Remembrance ...

It seems there is much for us to question in these modern times. Not least with the recent turn of events – with the on-going conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and with the humanitarian crisis this has precipitated in Europe; with the divisive issue of Brexit; with the outcome of the US Presidential election. But one thing which I never anticipated I’d ever need to question is a simple act of remembrance.

Each year on this day, November 11^th – Armistice Day, we come together to remember those who have fallen in the two World Wars of the last century. For as long as I can recall, like so many people in the UK, at this time of year I have always worn a little red paper poppy. I learnt long ago when I was a child at school that these commemorative poppies were made by the smart red-coated Chelsea Pensioners, veterans of these two wars, and that we wore these poppies as a quiet symbol of our respect and remembrance for the sacrifices their two generations made to ensure that Europe and the wider world remained free from the forces of fascism and oppression. As I grew older and studied this history in greater depth I came to realise that the global truth – both then and now – isn’t quite so simple as that, but in essence I always felt that the sentiment behind this day of remembrance was exactly that simple. War is bad. Never again.

Yet, in recent years I’ve begun to feel increasingly conflicted about the simple act of donning my paper poppy. It seems increasingly clear to me that the nature of this act and what it is seen and held collectively to express has altered. With the death of Harry Patch, the last of those veterans of the First World War in the UK has passed. That conflict has ceased to be a living memory, it is now history proper. And there are fewer veterans of the Second World War each year standing in solemn remembrance at the cenotaph and at local war memorials across the country. But so too, very sadly, in recent years the numbers of this country’s war dead have increased significantly with the UK’s involvement in armed confrontations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. It’s perhaps no surprise then that the efforts of the British Legion (who organise the annual event of distributing these paper poppies), and the rise of the charity Help for Heroes, have each sought to reorient this annual act of remembrance. It’s wholly right and understandable that such individuals should not be forgotten, but to me something does seem deeply amiss in all this.

Wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill has recently replaced social reformer and Quaker, Elizabeth Fry as the face on the new £5 note

Armistice Day, in my mind, represents that ideal of ‘Never Again.’ Yet the evidence of recent years runs contrary to this. Instead we live in a world where ‘Again and Again’ is becoming the norm. Armed conflicts are seemingly becoming normalised. War is big business. Especially for certain members of the elite; politically and economically, we are told, both tacitly and overtly, that arms are necessary, wars are necessary. I reject that notion completely. And I increasingly feel that it is the entire global system which is at fault here.

I am of the generation who came of age as the Berlin Wall came down. For us the end of the Cold War seemed to herald a new and unprecedented age of freedom, of happiness and contentment to come. Looking back though, particularly since the UK referendum on its membership of the European Union, I find the seeds of doubt were blindingly obvious even then. I didn’t understand the desperately bloody events in Balkans during the 1990s; they seemed to run counter to this Post-Cold War sense of optimism for the future. They seemed like an anomaly at the time, but since the Brexit decision I have revisited this era. I immediately turned to Timothy Garton Ash’s History of the Present (Penguin, 2000) in an effort to help me try to fathom why this idealism and optimism upon which I’d founded my world outlook now seemed so precarious. The Balkan conflict was a complex one, but essentially perhaps not altogether too complicated to comprehend. At risk of being too simplistically reductive it strikes me as a war of petty prejudices driven by equally petty and tawdry nationalisms. And this is what now worries me most about the future trend of global affairs. Populist nationalism is clearly on the rise. In this respect Timothy Garton Ash is still writing and trying to make sense of our times, even today (see here). This virulently populist nationalism has become alarmingly manifest in many countries besides my own. This poses urgent questions for all of us. What will become of all this? Where are we heading? … Another prescient book to read in this respect might be Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler (Picador, 2003).

