Today is Remembrance Sunday. I have conflicting personal and political feelings about this day. My own political standpoint is from anti-imperialism and this day commemorates selective remembrance based on the establishment’s terms. Elected war criminals standing at the Cenotaph. All jingoism and “our boys” mentality.
The glorification of war symbolic with the red poppy. Who are we remembering? Working class young people sent off to do the bidding of imperialism and ending up as canon fodder? War can shape political ideas, WW1 certainly shaped the political consciousness of my grandfather who realised he had been sold a lie and had been fighting a futile war where thousands died on the battlefields.
What about the victims of imperialism and colonialism? From Aden, Mau-Mau uprising, Korea, Vietnam, Ireland, Malvinas, Afghanistan and Iraq…. and so on and so on? What about the war crimes committed in Fallujah, Haditha, Bloody Sunday…and so on and so on?
And with Remembrance we have the bourgeois acceptable and sentimental poetry of Lawrence Binyen and Rupert Brooke with their heroic glorification of the soldier. While Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen saw the brutal realities of war and the battlefield, they tried to counteract the pro-war propaganda being churned out at the time. Somehow, I can’t imagine Anthem for a Doomed Youth being read out.
Below is the poem Dulce et Decorum est by Owen.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Posted by harpymarx 
Posted by harpymarx 
