If You Ask Me
with Malachi O'Doherty

Every year at this time I drop a coin in the box for the British Legion and then pause to consider picking up a poppy and putting it on and every year I pass. Why?

I don't like what it represents and I especially don't like the way it has come to stand for respectability.Most people believe that the wearing of that crisp paper flower in Northern Ireland follows a simple sectarian rule - Protestants do and Catholics don't - unless they are on television.

Some people see the poppy as one of those things that will one day signal full integration. Martin McGuinness will put his on, the way Mandela put on a Springbok jersey, and another symbolic barrier will have fallen. Well, there are better reasons for not wearing a poppy than it commemorating British forces, tens of thousands of whom were Irish anyway.

I don't like the remembering of service and sacrifice and national unity, the remembering of war as something that was ultimately good for us, brought out the best in us. There is something to ornate about the poppy but it is something ugly we should be remembering, a squandering of blood.

We should remember war in ways that would make us more wary of going to war again. But we don't. Bush and Blair took us to war in recent years, and most followed enthusiastically and blindly. The message of the poppy did nothing to discourage them. Gordon brown signed the cheque.

Concern for those who would suffer and die didn't get in their way. Today, young British and Irish men and women are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. We pay virtually no attention. And they are career soldiers who didn't have to join the forces. Many were eager to get out there. Are they doing a good job? They are if they are doing what they are told. Political masters sent them out and political masters will call them home.

We should remember how much young men enjoy war but be glad at least that now they do not die in the swathes that past generations died in.

Only the people of the countries we invade suffer on that scale. And that is what we should remember, that in the past war has gone horribly wrong, even for the British. And we should understand the seriousness of the game we play.

If this time the dead are not too numerous to carry home, it may be different next year. It is our enemies who determine the scale of the sacrifice we make.

Gordon Brown moves to withdraw British forces from southern Iraq. Why? Because he wants to placate an anti-war movement at home? Or because he wants those troops safe out of harm's way if the U.S. attacks Iran?

For fear that for the first time in longer than most of us can remember, British troops will be in the front line against a major power and facing the serious prospect of annihilation? W hat do you think about when you look at the poppy? Fields of scattered bodies. Do you smell blood off it?

If You Ask Me Archive