November 11, 1918 marked the end of the First World War, although Canadian soldiers fought for months more in Russia with the counter-revolutionaries wanting to regain power from the Bolsheviks. Memorial Day has its symbol, the red poppy, proposed in 1920 by the American Legion which was inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields, a militaristic work signed by Canadian soldier John McCrae. For the Radio-Canada ombudsman, this poppy is the only symbol that journalists can display without contravening the obligation of neutrality. What a good joke!
This symbol is not neutral, since we can prefer the white poppy, proposed in 1921 by the No More War movement and taken up in 1933 by the Women’s Cooperative Guild in Great Britain, which included many workers close to dead soldiers. during the First War. A symbol of peace, unlike the red poppy, which is part of the militaristic spirit.
The war today
In Quebec, the white poppy campaign is stubbornly supported by the Échec à la guerre collective, which recalls that it is about “commemorating all the victims of the war, military and civilians, all those killed , wounded, imprisoned, displaced, refugees, raped, and to include this commemoration in our desire to put an end to the war and its false pretexts.”
Wearing it today allows you to express, among other things, your opposition to the Parti Québécois’ Quebec army project, whose year 1 budget plans to devour $3.5 billion annually, an amount that is certainly underestimated. Certainly, this new country should have a — civilian — disaster response service, but a demilitarized Quebec is a much nobler ideal (see Serge Mongeau, For a country without an army at Écosociété).
More seriously, the white poppy seems all the more appropriate considering the current events in Ukraine and Palestine, not to mention forgotten wars, such as in Yemen. This symbol helps us keep in our hearts the memory of civilian victims, including children and babies. Modern wars also result in many more civilian than military casualties, especially when “democratic” states attempt to wage wars with “zero deaths” for their soldiers.
From Canada, we must remain attentive to certain “democratic” justifications for massacres of civilian populations. For example, that the armies of a democratically elected government would fight just wars. Seriously ? The thousands of civilian victims in Gaza should therefore cry “How lucky! They killed me democratically! » In reality, there are no “democratic” armies. They attack the local population (here: conscription in 1918, October crisis in 1970, siege of Kanesatake in 1990) or populations who did not vote for war to be waged against them.
Thus, the Israeli army has nothing “democratic” for the Palestinian people, any more than the South African army massacring the black population in the townships during the apartheid era or the United States cavalry exterminating indigenous populations during the “Indian Wars”.
The historian Howard Zinn, who volunteered against Nazism, admitted to having “behaved like a programmed robot” when he dropped his incendiary bombs on European cities from his plane, “without even asking myself if this what I was doing had the slightest connection with the eradication of fascism.” Crush the Nazis, yes; but the civilian populations? It is only a murderous madness in search of rational justification. Let us also remember that “democracy” is the only political regime that has dropped atomic bombs. On cities!
The white poppy should finally help us to be wary of the rhetoric of “human shields”, already used on the subject of Vietnam (yes…), then Iraq, then Afghanistan, then Iraq again. However, how many action films have we seen where the villain grabs “the” woman to taunt the vigilante hero? However, he always manages to kill the villain while sparing “the” woman, otherwise all his moral superiority would evaporate. Likewise, massacring civilian populations by evoking “human shields” (which remains to be demonstrated) is a moral and legal aberration, even an apology for state terrorism.
Civilians are no longer surprised to see all armed groups celebrating their dead, apparently all having fallen in just wars. It is also understandable that politicians wear the red poppy. The gesture is much more dubious among journalists. But why on earth should we, the civilian population, play the game? The white poppy rather allows us to commemorate the memory of millions of our people sacrificed by armed troops who always claim to massacre us for a just cause, even for our own good.