Celtic fans

[JM14]

I never claimed Muttley wouldn't respect it, I was asking why the Green Brigade (or anyone else) can't and why Muttley wants to give their behaviour a pass.

Apologies I misinterpreted your post

 

[Corcaigh_the_Cat]

'its been completely taken over as more of a political gesture than anything else over the last few years'

This is spot on, unfortunately.

 

[Muttley]

why Muttley wants to give their behaviour a pass.

I'm not sure I said that I did. I said

I wear a poppy and stand silent with everyone else but FFS this is just hypocritical theatre and part of the comforting lie of British Exceptionalism and jingoistic Nationalism

The Celtic/Rangers thing is two sides of the same coin. Rangers with their "British" identity and Celtic with their "Irish". I find the attitude of both sides adopting a National Identity other than "Scottish" as deliberately provocative. I agree that the numpties should honour the minutes silence but also think that the spread of "Remembrance" as theatre beyond a ceremony at war memorials is problematic. And at the core of why they feel "offended" in some way. Why are we, 75 years after the end of WW2, still so wedded to the rhetoric of the time. Johnson thinks he's Churchill re-incarnate, the imagery of Spitfires and Rhomboid tanks is pervasive. Seeing the Germans as a threat, the French are duplicitous, etc. It's not funny and it isn't relevant to the plight of living war veterans or yet those currently serving in our armed services. Next year will be 40 years after the Falklands War, some of the veterans of that conflict are still dying as a consequence of their mental health problems, visiting distress, violence and suffering upon their families. But we have some numpty spending money on lumps of stone and big poppies.

I don't like this theatre of remembrance and how it is spreading. I don't like it at all and some may think me "Anti-British" or unpatriotic but I think it is exactly the opposite I want to see efforts to unite and embrace people in this country not provocative theatre of the "you're with us or against us" feeling this gives me.

 

[Redwurzel]

There is a political element to some of these ceremonies and they do focus a lot on WW1 and WW2 and I do agree its all getting a bit much. I do think the 100 year WW1 anniversaries have contributed to this.

To answer the question the events don't help solders today, I would say the money raised from poppies goes to help people alive in the armed forces and particulary ex-forces who need some form of support.

In my family WW1 indirectly contributed to orphaning my father at 15 and I believe this had a negative effect on his personality and life. He died in 2005 and so I can see the long psychological shadow that that war cast long after 1918, in our family. Quite a lot of what happened to frontline troops was brushed under the carpet and it stayed under the carpet, with sometimes disastrous pyschological effects.

Recently I went to the newly opened Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum. This is WW2 period and has a political element, but I personally still think its important to learn and remember and try and avoid the mistakes of the past, in the future. The Galleries have been designed to take the visitor on a journey of how the Holocaust gradually happened over time, often quite slowly.