Every November, I wear two poppies. One red, one white.
It’s an arrangement which occasionally seems to invite more explanation than ought reasonably be demanded of two small paper flowers, but I’ve never particularly regarded them as contradictory. Quite the opposite, in fact. To my mind, they’re two expressions of the same sentiment, albeit with slightly different emphases.
There’s a personal dimension to this. My great-grandfather died in the First World War, and he’s at Thiepval, among the more than 72,000 servicemen commemorated on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. In my youth I spent time visiting the battlefields and memorials of northern France and Belgium: Tyne Cot, the Lochnagar Crater, the Danger Tree at Beaumont-Hamel, and others. Places where the scale of the killing is almost impossible to comprehend, even when the evidence of it is quite literally carved into the stone in front of you.
The numbers are extraordinary, but I think it’s the individual details which make them so affecting. The names, the ages, the regiments, the dates of death. The occasional brothers buried together, the clusters of men from the same village who died within days of one another. And, perhaps most hauntingly, the graves without names and the names without graves.
At Thiepval, the sheer quantity of names threatens to overwhelm the individuality of the people they represent. Yet every one of those names belonged to somebody who had a life before the war, who knew people and was known by them, and whose absence was subsequently felt by somebody else. That’s what a war memorial is trying to preserve against the flattening effects of time and statistics.
I find it difficult to come away from such places without understanding something of what remembrance is for. The dead deserve to be remembered, and their families deserve to know that those they loved haven’t simply disappeared into the historical record. So I wear a red poppy.
I also wear a white one. Not because I think the first celebrates warfare, or because I regard the second as a morally superior expression of grief, but because there’s something else I think we owe the dead, beyond the promise that we’ll remember them. We owe them a serious attempt to understand why they died, what might have been done to prevent it, and what we can do to prevent others from suffering similarly.
The distinction might seem academic, but I believe it gets at something rather fundamental about the way we commemorate war. Every November, we renew our commitment to remembrance. We gather at memorials, lay wreaths, read names and observe silences. We promise that we’ll never forget, and somewhere within those rituals sits the hope that such horrors might never happen again.
But never again is an aspiration, not a theory of peace. And I wonder whether we’ve become rather better at expressing the former than explaining how we intend to achieve the latter.
The problem with never again
The origins of remembrance are worth considering, because it’s easy to forget just how immediate the First World War was to the people who established its commemorative traditions.
When Britain observed the first national two-minute silence on 11 November 1919, the armistice had been only a year earlier. The people standing silently in the streets weren’t remembering an event they had studied at school, or one their grandparents had told them about. They were mourning husbands, sons, fathers, brothers and friends whose absence was still an immediate feature of everyday life.
The Cenotaph, the Unknown Warrior, and the thousands of memorials erected in towns and villages throughout Britain provided a language for a grief which was both intensely personal and almost incomprehensibly widespread. They also provided somewhere to mourn, particularly for families whose relatives had died overseas and whose bodies would never return home.
As the British Library observes, the early commemorations served not only to honour the dead, but to console those left behind and give some meaning to their loss.
This is worth emphasising because it would be both unfair and rather presumptuous to treat remembrance as merely a political exercise. Sometimes grief is simply grief, and those who have lost somebody ought to be allowed to mourn them.
Nevertheless, remembrance has always possessed a political dimension, even when its participants haven’t agreed about what that dimension ought to be.
Consider the history of the white poppy. The white poppy is sometimes treated as a comparatively recent intrusion into the established traditions of remembrance, invented by people who regard the red poppy as excessively militaristic. In fact, it was first produced in the early 1930s by the Co-operative Women’s Guild, an organisation whose membership included many women who had lost relatives and friends during the First World War.
The Guild’s decision to produce white poppies reflected a particular anxiety. Its members feared that the commitment to preventing another war was becoming detached from the rituals established to commemorate the last one.