The other day, whilst on my way to work I was directly accosted by a young man smartly dressed in an expensive looking suit. He thrust a collection tin at me. In his other hand was a box filled with paper poppies, poppy wristbands, enamel poppy badges, sparkling "blingy" poppies, and red rosette-style woolly-crocheted poppies. His manner was volubly direct and aggressive: “Can I interest you in a poppy, Sir?” His tone was an odd mix of accusatory but needy solicitation. He’d evidently homed in on me because I wasn’t wearing a poppy already. And he had deliberately moved to block my path. These actions prompted a similarly forthright reaction in me: “No.” I said firmly. That reaction I realised was instinctively reflexive, but nonetheless deeply rooted. I often feel myself harden to direct confrontation. I tend to stand my ground. But my reply, I realised was in fact the informed culmination of several years of carefully weighed consideration. As he’d effectively stopped me dead in my tracks I took a moment and looked around me. There were many young men similarly smartly dressed like him, squads of them in fact, all swarming around the entrance to the Tube station I was trying to enter. I pass by this way every day and invariably there are two men sitting on the pavement here, with little cardboard signs set before them stating that they are ex-paratroopers, begging for loose change. They weren’t there that morning.

A similar thing happened to me last year too. As I exited Temple Tube station and turned left, where there is a steep set of stone steps leading up to the street. That day the top of these steps were lined by a solid wall of military personnel – from the Army, the RAF, the Navy – all neatly turned out in their immaculate dress uniforms, looking down on us. Ready. All set to accost (or confront?) this beetling swarm of commuters exiting the station. This towering wall of military men was almost impassable. They deliberately didn’t make it easy for the ordinary people to get by. It’s this imposing blockade of patriotic coercion, intimidating and expectant which bothers me. How could anyone not want to donate and take a poppy? How could anyone question something which was their duty? Our duty to remember. Our duty to support the … the what? … The veterans? The British Legion? The national institution of the country’s armed forces? The lads in uniform? Or the foreign policies of our political classes and our ruling elite (seemingly regardless as to what their political colour outwardly professes to be)? There’s an oddly misplaced and uncomfortably bitter irony in talk of the “Poppy Fascists.”

My cynicism is growing deeper. Reading how the major arms manufacturers are cashing in on Remembrance Day (see here) only calcifies my distrust. Reading how many of today’s veterans also reject this present state of affairs with increasing vehemence (see here) only compounds my sense of dismay and despair. Something feels very wrong in all this. And as a historian it is impossible not to anguish and reflect on these conflicted issues and instincts over and over inside. Not least with all the centenary events to commemorate that first cataclysmic global conflict, the first industrially mechanised orchestration of death which swept away so many young lives, which are happening at present. Those “lions lead by donkeys.” We flood the moat of the Tower of London with a patriotic efflorescence of our collective piety. Never again! – And yet … our political leaders green light the renewal of something darkly awful like Trident – because “it will be good for industry, good for the country’s economy, as well as for our national security and defence.” They are doing it for us. But how many of them or us reflect on the fact that one single Trident missile armed with substantially less than its full capacity of warheads is sufficient to kill more individual lives than the entire total of those deaths which that moat of blood red poppies was set up to represent? … That’s more than 888,000 people with just one missile (see here for a fuller explanation of the maths). It seems to me that if there are lessons to be learned from history, from war, and from the present uncertainties in which we live – we’d do well to remember and reflect a little more deeply.

References:

The British Legion’s Fundraising in the Age of Empire

My Name is Legion: The Control of Remembrance

Red Poppies and the Arms Trade

Do We Remember in Order to Forget the Realities of War?

What is it Good for?

The Sacred & The Profane

Historians are often asked to comment on the here and now, almost as much as they are on the events of the past. Particularly in the media. The validity of such comment is, of course, a useful point of departure for discussion, but do we give much pause to wonder why such analysis and comment is actually being sought? Is it simply to make some sort of sense of the here and now? Or is it merely meant to bolster and affirm the notions on which we have founded our world view? Are we seeking to understand? To justify? To champion, or to condemn? Or is it purely a means to provide ‘copy’ to fill TV news bulletins and newspaper column inches?

Undoubtedly the last question is a given, but the other questions all have a bearing on what angle that ‘copy’ maintains and whether or not such reports simply create an unending vicious circle. Social comment is the means by which we shape our collective worldview, it’s what we share as much as what we differ over which makes our society what it is – the present global world system operates in and through what we each think of ourselves and what we think of others. And this could well be simplified to binary opposites. Black and white. Good versus bad. Them and us, with both sides viewing their opposite as ‘the Other.’ We define ourselves by contrast; we are not like them, and they are not like us – but how true is this in reality if we look a little deeper?

