Marching for Peace
Demilitarising our lives
For some people crisis and mass death are spurs to writing. For me the words dry up. On a day that may or may not turn out to bring a temporary cessation in the British-backed Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I’m posting a few paragraphs I managed to scribble last week, following the London March for Palestine on 11 November, Armistice Day.
I’m what you might call a red-poppy baby. I grew up in the city where John McCrae – the Canadian soldier who penned the poem “In Flanders Field”, sometimes credited for making poppies a symbol of remembrance – was raised. I went to the high school McCrae had attended a century earlier, before he died of pneumonia in Ypres during the final year of the First World War. Just a few weeks ago, on a trip to my hometown, I walked with my mother past the small bungalow where he lived, now a museum, McCrae House, where schoolchildren go to learn about the horrors of war and how to honour those who have “fought for our freedom”.
Such a loaded phrase. So much unfulfilled promise in that final word; so much exclusion in the one before.
John McCrae was a poet and doctor as well as a soldier. There is much to admire about him. That doesn’t mean we should admire the institution he served. Poppies, “In Flanders Fields” and McCrae memorabilia were all part of what I’ve come to think of as the banal militarism of my childhood. A militarism coated in the language of peace, ignorance and fuzzy Canadian patriotism, what a friend of mine once called Canada’s “fluffy-bunny image” of itself.
It was when I passed into adulthood that the penny dropped, and with it the red poppy. I noticed that for all the hype about remembering the dead and the end of war, Remembrance Day, as it’s called in Canada, was always accompanied by banners with the photos of soldiers and other army paraphernalia and propaganda. The people selling the poppies for a few coins outside the mall were dressed in uniforms. On Remembrance Day there were the ageing mothers of multiple men killed far before their time in a far-off wars in faraway places. But the token weeping women civilians were always propped up by rows of white male veterans and politicians gathered solemnly around the local Cenotaph. When I moved to the UK, I encountered not one day to honour the heroes of war, but two: Armistice Day, which marks the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, and Remembrance Sunday, when the real remembering takes place – a firm reminder that the dead to be remembered are not only combatants and overwhelmingly men, but Christian, and High Anglican at that.
Maybe it’s that taken-for-grantedness that made this year’s Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday stand out. Instead of falling into line by either obediently observing or ignoring the day altogether, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of London demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.
In response to this protest for peace, we were met with accusations of hate, disrespect for the dead and anti-Britishness.
Maybe it’s because of Canada’s poppiness that the Canadian press had a special stake in what happened in the heart of the former empire on that Saturday. The Globe and Mail reported on its front page that the London march had been carried out peacefully, a fact apparently newsworthy enough also to be carried in the media in other former colonies, from the United States to Australia.
The underbelly of the story of the peaceful march for peace on Armistice Day was the violence carried out not by the protesters (whom the now-former Home Secretary Suella Braverman had labelled “hate marchers”) but members of the English Defence League, the far-right organisation led by Tommy Robinson, who charged police around the Cenotaph in central London, yelling “You’re not English anymore!” Elsewhere, a posse of angry white men, some wearing red poppies, physically assaulted a group expressing solidarity with Palestinians, yelling “F**k you, you terrorist c**t. We were born in this country”.
In England, many commentators blamed Braverman for inciting Robinson and his crew. But they didn’t need egging on. The EDL supporters were furious at the March for Palestine not just because they’re Islamophobic (they are), but because they were determined to remind the marchers that this was the day when we celebrate our dead.
That objection was echoed, in admittedly more mild-mannered tones, in the words of one woman who attended Armistice Day events in London and was interviewed for the Globe’s Sunday edition (you’d be forgiven for thinking that Canada is such a backwater there is no news to report there). She said the march made her feel “unsettled”: “It was in the back of my head and it made me feel a bit on edge. They’ve got a right to do it but not on Remembrance weekend.”
To say that Armistice Day is a celebration of militarism and nationalism is not to say that everyone who marks it, everyone who wears a red poppy, takes time out to remember their grandad who fought in the war, or observes a minute’s silence, is a warmonger. It doesn’t mean forgetting the gross class and racial inequalities that make cannon fodder of the young people who sign up to get an education or a decent meal. There is much to be said about taking time to remember all those whose lives are ruined by armies, why we must never stop marching for peace. But I long ago betrayed my red-poppy origins. Now I wear a white peace poppy in November, as a symbol of remembrance of civilians and victims of colonialism as well as soldiers, a reminder that remembering the wars of the past must go hand in hand with a resisting the militarism and nationalism that sustain mass slaughter in the present.
I haven’t been to a Remembrance Day event since I was a kid. Yet the injunction to mark it in a proscribed way is so ingrained in me that on the day after the march, Remembrance Sunday, when I happened across a small gathering around the cenotaph in my local cemetery while walking my dog, I was mildly panicked at the thought that she might interrupt the minute’s silence. Relieved that she held her bark, I stood behind some trees while The Last Post trumpeted at the end of the sacred minute. I am still humbled by that sound; it can still make me stop in my tracks, remind me to remember.
Once the people around the large cross had dispersed, I wandered up to another memorial a few metres away, and stood for a few moments in silence, reading the names of those killed by the bombs that fell on their homes and schools and businesses in North London during the Second World War. In a number of cases several members of the same family had been killed. Many of the names are Jewish. Today, people living in those same streets would also have Turkish, Polish and Pakistani names, as well English, Irish and many more.
It is rituals like these that we need, what the late poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt called “daily conscious actions” – actions that refuse state-sanctioned commands to remember “dead heroes”. And we need to keep marching, sitting, shouting to demand peace in the present.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here.
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Thank you very much for crafting this piece. I connect on a profound level with what you write here despite the differences in cultures and countries. I believe there is an anti-militaristic and pro-peace sensitivity that is queer beyond gender and sexuality. I hope many people read this. It's a balm.
Lovely!