The Guild’s General Secretary, Eleanor Barton, called for a return to the spirit of never again which had been so strong in the immediate aftermath of 1918. In 1938, her successor Rose Simpson explained that the organisation had no quarrel with the red Flanders poppy of Remembrance, but wore the white poppy as an additional commitment to preventing future wars.
I find this history rather revealing.
Here were women who had themselves lived through the First World War, who had experienced the immediate consequences of its destruction, and who were already concerned that Britain was forgetting the lessons it ought to have learned.
They weren’t complaining that the war had passed beyond living memory. Quite the opposite: the memories were still painfully immediate, and their anxiety was that the way society chose to honour those memories might not lead to the political conclusions they considered necessary.
So perhaps this isn’t a new problem at all.
Perhaps there never was a golden age of remembrance in which everybody understood its meaning perfectly, followed by a gradual decline into empty ceremony. Perhaps remembrance has always contained an unresolved tension between honouring sacrifice, mourning suffering and preventing recurrence.
Indeed, it would be rather strange if it didn’t. The First World War meant different things to different people, even among those who fought in it. The experiences of a grieving widow, a wounded veteran, a decorated officer, a conscientious objector and a politician who had supported the war couldn’t be expected to produce identical interpretations of what had happened.
And the Second World War subsequently complicated matters further, because it became necessary to reconcile the determination that another war should never happen with the experience of a war which, for all its horrors, had also involved the very necessary resistance to Nazism.
There was never going to be a single, uncontested lesson.
But that doesn’t mean there are no lessons to learn.
The difference between remembering sacrifice and remembering war
The language of remembrance tends, understandably, to emphasise service, sacrifice, courage, duty and heroism.
These aren’t objectionable concepts. Many soldiers behaved with extraordinary courage. Many risked, and lost, their lives protecting others. There are circumstances in which military service represents an exceptionally demanding form of public duty, and people who have performed it deserve recognition.
But I think there’s a danger in allowing these virtues to become the entirety of our understanding of warfare.
We can commemorate the courage of a soldier killed at Passchendaele without asking whether the military decisions which placed him there were justified. We can celebrate somebody’s sacrifice without investigating the political failures which made that sacrifice necessary. We can praise the determination of those who endured appalling conditions while neglecting to ask why they were expected to endure them.
And, perhaps most troublingly, we can allow the language of sacrifice to imply that the deaths themselves were necessarily justified by the causes for which they occurred.
This deserves some scrutiny.
To say that somebody died bravely isn’t the same thing as saying that they died for a just cause. To recognise the tragedy of a soldier’s death isn’t to endorse the decisions of the government which sent him to fight. Nor, for that matter, does recognising the humanity of an enemy soldier require us to regard the causes of the two sides as morally equivalent.
These distinctions ought to be obvious, but public remembrance doesn’t always encourage us to make them.
There’s a tendency, particularly in patriotic rhetoric, to frame military deaths as sacrifices made for our freedom. Sometimes that description is historically defensible. Sometimes it’s considerably more questionable. Britain has fought wars for all manner of reasons, not all of them noble, and it would be peculiar to suppose that every serviceman killed in every conflict necessarily died defending the same political principles.
If we want to honour the dead, we should be able to do so without retrospectively legitimising every war in which they fought.
Indeed, I’d suggest that the willingness to scrutinise those wars is one of the more serious ways we can demonstrate respect for the people who suffered through them.
That doesn’t mean every commemorative service should become an occasion for political argument. The Royal British Legion explicitly understands its role as remembering the experiences of service personnel and their families without adjudicating the politics of individual conflicts, and there’s a perfectly respectable reason for that position. A mother remembering her son shouldn’t have to listen to a lecture on the geopolitical circumstances of his deployment.
Nevertheless, there’s a difference between keeping a ceremony non-partisan and allowing the political questions raised by war to disappear from our collective understanding of remembrance altogether.
If our commemorations acknowledge the terrible consequences of warfare while setting aside the decisions which produced them, we’re preserving the memory of suffering without necessarily learning very much about its prevention.
And this becomes particularly uncomfortable when we consider what never again ought actually to mean.