I doubt many readers of this blog will not have looked aghast at the news images this week of men in Iraq’s second largest national museum in Mosul felling ancient Assyrian sculptures with sledgehammers. And rightly so. What an unthinkable thing to do! ... And why? ... It seems so pathetic. Are they really so afraid of inanimate objects? Are such ‘graven idols’ really an abomination in the eyes of their ‘jealous’ God – or, more precisely, are these statues really such a threat to that God’s legitimacy?

But to ask such questions is really too simplistic. There must be many levels driving the motivation to perpetrate such actions. Seeing those images my first thoughts were that these were desperate actions. The news reports said that the Iraqi Armed Forces were now beginning to push back against the Islamic State militias which have taken control of these regions. Thus, presumably, in a prelude to retreat, they are hitting out like impotent soldiers about run away. Taking a swipe at a symbol, in a sense itself equally symbolic, as a gesture of last ditch defiance.

But again, this too might still be an overly simplistic view. There may be more to it. They might well have destroyed these artefacts even if they ultimately prevailed in holding that region. No doubt it would still have been a gesture made with calculated symbolism and an eye to attracting the attention of the world’s media.

Help Restore Mosul Museum - Project Mosul : Call To Action

Whilst we still know really very little about precisely how coherently the Islamic State (or ‘Daesh’) might or might not be organised within its ranks, we are told that they are setting themselves up in opposition to the majority world system. Seeking a ‘medieval’ religious ‘caliphate’ in stark contrast to a modern, secular mode of Government, or even a moderate religious one. And as such, I read with interest a recent article which suggested that they weren’t so much smashing their own heritage into pieces, they were in fact smashing down the inherited or imported cultural institution of ‘the museum’ itself – the temple of ‘secular sacred idols’ – seeing the Western museum tradition as a colonial means of secular control. The worship of ‘graven images’ not so much in terms of false Gods from antiquity, but rather the false Gods of the present era – the worship of secular systems of government, capitalist economics, and the world system which has been globally imposed as a result of past colonialism, an ‘anti-Orientalising’ uprising of sorts. This struck me as a valid possibility, a plausible motivation, and, as such, a suitably manifest expression thereof.

But, then again, on the other hand, perhaps this is going too far – simply over-reading the situation instead? After all, it has been shown that a current major source of funding for Islamic State is the illegal trade in looted antiquities. In tandem with symbolic acts of destruction, it is currently facilitating the illicit Western art trade, under the radar so to speak, as a means of supporting itself. There’s possibly an irony here equal to the fact that the notion of an Islamic ‘State’ itself arises from the distinctly Western concept of the Nation State as an 'imagined community' (cf. Benedict Anderson, or perhaps the news reports regarding wannabe jihadis reading ‘Islam for Dummies’ instead).

Perhaps these orchestrated instances of iconoclasm are more likely to be an equally reductive quid pro quo as are those initial accusations of plain and simple barbarism. The same article sought to remind its readers of a similarly ‘iconoclastic’ image: that of the felled statue of Saddam Hussein, the dictator deposed by the US led military invasion of 2003. In a sense then this is perhaps a case of ‘history repeating itself’ in a never ending and yet ever increasing fractal pattern of symbolic destruction, this time with the boot firmly on the other foot. 

The political ‘spin doctors’ no doubt hoped the toppling of a statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdos Square would have a similar resonance in the media as the toppling of statues of Lenin had in Eastern Europe at the remarkable and unexpected end of the Cold War; yet what they didn’t account for was the spontaneity and the immediate agency (i.e. – the fact that it was done by an uprising of ordinary people) which made the toppling of a bronze Lenin so remarkable and so memorable, similarly the binary undoing of the toppling of a bronze Saddam was rooted in how the action came about – for the bronze Saddam was felled not by the local Iraqis, but by the soldiers of an uninvited and invading foreign Army. The symbolism of that fact was unwittingly reinforced by the faux-pas which saw a US soldier first rubbing 'the stars and stripes' in Saddam’s face before someone with a bit more media-savvy quickly (but not quickly enough) managed to replace those colours with the flag of the Republic of Iraq instead. All symbolic acts are meant to have a resonance, and all of them are meant to remain in the memory – but some acts, it seems, always return to haunt more than others. 

