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The James McClean Sponsored Poppy Thread


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I live and work in Central Edinburgh and got a train from Waverley this evening

I’ve still not seen a poppy for sale


Poor marks for observation. They had lovely poppies for sale with ‘1918-2018’ written on them. Classy.

f**k those daft c***s who dies 1914-1917. All that matters is the 100 years thing. People like that sort of stuff, 25, 50, 100.

I’m glad no other major conflicts happened in that 100 years. Makes all the sacrifice worthwhile.
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I don't wear the poppy. I wore it, and was proud to wear it when I was a lot younger (Primary School age) because I thought it was the right thing to do. Most of my great uncles or great grandparents had served during WWII. Not long before he passed away, I was speaking with my elderly great uncle who was in his late 80s, and served in the Navy during the Second World War. He had always made a point of not speaking about anything he experienced during the war, but would give a wee speech every year at our local Cenotaph. He would always say that the main reason we remember is so that we remember how dangerous fascism was. His motivation for Remembrance Sunday was to make sure it never happened again.

I was too young to properly appreciate his wisdom at the time, but I remember him watching the carpet bombing of Afghanistan post-9/11 and saying that the current modern America and Britain remind him more of the ideology he fought against than the ideology he fought to defend. It broke his heart to see Britain act as the aggressor, and I stopped wearing a poppy soon after.

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26 minutes ago, BishopLenBrennan said:

I don't wear the poppy. I wore it, and was proud to wear it when I was a lot younger (Primary School age) because I thought it was the right thing to do. Most of my great uncles or great grandparents had served during WWII. Not long before he passed away, I was speaking with my elderly great uncle who was in his late 80s, and served in the Navy during the Second World War. He had always made a point of not speaking about anything he experienced during the war, but would give a wee speech every year at our local Cenotaph. He would always say that the main reason we remember is so that we remember how dangerous fascism was. His motivation for Remembrance Sunday was to make sure it never happened again.

I was too young to properly appreciate his wisdom at the time, but I remember him watching the carpet bombing of Afghanistan post-9/11 and saying that the current modern America and Britain remind him more of the ideology he fought against than the ideology he fought to defend. It broke his heart to see Britain act as the aggressor, and I stopped wearing a poppy soon after.

We all make sense of the world in our own ways etc so I respect yours and your great uncle's opinions, but I couldn't make sense of them myself, because Britain in 1939 was a global imperial force subjugating people around the world. That's different to fascism, but not that different to what happened in the War on Terror, so I presume British imperialism wasn't the value set your great uncle believed he had fought for - in which case, what was?

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2 hours ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

We all make sense of the world in our own ways etc so I respect yours and your great uncle's opinions, but I couldn't make sense of them myself, because Britain in 1939 was a global imperial force subjugating people around the world. That's different to fascism, but not that different to what happened in the War on Terror, so I presume British imperialism wasn't the value set your great uncle believed he had fought for - in which case, what was?

I'm not saying I agree, or necessarily follow his logic or his opinion. All I'm saying is that his beliefs had an impact upon me and made me far more questioning of Governments and their attitudes to war. I'm willing to overlook the whiff of hypocrisy and naivety in his world views.

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10 hours ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

We all make sense of the world in our own ways etc so I respect yours and your great uncle's opinions, but I couldn't make sense of them myself, because Britain in 1939 was a global imperial force subjugating people around the world. That's different to fascism, but not that different to what happened in the War on Terror, so I presume British imperialism wasn't the value set your great uncle believed he had fought for - in which case, what was?

Bit of whataboutery going on there, what the Germans were doing was unprecedented in human history given the industrial scale of the slaughter, and the clerical selection criteria. Mind you, my Dad didn't know why he was fighting until the war was over and the stories came out. Doubt the Bishop's Great Uncle did either.

Edited by welshbairn
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