Lest we forget

It's that time of year again - I've started to notice the red poppies appearing on newscasters and politicians.

As ever, I will be wearing a white poppy instead of a red one. As I said in last years's post, I know I owe my freedom to many men and women that fought for that freedom but I choose to honour them in my own way.

To my mind, the events surrounding Remembrance Day are full of pomp and ceremony - marching bands, flags and medals. Instead Remembrance Day should be about:

educating the next generation about the futility and stupidity of war;

encouraging politicians to realise that it's not good enough to just think about their four years in office;

foreign policies that reach into the next ten, twenty, fifty years allowing the analysis of where future wars might occur so preventative action can be taken in good time.

When the White Poppy was originally launched in 1933 by the Co-operative Women's Guild it was as 'a Pledge to Peace that war must not happen again'. Many of the women in the guild who 'were mothers, sisters and widows and sweethearts of men killed in the First World War began to feel with the rising domestic and international tensions that the ‘war to end all wars’, in which their men had died, would be followed by an even worse war. The white poppy was born out of this fear. But more than that the people who wore it did so as a commitment to peace and to insist that those in power should resist war; that conflicts should be resolved without violence and with justice.'

Since the launch of the White Poppy there have been over 300 wars world wide and over 100 million people have died (this is a very conservative estimate). Lest we forget?! How can we forget when the number is growing on an almost daily basis? Whilst western Europe is enjoying a period of relative peace, many parts of the world resemble those black and white pictures that we all saw in our history lessons at school - buildings being bombed, people running and hiding in fear of their lives, prisoners of war being held (and killed), teenaged men and women in control of killing machines ...

I will wear my White Poppy in the coming days to say with my one small voice that war is a crime against humanity and I renounce it.


[Quotations and data taken from the Peace Pledge Union website.]