One can’t help thinking of Donald Rumsfeld’s shrug that in war “stuff happens.” Take for instance, another recent news report this week which first ran with the headline: “The Man Who Helped Blow Up the Bamiyan Buddhas” – a classic media spin to pull the reader in. But it wasn’t an interview with an unrepentant Taliban fighter responsible for what is possibly the arch-iconoclastic act of violence against ancient antiquity perpetrated in our own times (until, perhaps, we find out the full extent of what destruction the Islamic State fighters have done to Iraq’s ancient sites, such as Nimrud and Nineveh), nor was it an interview with a reformed and repentant Taliban who has at last seen the error of his ways – rather it was a more pitiful and pitiable interview with an ordinary man who happened to live near Bamiyan, who was taken prisoner by the Taliban and forced to commit the destruction in order to evade execution and keep himself alive. At the end of the piece he is quoted as saying: “I regretted it at that time, I regret it now and I will always regret it.” 

These are desperate times indeed, but they are not unprecedented; nor are they as black and white as they might at first seem. And to point this out is not to take sides, nor to excuse either side of such acts of cultural vandalism. It is hard to be objective rather than purely emotional. Destroying antiquities and attempting to erase the most important parts of our common heritage is and always should be an inexcusable crime. But, if we wish to view our world so simplistically, we should be mindful of how our own reductiveness actually blinds us to ourselves. Is rubbing a foreign nation’s flag in the face of a toppled dictator today not akin in some senses to the sacking of the Summer Palace outside Peking in 1860 at the start of China’s ‘Century of National Humiliation’, or smacking the head off an ancient Assyrian statue for that matter? How is our ‘just-retribution’ more just than their ‘just-retribution’? 

Is an extremist religious cult’s attempt to redefine the world system really so unprecedented, when we think of the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864? Perhaps Islamic State is less an extremist religious ideological expression, and more of an extreme psychological collective manifestation; as one recent perceptive article has suggested, perhaps Islamic State has more in common with David Koresh’s millenarian death cult in Waco, Texas in 1993 than it does with the true notions of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb? … No, Mark Twain is probably right, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

 

I deplore all forms of aggression, however necessary aggression might sometimes be. Think of the dilemma that pacifists faced when confronted by the juggernaut of destruction which raged through Europe in the form of Nazism during the last century. If anything at all is true in the old adage that ‘history repeats itself’, now is perhaps a salient time to ask ourselves: what can we actually learn from such cycles of history? Is it right to reduce our thinking to such simplistic clichés? Especially when we have the opportunity of being more informed and more measured in our own consideration and personal influence (via social media, for instance) than might have been possible in the past.

Think of all the recent media jingoism which has accompanied the centenary commemorations of the outbreak of the First World War last year – “Lions led by Donkeys”, etc. Many people might have thought so at the time, just as many seem adamantly sure of it today; and, similarly, so too, many thought so when the second invasion of Iraq was first proposed in 2003. – Cause and effect? – We reap as we sow? … Opinions will always be divided, as will outcomes. We can never know what realities the opposite counterfactuals might have created – What if Saddam was still in charge of Iraq today? – What if the Berlin Wall had not fallen? … A colleague of mine (who is only just a fraction too young to remember the last few years of the Cold War) once remarked: “I don’t see what all the fuss over the Cold War was all about; I mean, after all, it all turned out alright in the end, didn’t it?” … He was being serious too.

I might be a historian, but – it doesn’t mean I have any clearer answers than the next person. The world, likely as not, will always be a divided place. One person’s ‘terrorist’ will always be someone else’s ‘freedom fighter.’ History, like the present, is filled with seemingly unanswerable questions – but this in itself is no reason for us to stop asking such questions, or to stop challenging ourselves to think a little deeper than how the headlines might seek to herd us … 

Islamic State is far from ‘medieval’ when one stops to consider all the many cultural and scientific achievements of Islamic scholars in the Middle Ages. Islamic State is a modern phenomenon. It has not arisen in isolation seemingly out of nowhere. It has arisen in opposition. If division is to be the default mode of human existence, then I can only hope that one day we might at least all come to draw a line together, and abide with one another in an understanding of the stark truth spoken by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, that “an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”