Letters: Why I'll be wearing a white poppy this Remembrance Day
SIR — For Remembrance Day this year, I will be wearing a white poppy alongside the red one. Why? Because if we do genuinely care about the service personnel we are pausing to honour, we must actively reduce our casualties of war to their smallest possible number.
Surely the best way to achieve this is to enthusiastically work for peace. But peace doesn’t happen by chance. It has to be worked for.
This is the central objective of the Peace Pledge Union, the organisation behind the white poppy. Peace was the ethos behind the very first memorial parade, as WW2 veteran Harry Smith recalls: “No matter how much people debated the cause or merits of the Great War, everyone believed the price in lost lives to our country was too great”.
This decorated veteran is reminding us that we’ve forgotten an essential ingredient from this ceremony that needs to be put back front-and-centre: the imperative of striving for peace.
The white poppy was created by people in the aftermath of WW1 who understood all too well the costs of war. They had all lost fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, and were unanimously of one mind - that non-military solutions are vital.
The white poppy is also the symbol of remembrance for all victims of war. The red poppy recognises only military deaths, excluding all those fighting under any flag but the British one.
None of our countless Commonwealth allies who fell, no resistance fighters, no firemen or home guard who perished are represented by this symbol. Neither are any civilians.
But why should civilians matter on Remembrance Day? Well, because 90% of war casualties in the 21st century are now civilians. Even during WW2, twice as many civilians were killed due to war-related activity, famine or disease, than military personnel; 32,000 British civilians were killed in the Blitz alone. So to not acknowledge this is to miss most of the picture.
If Remembrance Day is to carry on being meaningful (and I sincerely hope it is) and not just a hollow ritual, then we have to acknowledge the facts. A symbol which acknowledges all victims of war instead of a small bracket of native military personnel gives us a much better understanding of the subject we are remembering.
I fervently agree that our military dead should be respected on this day. But I absolutely don’t agree that an overwhelming number of other casualties of war should be ignored. This cheapens the act of remembrance.
The popularity of the white poppy symbol is soaring over recent years with well over 100,000 sold annually. But here we come to a difficult issue: it is still difficult to get hold of them.
Go to any superstore, high street, or newsagent’s counter over the next month, and you will find someone selling red poppies. But to source a white poppy, there is only one tiny outlet in Southampton, or failing that the nearest outlet is Chichester in the east, or Exeter in the west.
I believe if they were more widely available, they would be much more widely worn. After all; it remembers every victim of war, not just a few. It has the promotion of peace as its core. It symbolises an inclusive remembrance based on an accurate understanding of the past, and showcases our best direction for the future: fewer wars, not more.
For those interested in buying a white poppy this year, I will be selling them on Lymington High Street on Sunday 3rd November, or you can email whitepoppy2019@outlook.com, and I will arrange to get one to you.
Jon Bray, Lymington