A peace worth having
There is, of course, an obvious difficulty with the aspiration that war should never happen again.
The First World War was followed, scarcely twenty years later, by the Second.
It’s tempting to treat this as a straightforward refutation of pacifism, and the history of appeasement has often been deployed in precisely that fashion. The lesson, supposedly, is that the determination to avoid war can itself become dangerous when it prevents governments from confronting aggression.
There’s something to this, although I think the argument becomes much less straightforward when we consider how intimately connected the two wars were.
Take the Treaty of Versailles.
The settlement imposed on Germany in 1919 became a powerful source of grievance, resentment and political mobilisation. Nationalist politicians portrayed it as a humiliation, and the Nazis proved particularly adept at exploiting those sentiments.
It’s possible to construct a plausible counterfactual in which a different settlement, one perceived as less punitive or more legitimate, might have produced a more stable post-war Germany.
But that doesn’t establish that Versailles caused the Second World War, nor that a more generous settlement would necessarily have prevented it. The treaty’s economic consequences have often been exaggerated, while Nazi expansionism and racial ideology possessed causes and ambitions which can’t be reduced to the events of 1919. As a recent reassessment of the Versailles settlement observes, historians have increasingly moved away from treating the treaty as the singular explanation for the catastrophe that followed.
Nevertheless, Versailles does demonstrate something important about peacemaking.
Ending a war isn’t necessarily the same thing as establishing a durable peace. A settlement may succeed in stopping the immediate fighting while creating, preserving or failing to address political conditions which make further conflict more likely.
The people negotiating a peace therefore have responsibilities which extend beyond deciding who won, who lost and what punishment the defeated deserve.
They must also consider how their settlement will work in practice, whether it can be maintained, how it will be regarded by the populations subject to it, and whether it provides credible means of resolving future disputes.
That doesn’t mean abandoning justice in the interests of avoiding resentment. A peace which rewards aggression or abandons its victims may be no more sustainable than one which humiliates the defeated.
Rather, it means recognising that the construction of peace involves difficult and sometimes competing political obligations.
The remilitarisation of the Rhineland offers a different, but related, problem.
In March 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the demilitarised Rhineland, in violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Germany was still in the process of rearmament, and the operation represented a considerable gamble. French military superiority was substantial, and Hitler couldn’t be certain that Britain and France would permit the violation to proceed.
But they did. France was unwilling to act without British support, while the British government was reluctant to confront Germany over treaty provisions which many Britons already regarded as unfair.
It’s sometimes suggested that a decisive French response would have forced Hitler to withdraw, perhaps undermining his political position so badly that the subsequent war might have been avoided altogether.
This is an appealing counterfactual, knowing all that followed, but it’s impossible to establish with confidence. Military intervention could have provoked fighting, the governments involved faced serious domestic and strategic constraints, and we shouldn’t assume that Hitler’s regime would necessarily have collapsed following one diplomatic humiliation.
What we can say is that the decision not to confront Germany had consequences. It demonstrated the difficulty of enforcing the European security settlement and left Hitler in a stronger position to pursue subsequent territorial ambitions.
And here’s the distinction I find important: avoiding an immediate confrontation isn’t necessarily the same thing as preserving peace.
There were forms of resistance available to Britain and France short of launching a full-scale war, including coordinated diplomatic pressure, economic measures and attempts to enforce international commitments. Whether any particular combination would have succeeded is another question, but the absence of a guaranteed solution didn’t make inaction consequence-free.
Sometimes preserving peace requires us to confront aggression before it develops into something more destructive.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon our aversion to warfare. It means recognising that there are different kinds of conflict, and that the avoidance of conflict itself isn’t always a virtue.
Which brings me, somewhat belatedly, to an interesting distinction I hadn’t encountered until comparatively recently.
Pacifism, pacificism, and the problem of doing nothing
For a long time, I would probably have described my own position as something like practical pacifism.
