Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Perhaps one year soon Armistice Day will pass without a modest symbol of respect and remembrance inspiring a single display of hatred and intolerance.  Unfortunately 2010 wasn’t that year. First we had the so-called ’Green Brigade’ and its illiterate protest at Celtic’s decision to display a poppy on the club's famous hooped football shirts .  Now the Andersonstown News reports that Relatives for Justice, a republican victims group, has asked BBC Northern Ireland to ban poppies in the interests of ‘neutrality‘ . Last year it was that newspaper’s columnist, ‘the Squinter’, who took anti-poppy bile to a new low, by describing the British Legion’s fundraising campaign as a “three week orgy of ‘up yours fenian face’”.   I posted on that occasion , lamenting the tendency to perceive a simple act of remembering as a hostile political act. There’s no particular need to rehash the same old arguments for the Relatives for Justice campaign.  It’s enough to note that ther...

Tomorrow is Armistice Day. Although commemorations are more commonly held on Remembrance Sunday, in the UK, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is marked by two minutes silence, in memory, in particular, of those who died in the First World War. Hostilities ceased, on the Western Front, at that time in 1918, after four years of mechanised warfare had wrought devastation on a generation of young men. Yesterday, whilst recording an episode of Blogtalk NI , I was asked to consider the issue of remembrance and in particular controversy which often becomes attached to the simple act of remembering, in Northern Ireland. In retrospect, I am dissatisfied with the answer I gave and pre-emptively, I would like to add a few thoughts here. Slugger O’Toole provides a useful snapshot of febrile debate which can attend simple, reverential acts, such as wearing a poppy, or laying a wreath. If you have the time, and the patience, there are pages and pages of it. In additio...