Remembrance Sunday

After World War One Britain was a country of unemployment, bitter poverty and cynicism. Many disabled ex-servicemen expecting some recompense for their sacrifice an loss of limbs or sight found their claims for meagre pensions met with delay and sometimes blank refusal. Those who had come through the war in one piece join the local dole queue.

Such men often found their way into one or other of the organizations which were springing up with the aim of fighting the case of the ex-servicemen. At first these split on political lines, with one linking with the TUC and another - the grandly titled Comrades of the War - attracting ex-officers. It was to stem this despair, to sell the ex-servicemen the idea that there was more to the life of a returned hero than the dole queue and the Means Test, that a movement began to unite the opposing organizations. The leader of this movement was none other than Douglas Haig, the general who ordered mass slaughters in No Man's Land. In May 1921 the British Legion was formed. 

The Legion declared that it was non-political. It saw no inconsistency in adopting distinctly political attitudes — their loyalist patriotism, their servile royalism and the assumption that capitalism is basically a decent society.  In the General Strike the Legion advised its members " ... to come forward once more and offer their services in any way that may be needed by the authorities" even though many of the strikers were ex-servicemen who had been driven into it by desperation at the conditions they had faced when they came back from the war. "Non-political" attitudes were also evident when the Legion sent a delegation to Germany in 1935. They saw the concentration camp at Dachau, where the Nazis were holding their political prisoners, and then they had a "quiet family supper" with Gestapo chief Himmler who was, they thought, "...an unassuming man anxious to do his best for his country." 

The first Poppy Day was in 1921. Between the wars the effect of Poppy Day was immense. To begin with, it was always on the anniversary of Armistice Day — November 11, which often meant that the working day was interrupted by the two minutes' silence. Schools, factories, transport, offices — they all marked the occasion in this way and the sombre ritual became established. 

There were poppies growing in the fields of Flanders. But poppies also produce opium and those who buy a poppy are helping the workers to deaden their senses to the facts. War is not to be remembered with pride; it is to be feared and hated. Capitalism kills workers in their millions, all to protect the position of the ruling class, to keep in being the very society which ensures the next bloodbath.