I regard war as a profound human tragedy. I think societies should be prepared to devote considerable time, effort, and resources to preventing it. I’m deeply suspicious of the tendency to treat military force as an ordinary instrument of political problem-solving, or - in the words of the late Tony Benn MP - for us to treat war as “a computer game for our children and just an interesting little Channel 4 news item”.
But I’m not convinced that violence is never justified, or that refusing to resist aggression is necessarily the most peaceful course of action.
As it happens, political historians have a word for something rather like this position: pacificism.
The historian Martin Ceadel, who has written extensively about British peace movements, distinguishes between pacifism and pacificism.
In its stricter sense, pacifism regards participation in warfare as morally wrong. Pacificism, by contrast, places the prevention and eventual abolition of war at the centre of political responsibility, while accepting that force might sometimes be necessary in the immediate circumstances of an imperfect world.
The distinction is more than a convenient escape clause for people who don’t quite want to commit to absolute pacifism. It reflects a difference in how peace itself is understood.
An absolute pacifist might reasonably argue that the individual has a moral obligation not to participate in warfare, whatever the consequences. A pacificist is more concerned with the political responsibility to prevent warfare from occurring, including by changing the institutions and relationships which make it possible.
This isn’t simply conventional military deterrence dressed up in more agreeable language. The aspiration isn’t merely to maintain sufficient military power that other countries are frightened of attacking us. It’s to construct an international order in which warfare becomes progressively less necessary, less attractive and less legitimate as a means of resolving disputes.
Which raises another question: what, exactly, is peace?
The rather obvious answer is that peace is the absence of war. I’m bringing to mind the powerful language of the UN Charter, which in the preamble states that the peoples of the UN have determined “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind“. It’s moving stuff.
War is awful. But consider a society governed by an authoritarian regime which suppresses dissent so effectively that nobody dares challenge it - maybe Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein, since I’ve already mentioned Tony Benn’s speech against the Iraq war. Or a colonial empire which maintains decades of relative stability by denying its subjects political autonomy. Or two countries which avoid open warfare while one systematically threatens and coerces the other.
These arrangements might be peaceful in the narrow sense that organised armed conflict is absent, but there’s something unsatisfactory about treating them as models of peace.
The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung offered a useful distinction in his 1969 paper, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.
Galtung distinguished between negative peace, characterised by the absence of direct violence, and positive peace, which also requires the absence of structural violence: the forms of suffering and deprivation produced by unjust social, economic and political arrangements.
The terminology is perhaps a little unfortunate, since negative peace sounds rather more objectionable than it’s supposed to be. The absence of people shooting one another is, after all, a considerable and laudable achievement. But Galtung’s point was that we shouldn’t mistake it for the whole of what peace might involve.
There are reasonable criticisms of this approach. Galtung’s conception of structural violence can become so expansive that it risks treating almost every social injustice as a form of violence, without adequately distinguishing between different kinds of harm. Nor does the pursuit of social justice automatically eliminate the possibility of armed conflict. Nevertheless, I think the distinction captures something valuable.
Peace isn’t simply a condition in which nobody is currently fighting. It’s also a condition in which people have meaningful ways of resolving disagreements, pursuing legitimate interests and challenging injustice without violence.
And this brings us to a second distinction, one which I find particularly useful: peace is not the absence of conflict.
Conflict is an ordinary, unavoidable feature of human relationships. People disagree about their interests, values, identities, resources and aspirations. Sometimes those disagreements are trivial; sometimes they concern the most fundamental questions of political power and human rights.
Indeed, many of the most important achievements of social reform have depended upon people deliberately generating conflict with established institutions.
The movements for women’s suffrage, civil rights and democratic representation weren’t exercises in avoiding disagreement. They challenged existing arrangements, mobilised opposition, disrupted established practices and demanded changes which powerful people often resisted.
It would be peculiar to describe the societies which those movements challenged as more peaceful simply because their injustices had not yet been confronted.
The peacebuilding scholar John Paul Lederach offers a useful way of understanding this. His approach to conflict transformation treats conflict not simply as a problem to be suppressed or resolved, but as a potentially constructive force which can generate changes in relationships and social arrangements.
