Remembrance Day: The Death of a National Symbol

I grew up in an area of Nottingham called Bulwell that, it would be safe to say, does not have the greatest reputation. Every city has its parts where, if you mention them by name, people grimace and make a crude, probably classist joke about it, depending on the setting. And although I’d argue that the Bulwell of 2024 no longer really deserves that sort of reputation compared to other parts of Nottingham, it’s inarguable that twenty years ago the situation was very different.

In every person’s childhood there is a moment when you are required to perceive ‘real-life’ for the first time, glimpsing the world that exists outside of the safe boundaries of your family existence. For a lot of very privileged people, this time can arrive as late the teenage years, perhaps when forced to confront the reality of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in a school environment. For the most vulnerable amongst us, this moment can arrive much, much earlier in life, with that initial safety net of family potentially being called into question almost immediately. Personally, I was lucky enough to find myself somewhere in between those two extremes when the façade of Everything Is Perfect dropped away. For me, the point of no return was grand theft auto.

When I say grand theft auto, I’m not referring to the videogame, I’m referring to the crime that it borrows its name from: the stealing of cars. If you put a gun to my head ten minutes ago and asked me, I’d have said that we had no less than five cars stolen from outside of our home when I was growing up. After consulting with my parents, the stats are actually: one successfully stolen car, about five attempted break-ins of cars, and one thwarted break-in, during which I watched my fully nude father pin a would-be thief up against his would-be prize with a screwdriver pressed into his would-be throat (it was his actual throat). I was probably only four or five at the time, and it was the first time I’d seen violence in real life, whilst also being the first time I’d become aware of the potential for the ‘baddies’ to even exist in real life. Up to that point, they were just characters in a film, or stories in a book.

A few years later, in 2003, a Bulwell police officer was killed. His name was Ged Walker, he was forty-two, and he was dragged one hundred yards along the road outside of my primary school whilst trying to retrieve the keys from the ignition of a stolen taxi. I was seven years old at the time, and though my parents tried to shield me from the grim details of the killing, this shielding can never be one hundred percent effective, and eventually the story spread around our school playground, the way that these things do. Two years later, a memorial was unveiled near the site of his death, a small, classy, stone, with a short inscription, located in between two connecting paths that led across the golf-course towards my soon-to-be secondary school. Within six months of its unveiling, the memorial became a convenient meeting spot for children coming from all directions, and you wouldn’t even think twice about the significance really when you uttered a dead man’s name so casually day after day. We all knew the story, of course, but saying “Meet at Ged Walker?” wouldn’t stir those memories up. It just became another arrow in the quiver of local parlance. Ged Walker became a place, just as much as he ever was a person.

So what’s the purpose of a memorial? My suggestion would be that it depends on who is asking. For locals who have lived in Bulwell for many years, the memory of Ged Walker and what happened to him is not something likely to ever be forgotten, not completely - so while the memorial serves as a sentimental reminder of the events that transpired and the person who lost his life, it isn’t necessary in the sense that it doesn’t provide new information. However, for someone who is visiting Bulwell and who isn’t familiar with the history of the area, seeing the Ged Walker memorial invokes something entirely different: a curiosity, and a sense of history for a place that you likely wouldn’t otherwise think twice about. This same principle applies to memorials and plaques and dedications all over the world. When you’re on holiday in Croatia you might see a small plaque near a bench somewhere, somewhere that you might never otherwise stop, and you read it, and the location gains significance. For memorials such as Ged’s, in which the engraved event is one of tragedy and loss, I also think there has to be some intention of reflection, and deeper learning, and hopefully prevention. And though it would be naïve to say that the Ged Walker story and memorial are absolutely, one hundred percent to be credited with the decrease in violent crime and theft in Bulwell, it does make me wonder if, deep down in the subconscious of my teenage mind, and the minds of others from the area, it did make us think “it’s not worth it.” Has there ever been a guy, somewhere in Bulwell, one hand on the steering wheel of someone else’s car, key in the ignition about to turn, who thought for a fraction of a second about that tragic story from his childhood, of the father needlessly killed. Has that thought ever stopped someone from committing crime? It’s genuinely impossible to say, but what is measurable is that a police officer hasn’t died in Bulwell by being dragged alongside a stolen car in twenty years. And so, in that sense, you’d have to consider the story, and the memorial, a success. An unfortunate sacrifice that people have learned from. A collective step forward, even if it’s a small step.

