filled cretins amongst their support who intended disrupting proceedings. They could and should have requested police eject anyone breaking the silence from their stadium or arrest them for breach of the peace. But damage limitation, not decency and decorum, was order of the day and foremost in the minds of John Reid, Peter Lawwell and Co.
“Keep the name of Celtic clean at all costs” the mantra once again. Thus they opted to shame themselves and their football club in the most contemptible way imaginable.
Predictably the Celtic-minded apologists were at their pre and post-match best, deflecting and rewriting as only they can. On Saturday morning the Daily Record told us the minutes applause was introduced in Scotland after Hearts fans disrupted a silence for the Pope. Lies. The first minutes applause in Scotland took place at Septic Park in honour of the late great George Best. The reason? Best had made some derogatory remarks about Gerry Adams and the IRA in his Mail on Sunday column a year earlier, propmting outrage in Republican circles. The Ce ltic heirarchy knew any silence would be disrupted.
At pains to propagate the increasingly risible “tiny-minority” line, the media once again did Peter Lawwell’s bidding for him. Numbers for those who walked out of Ce ltic Park in protest against “British Imperialism” ranged from a few hundred to Hugh Keevins’ ridiculous 20 figure. Mark Guidi in the Sunday Mail clawed hopelessly as he stated “a maximum of 80 Ce ltic fans left the stadium”. How bloody desperate.
Ce ltic of course refused to speak out, their work done for them. “Not worthy of comment” said a Celtic spokesman, just as 3500 of their fans singing loudly in tribute to their IRA heroes at Tynecastle the previous weekend
November 12, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Tony
Excellent article Phil. Especially because it got me to thinking, as some of your analysis was new to me.
November 11, 2008 at 3:11 pm
steve thomson
You really are very bitter the things that upset the Irish about the British happened so many years ago its time to move on.If they want to remember the war dead then so what the Irish can remember there war dead as well.These type of stories just keep the hatred going its time to stop recalling the past wrongs and get on with the future.
November 8, 2008 at 12:10 pm
MadraRua
To speak the lie that the poppy commemerates the First world war only, whilst gloryfying the neverending conflicts of British warmongers in every decade since, demeans the deaths of those exploited working class men, all those years ago.
November 7, 2008 at 6:21 pm
martin connolly
well said phil
November 7, 2008 at 5:52 pm
McElwee
Nail on the head Phil, nail on the head. Superb stuff as ever!! Take a bow.
November 7, 2008 at 1:43 pm