The task of peacemaking isn’t therefore to eliminate disagreement, which would be impossible, but to establish means by which disagreement can occur without producing violence and domination.
This seems to me a much more useful conception of peace than the simple aspiration that everybody should stop fighting.
It also offers a way of thinking about the failure of appeasement which doesn’t collapse into the opposite error of treating military confrontation as the natural solution to international disputes.
The problem with appeasement wasn’t simply that its practitioners disliked war. It was that their attempts to avoid immediate warfare failed to secure a sustainable peace, and, in some circumstances, permitted an aggressor to become more dangerous.
A serious commitment to peace must therefore be capable of resisting aggression, challenging injustice and confronting destructive political ambitions.
It must be active rather than passive; concerned with the conditions which produce violence rather than merely its immediate expression.
And sometimes, regrettably, it must confront the possibility that the use of force is necessary to prevent still greater violence.
That last point is an uncomfortable one, because any philosophy which permits exceptions must explain where those exceptions begin and end. It isn’t enough to declare every proposed intervention a necessary defence of peace. History contains rather too many examples of wars justified in precisely those terms.
Pacificism doesn’t eliminate the difficult judgements associated with warfare. If anything, it makes them more demanding, because it requires us to consider both the immediate moral consequences of action and the longer-term implications for the peaceful order we’re attempting to establish.
But it does suggest that there’s a form of opposition to war which isn’t equivalent to passivity, isolationism or a refusal to confront aggression.
Perhaps that’s the kind of pacifism I mean when I wear a white poppy.
What we owe the dead
All of which brings us back, eventually, to the question of remembrance.
I’ve wondered whether the gradual disappearance of the generations who experienced the two world wars is changing the way we understand their legacy.
The last known First World War veteran, Florence Green, died in 2012. The last British veteran of the Western Front trenches, Harry Patch, had died three years earlier. We are now approaching the point at which the Second World War, too, will pass entirely beyond the living memories of those who experienced it.
There’s something rather unsettling about this transition. The wars are becoming history in a different sense from the one in which they were history for our parents and grandparents.
We still have the photographs, the letters, the documents, the memoirs and the memorials. We still have extraordinary amounts of historical scholarship, and in some respects our capacity to reconstruct individual wartime experiences has never been greater.
But we are losing the people who could speak about those experiences with the authority of having lived through them.
And I wonder whether that makes it easier for us to tidy up the past, transforming complicated individual lives into a more comfortable collective narrative of service, sacrifice and national endurance.
I don’t want to exaggerate the point. The presence of veterans never guaranteed that remembrance would be historically accurate or politically wise, and people who experienced the same conflict often drew radically different lessons from it.
Nor do I have any reliable evidence that contemporary Britons are less committed to peace than their predecessors. It would be rather too convenient to assume that society has been steadily forgetting the things I happen to consider important.
But I do think there’s a vulnerability in the way remembrance operates.
Commemorative traditions are extraordinarily good at preserving symbols, rituals and emotional associations. They’re less obviously equipped to preserve the arguments, disagreements and political responsibilities which originally accompanied them.
This is especially true when a ritual is designed, quite reasonably, to unite people with very different political beliefs.
A national silence is a shared moment, but it can accommodate almost any view of the wars being remembered. It can express grief, gratitude, respect, patriotism, sorrow, anger or a commitment to peace, without requiring participants to agree about any of it.
That’s part of its value, I guess. But it also means that the ritual itself cannot do all the work of historical understanding.
And I think the danger is that we begin to treat the performance of remembrance as evidence that we’ve discharged our responsibility to the past.
We’ve observed the silence. We’ve laid the wreath. We’ve promised to remember.
What follows?
If we take the aspiration of never again seriously, the answer has to involve more than an annual act of commemoration.
It requires us to think about how conflicts develop, how international institutions can prevent aggression, how diplomacy might resolve disputes before they become wars, and how political settlements can secure a durable peace rather than merely suspend the fighting.