It will soon be Remembrance Sunday, a day that I always held great reverence for growing up. I read the books, I watched the films, I listened to the poetry of soldiers in trenches in foreign lands, dying for reasons unbeknownst to them or even me, one hundred years later. I felt sick with the impossibility of the numbers of dead that Wikipedia displayed, and I tried to understand the unimaginable fear of being under bombardment from people who couldn’t even see you, who had never met you, who wanted you dead without even the courtesy of true, personal, hatred. Watching the Cenotaph ceremony on TV, it felt bizarrely sobering, even as a young man with no real understanding of the sacrifice that so many made in both World Wars. It felt important to watch these people - these people who were always on the TV shouting at each other about one thing or the next - agree as a collective to come together in the greatest act of respect that you are able to give someone who died such a long time ago: a silent and sincere remembrance. It felt good to know that we all felt the same about at least one specific thing: this couldn’t be allowed to happen again. I wore a poppy each year as a teenager, and I held deep respect for the significance of the symbol. But now the poppy is dead.

2024 has been a year of unravelling. Everything that mainstream culture and government and news media has held up as the rational and undeniable truth has fallen apart under the strain of an incredibly easy task: admitting that bombing children is bad. Half of our celebrities, previously adored from a distance, have been baited, bit by bit, into defending the atrocities of genocide. Our government, once held up (by themselves) as the peacekeepers of the world, have been forced to admit outright that they will do nothing to stop war-crimes committed by Israel, and in fact, they will aid in the committing of them. And our once-sensible journalists, our incredible BBC, once the most important news organisation in the world, has time and time again found itself at the bottom of the most disgusting barrel of reporting, choosing to muddy the waters of fact-finding instead of objectively telling the truth, choosing solidarity with murderers instead of their dead colleagues (139 dead journalists in Gaza at the time of writing), and choosing to manufacture consent for the killing instead of condemning it. If you’ve been paying attention at all, 2024 has been the year of giving up on the idea of someone telling you the truth with a straight face in this country. And now it’s Remembrance Day, and we all have to either agree to pretend that it all still matters the same as it did fifty years ago, and that these people, our celebrities, our politicians, and our media, really do still mean it when they say things like “Never Again”. Or we can reject the premise entirely, as we know they’re all lying, and we know that when they stand there and say with a straight face “Never Again”, what they really mean is “Never Again For Us”.

It's a hard thing to stomach, the end of a tradition like Remembrance Sunday. At some point, a long time ago, it was something good. At some point, war wasn’t just a thing that happened to brown people in far off lands, or as fodder for History channel documentaries and Netflix series. At some point, there was a memory of what war was when it arrived at your doorstep. People remembered the bombings, people remembered their parents not returning from overseas, people remembered the quality of life dropping through the floor. Those people erected statues, monuments, memorials. They built the Cenotaph, they created anti-war art, they founded museums. All this and more, all in the pursuit of the idea that what once has happened, should never happen again. And they all failed. Every single one of them. The ideas and the stories and the characters were absorbed into our culture, but the lessons were left behind. People who lived through the Blitz remembered it as the greatest horror of their lives, but now when those stories are invoked by politicians, it’s in jovial terms. The spirit of the blitz! Death and destruction raining down, but we all just carried on, didn’t we? A myth, of course, as none of these politicians remember what it was like, and in fact their closest connection to the blitz is through their funding and arming year-long blitzes of Middle Eastern cities full of children the same age as their own.

For the poppy, it has been a decade of fanatical lunacy. What once was a classy and sombre symbol of thoughtful remembrance, has now become a disgusting competition of virtue signalling, wherein the act of celebrating the symbol is far more important than the meaning behind it. People decorate their front gardens with the silhouettes of soldiers like it’s Halloween. Their cars are plastered in poppies like there’s some kind of flower-based World Cup. Shops set up poppy displays in their front windows weeks in advance of Remembrance Day like it’s Christmas. In a country lacking any uniform religious framework, the poppy has stepped into the void and become a symbol of worship in itself - as sacred as the cross. And, perhaps inspired by the insane hypocrisy that is often found within organised religion, you are now able to do nothing but gape in amazement as our national symbol of anti-war sentiment is casually painted onto the side of our most potent weapons of mass killing.
  
