Description
The Red (or Flanders) Poppy has long been established across Great Britain as a favourite symbol of remembrance, punctuating the autumn calendar of mundane British civil religion. Since the turn of the century, however, the Poppy has also adorned an ever-widening range of objects, been worn for ever longer periods, and served to convey an increasingly hegemonic and confident kind of militarism. On the back of recent scholarship affirming the value of pacifist thought in politics and international relations, and adopting a Tolstoyan lens to sharpen its theoretical contributions, this paper articulates a first- and second-order pacifist critique of this drift. The first-order critique exposes the narrative inconsistency, the selective memory, and the limits of the patriotic solidarity expressed by the Poppy’s contemporary framing. The second-order critique examines the interests served by this framing across the military-industrial-entertainment complex, the contrast between memorial posturing and neo-colonial geopolitics, and the British government’s approach to caring for the priorities of its war veterans. The Red Poppy and its associated commemorations are thus shown to function like a sacred ritual in British civil religion, silencing in the process those voices that seek to question orthodox narratives about British war history and foreign policy, and othering as suspicious, uncivil, and even dangerous those who since the Great War have been saying: ‘Never Again’.
