In a Memorial Day post some years ago, the late Kevin R. C. O’Brien, a veteran himself, explained that that day was to honor the dead, not to say “Thank you for your service”:
Memorial Day is not on occasion to celebrate those many of us who survive. At least, not in the USA. We’ve got a day for that, in the bitter month of November, for good and historical reasons. That’s the day for those who returned upright and animate.
It’s not like that in the rest of the Anglosphere.
November 11 is celebrated as Remembrance Day in Canada, England, Australia, and other Anglosphere countries. It’s more like Memorial Day in America, in that it’s dedicated to the honored dead, rather than living veterans.
Writing about Memorial Day, a few years ago, I wrote that VDARE’s overseas Anglospheric readers celebrate Remembrance Day on November 11 (Armistice Day in the U.S.) in honor of a soul-destroying, seemingly pointless slaughter that destroyed the old order between 1914 and 1918.
But by 1914, the United States had already been memorializing its own soul-destroying, seemingly pointless slaughter for fifty years.
On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy — not a real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th. They’re sold in the street by aged members of the Royal British Legion to commemorate that moment 83 years ago today, when on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns fell silent on the battlefields of Europe.
The poppy is an indelible image of that “war to end all wars,” summoned up by a Canadian, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, in a poem written in the trenches in May 1915:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Row on row on row. And, in between, thousands of poppies, for they bloom in uprooted soil. Sacrifice on the scale McCrae witnessed is all but unimaginable in the west today … [More]
A Remembrance Day ceremony is an implicitly white event. There were contingents of non-white troops on both sides of World War I, but it was white people fighting white people that made the war.
