#“lest we forget” forget WHAT? how we “beat the bosch��? how we all had stiff upper lips and good british character while scarring the world? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mangled-by-disuse · 9 days ago

Text

when over ten million soldiers (mostly teenagers and men in their early 20s) and at least as many civilians were being blown to pieces and their twitching, bloody bodies were being carried off the battlefield over a muddy morass made up mostly of dead men and horses

how many of them d'you think thought "hey, this sucks, but it's going to make a SICK lawn ornament"?

Don't think for a second, I'd forgotten about Poppy Watch.

Displays like these are outright disrespectful, and there's a whole new industry around producing these appalling silhouette cutouts that didn't exist when I was growing up.

#armistice day #remembrance day #poppy culture #like honestly at this point FUCK remembrance day and all its trappings #i say this as an (amateur) ww1 historian who has spent a lot of time with the personal experiences of people who died in the war #waving a fucking union flag over your bedazzled poppies #while calling a return to the same imperial expansionism which left europe (and most of its colonies and territories) destroyed #“lest we forget” forget WHAT? how we “beat the bosch”? how we all had stiff upper lips and good british character while scarring the world?#how the (white obviously what do you mean there were hundreds of thousands of black and brown soldiers) tommy beat the hun?#how the spitfire is really cool and we love a good tommy-gun?#god. i've been doing so well at NOT getting steamed about this this year #and yet here we are #“lest we forget”. you did fucking forget. or rather you never cared to know in the first place.#the centennial should have sparked reflection but instead it just sparked a whole new era of tawdry militarism #meanwhile the poppies are a british legion thing and the british legion proudly slaps haig tartans all over its shop #you know. haig. the guy whose pigheaded britain first bollocks saw a MILLION people die to gain a few yards #here's what i want #i want everyone who has this kind of display to sit down and watch battle of the somme (1916). it's british propaganda! you love that!#and then i want them to be reminded that 1/3 of the people smiling and joking around in that film were dead before it was shown #i want them to look every one of those kids in the eye and be told their names and who they were - the germans and the french too!#i want them to realise that the people who died weren't fucking heroes or symbols of a glorious past. just scared human beings.#and then #after all that #i want them to fuck the hell off #the ONLY use of remembrance 105 years after the fact is to try and cling to the idea that it isn't too late to FUCKING DO BETTER.#but if your response to any of it is to slap more nationalism and jingoism on top of a shadow of a memory of Glorious Death #then with all my heart: fuck you

2K notes · View notes