For others, it’s a moved from a quiet sign of Remembrance to an icon of Brexit nationalism. The author Matt Haig tweeted “I'm not wearing a poppy this year. I think it is shifting from a symbol remembering war's horror, to a symbol of war-hungry nationalism.”[...]
When the government had organised a number of victory parades, some of the soldiers refused to participate. When they instead held the first, more sombre Armistice Day, in 1919, a number of the veterans protested against the conditions they were expected to live in.[...]
Similarly, the poppy hasn’t just recently become a nationalist symbol. It always has been. Until last summer, there was a famous memorial on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, to the Anzac soldiers who fought against the Ottoman empire there. Supposedly quoting Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, it reads, “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours”.
The contrast with the British legion’s statement, under the banner “what we remember” on their website: “The Legion advocates a specific type of Remembrance connected to the British Armed Forces, those who were killed, those who fought with them and alongside them.”
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