<nettime> Poppies

["M. J." <harrier@easynet.co.uk> (by way of richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk (Richard Barbrook))]

OH POPPY, THOU ARE'T SICK
(after William Blake)
 
John Barker <harrier@easynet.co.uk>

On TV it is mandatory, the poppy on the lapel, in this first week of
November which culminates with an insolent nation state appropriating the
remembrance of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the two
killing-field European wars of this century.

Mandatory! 

All who appear, football faces telling you what you've already seen for
yourself; newsreaders; each and every parliamentarian; iconic and ironic
arts critics, the sassy black American lady who knew how to stand up for
herself included. Maybe they have a stock of them in the studio. Maybe,
just in case there's one face in twenty doesn't know the score.

My family was hurt by these wars, not eradicated like so many Jewish and
Russian families but damaged, shrivelled. My father, a teenage soldier in
the First War, after the deaths of his older brothers would not talk about
it, would not wear a poppy and -we had no TV- would resolutely not have the
radio on for the state solemnities at the Cenotaph.

To not forget is a laudable aim, my daughter is now studying the British
poets of the First War for her GCSE, and these poets convey some of what
must have been its horror and their disillusion with their own patriotic
enthusiasm which is so foreign to our times. But in our times this
remembrance has been appropriated by one of the very nation states which
instigated and perpetuated this horror.

In the Gulf War of our times - when memory of those European Wars prompted
Western policymakers to form a strategy of minimum casualties on their own
side a priority - those who supported it accused those who opposed it of
being Conspiracy Theorists. Against those who opposed it, those who pointed
to how the west itself had armed Saddam Hussein, its supporters, always a
little late in the day highlighted the brutality of the Iraqi dictator but
quickly took up a fall-back position that the actual war had not been
planned but was a result of cock-ups. Modernists to the core, that's how
the world is, by a series of cock-ups, good men are forced into a position
that is not of their own making.

In the case of the First European War of this century this is standard
currency, and for once revisionist historians simply amplify the standard
version. The European leaders and generals of the time did not understand
what the first war of an industrialized Europe would involve, that they
became trapped by the technology of a war in which millions died in the
mud, this is the standard version. Their sons died too, and it marks the
birth of modernity as a loss of innocence.

Some of their sons did die and it is their memoirs - disillusioned as they
might have been - which dominate modern memory and its cultural products
which deal with that war. What this leaves out is that even in that
seemingly archaic war there were people who planned, people who assembled
the various technologies of Gatling guns, awesome artillery,
Fokkers, tanks and Sopwith Camels into a strategy whose consequences
were visible years and millions of deaths before the war ended. If, instead
of taking the sentimental view of archaic politicians and generals trapped
in technologies of attrition we use the normal tools of cause and effect,
and what is more concentrate on the effects, the results, as we are
encouraged to do in the modern world, we would have to say that the main
effect was the eradication of the intelligent and critical artisan class,
both in and outside of mass industrial production. The class which in those
last years of Edwardian innocence were realising their political power.
>From this point of view the Holocaust is the finale of this eradication.
The tragedy of that time, the tragedy of my grandfather for example, is how
for the most part, the social democratic politics of that class embraced
that perpetuated by the rationale of the nation state and its war
organisers. And it was not to stop there. In Western Europe even those who
had opposed the war went on to become proto-monetarists, while the
Bolsheviks having seized power on an anti-war ticket felt bold enough to
continue with their own eradication of independently-minded artisans,
whether writers or engineers.

As usual, this years mourning celebrations provided material, pages of it,
for salaried columnists and commentators. Most shocking was the
double-spread from 'The Observer' newspaper's Will Hutton whose recent
polemics against US organisation of economic suffering for other peoples in
its own interests hve been so sharp and passionate. On this first
pan-European war however (vulgar enough even to have written of it) he
offers a banal apologia for that war. The war, he asserts forces modernity
on the world, ended the age of deference, created Russian communism and
thus changed the world. In fact the age of deference was being successfully
challenged right across Europe before the war began, The war distorted that
challenge and damaged most the class of internationally-minded artisans who
led it, and in Russia allowed precisely its seizure by authoritarian
bolsheviks who also detested this class. This war was in fact a brutally
enforced step back from a confident progressively, secualr politics. A time
when the organisers of nation states could say, Yes, see now, just how
brutal we can be.
 
The modernist cliche of the Cold War is of world in which sophisticated
spies have more in common with each other than their masters; the reality
that they share a sceptical subservience to masters without ideology other
than a repugnance for any mass, critical intelligence of people having to
produce things to make a living.

I am angry with my grandfather, that this representative of working class
interests should so betray them to their extinction. Now I am even angrier
with the new social democrats of this country who have refused to pardon
those 'deserters' executed by the British state in the first pan-European
war of the 20th century. 

In 1998, they refused to give this pardon while proclaiming their selected
virtues of modernity, these guys for whom the worst that ever happened was
defeat in a student politics election. We have no way of knowing how
members of our government would have reacted to an order demanding they
leap out of a muddy trench it almost certain death. It is possible that
they would have been impossibly courageous. In the meanwhile they have no
right to judge-by default those whom the authorities of the time deem to
have been deficient in enthusiasm.

But that is what they do, as a matter of elitist honour, not revealing any
of the dirty secrets of the nation state they are managing for the interim,
not even if they are 80 years old secrets, just when they proclaim their
modernity at every opportunity. The only modern politician to show any
honour in this has been French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin who has called
for respect for those thirty thousand French soldiers who refused to go on
yet another suicide mission planned by generals 'safely in the rear', and
has since been heavily attacked by the French political establishment.

In the UK on the other hand there is uniformity and every arsehole under
the sun wears a poppy for any occasion which may be public. Such ostentatious
conformism is vulgar. Not surprising when vulgarity is the name of the
modern game; not surprising when the only bastions against vulgarity, the
mass artisan class have been so eradicated in this century.

Now vulgarity is shameless in all its pomp and circumstance, Queen,
Government, Opposition and selected personalities with de rigeur poppies,
celebrating the state's ability to make something of its appropriation of
mourning.
 


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