It requires us to consider the relationship between injustice and violence, and to recognise that political stability maintained through oppression isn’t necessarily a peace worth preserving.
It also requires difficult judgements about deterrence, collective security and the circumstances in which armed resistance might be justified.
None of these questions can be answered by wearing a poppy, of either colour.
Nor should we pretend that the generations who experienced the world wars found straightforward answers to them.
But there is something instructive about the political achievements which followed the Second World War. The creation of the United Nations, the development of international human rights law, the reconstruction of European relations and the institutions which eventually contributed to European integration were all, in different ways, attempts to create a more durable international peace.
They were imperfect, sometimes profoundly so. They didn’t prevent the Cold War, decolonisation conflicts, genocide or the numerous wars which have continued to devastate societies around the world.
Nevertheless, they represented attempts to translate the memory of catastrophe into political arrangements intended to prevent its repetition.
The generation which experienced the Second World War didn’t simply build monuments to its dead. It also attempted to construct institutions through which future generations might settle their disagreements differently.
And perhaps that’s the part of the inheritance we should be thinking about more carefully.
Not simply the obligation to preserve the rituals they established, but the responsibility to continue the unfinished political work which those rituals were supposed to represent.
Because peace isn’t something we can secure once, put in a museum and periodically commemorate. It has to be maintained, defended, renegotiated and, occasionally, rebuilt.
It demands attention to the conditions which make warfare more likely, even when there isn’t currently a war to attract our attention. It requires political courage when confronting aggression, but also restraint, patience and an awareness of the potentially catastrophic consequences of getting those judgements wrong.
And it requires us to recognise that the horror of war doesn’t automatically tell us how to prevent the next one.
That’s something we have to work out for ourselves.
Two small promises
Which is why, every November, I find myself wearing two poppies.
I don’t imagine that doing so makes me any better at remembering than someone who wears one, or none at all. Symbols aren’t a test of political virtue, and I’d be rather suspicious of anyone who treated them as such.
Indeed, the red and white poppy aren’t representing mutually exclusive sentiments, whatever some of the more enthusiastic participants in the annual poppy controversy might suggest.
But I find it useful to hold the two emphases together.
One reminds me of the horrors of war, and of the untold numbers of people who suffered and died, including a great-grandfather whose life ended on the battlefields of the Somme long before I was born, commemorated at Thiepval because there was no body left to bury.
The other reminds me that remembering their suffering and sacrifice ought to carry an obligation to those who might otherwise suffer similarly, that never again is not a platitude but a complex and vulnerable political project which needs re-enacting every day.
And I think those promises belong together.
We should remember the dead because they were people, because their lives possessed value independently of the causes for which they fought, and because their families and communities bore the consequences of their loss.
We should remember the wars because they teach us something about the capacity of human societies for destruction, the fragility of political order, and the appalling costs of allowing conflicts to develop into organised violence.
But we should also remember the attempts to make peace, including those which failed, because they confront us with the more difficult question of what preventing another catastrophe might actually require.
Perhaps that’s the part of remembrance which is easiest to lose. Not the names, the dates or the battles. We have become remarkably good at preserving those. It’s the recognition that never again isn’t a sentiment we can express once a year and consider fulfilled. It’s a political obligation which stretches into the other 364 days, when we’re making decisions about diplomacy, international law, security, justice and the kind of world we want to leave behind.
It isn’t necessarily an obligation to avoid every confrontation. Sometimes peace requires us to confront aggression, to resist injustice, and to accept that there are things worth defending even at considerable cost.
But it is an obligation to take the prevention of war seriously as a political project, rather than treating it as a desirable outcome which might somehow follow from our general disapproval of bloodshed.
And perhaps that’s what I want my two poppies to represent.
The first is a promise that we won’t forget those who died.
The second is a promise that we’ll do something with the memory.
Because remembering the last war is one thing. Building a world in which the next one becomes less likely is considerably harder.
And if we’re going to promise them never again, I think we owe them at least the seriousness of trying.