The growing poppy-mania has all been building to this weekend. After years of people in the public eye being hounded on Twitter about not wearing a poppy, after years and years of discourse about poppies on football kits, poppies on cars, poppies on the England flag, are you wearing the right coloured poppy, is your poppy the right way round? After all of this, we’ve finally reached the moment, the tipping point. This year, there will be politicians, and celebrities, and journalists, on live TV, wearing their poppies, arguing that fifty thousand dead children, their bodies mangled by bombs dropped on the advice of British soldiers, their brains blown out by British-made sniper rifles, are just an unfortunate consequence of a necessary genocide. All of those symbols, all of our traditions, are now reduced to just that: tradition, for the simple sake of tradition. There’s no weight, no meaning, no purpose beyond an obligation to tick the correct boxes because it’s that time of the year. Put up the tree, turn on the lights. But it’s all coming down on December 26th.

The concept of trickle-down economics might be roundly and correctly criticised as nonsense these days, but I believe wholeheartedly in the concept of trickle-down morals in a society. Watching our new Prime Minister speak sternly about cracking down on crime is almost enough to make you laugh out loud when you consider the weight of the crimes that he is willing to ignore on a daily basis. And though he might be willing to ignore it, in 2024, the general public are simply too well-informed to be absolutely unaware of such a hypocrisy. It might not happen on a conscious level for most, but I can’t fault anyone who has witnessed the events of the past thirteen months and thought: “Why should I play by the rules if no one else is?” In a country participating in ethnic cleansing, what significance does common law truly hold? And more to the point, for a country participating in extreme violence, what moral defence do they have to counter its use against them at home? It’s hard to get used to violence. But when someone does become used to it, when you force someone to get used to it, by arguing every day that their family, and their friends, and their people are all valid targets for that violence, a new question hangs in the air: if those people are valid targets for your ideology, who are the valid targets for my ideology?

So this is what happens next. And I don’t mean in Palestine, I mean here, in the United Kingdom. The whole world has seen the true face of our newly elected, incredibly unpopular government. And a reckoning will come. And it will come in the form of explosions, or stabbings, or trucks driven into crowds, or some other new form of terrorism that will shock and upset and anger the nation. And in this case, it will be called terrorism, because it will be done here at home, to white people, on British streets. They will be acts of violence committed not by cowardly drone operators or anonymous bomber pilots hiding way up in the clouds, but by individuals with faces and names that we can plaster on front pages and across the news. They will be people we can point our fingers at and blame. They will be orphans or widows or childless fathers, people whose justifications will be kicked under the bed with the same lazy label of “religious extremism”. And so the BBC presenters will wear black ties, and they’ll speak in grave tones, and we’ll consume endless hours of coverage on TV and Twitter. And our celebrities will speak their sympathies for the dead, loud and proud, gushing on the internet and in interviews, making sure they’re the ones that sound the most sad. And our politicians will condemn the attacks in the strongest terms possible, promising swift justice, and an enquiry into how this could have come about, enjoying a fragile boost in the polls after sounding serious on TV. And our troops will be sent across the globe to a country where people much more used to violence are forced to kill them in self-defence. And then one Sunday, the following year, those brave, dead soldiers, our brave dead soldiers, will have their names read out on a day of remembrance. And we’ll pretend we don’t know how it happened, and we’ll pretend we don’t know how to prevent it, and we’ll pretend that we don’t want it to ever happen again. And the Cenotaph will loom large over the presiding Prime Minister, whoever it may be, and the tomb of the unknown soldier will never be more meaningless. And the pockets of the arms manufacturers will never be fuller. And the pockets of the politicians will never be fuller. And the pockets of the celebrities will never be fuller. And all you can do is watch. And watch. And watch. And if you’re watching, you better be wearing your fucking poppy.

Coming to a city near you, courtesy of your government.