On remembrance

[Iris]

Is it wrong that the most moving Remembrance Sunday thing I've seen was tonight's Doctor Who?

The Radio 3 soundscapes were interesting, but ultimately just location recordings. The various bits of conceptual art this year had nothing on Jeremy Deller's We're here because we're here from 4 years ago - if memory serves we caught it in a small town in Shetland. The black cutouts of gun-toting helmet-wearing tommies that have popped up everywhere are gratuitously inoffensive.

Our local council has had some truly horrible tin statues made for the war memorial garden (not quite as nasty as the Jubilee stamp, but ran them close), has installed a new bench with cut-out soldiers on its back and has put bedding plants in the shape of poppies in several of the flower beds. I caught a little bit of the evening Westminster Abbey shindig on Radio 4 (prayers carefully scripted not to give offence and a bland bit of choral music, not very well sung which turned out to be by Judith Weir). And there was the usual drum, glockenspiel and bugle band presumably going to the Legion and audible from the house earlier today.

I would say that we used to do restraint, but then I remember the editorial from 1918 that the Observer republished today (sorry, I can't now find it online), which managed to claim that for the "fourth time since Elizabeth" we have "saved the world" from tyranny. Which rather elevates the potential impact on "the world" of the Armada and Napoleon (and understates both the impact of the weather and other countries), elevates what I assume was the Boer War from a bloody colonial skirmish to an existential threat and sweeps under the carpet the impact of creating an Empire, the little matter of a civil war and a take-over by the Dutch and ignores the impending catastrophe in Ireland.

(Moved from a different thread)

[Iris]

And for all the "we will never forget" rhetoric, we will, and quickly.

Also yesterday we went out to a local National Trust bit of open ground known as The Monument. Other than its long vistas to the hills above Oxford, to Didcot power station and to somewhere near Bicester, and its position overlooking Chequers, it is a monument. To the hundreds of locals who died in South Africa in 1899-1902, a conflict which at the time was devastating (think Housman) but is now all but ignored.

[Rutabaga]

I think the aspect of "Remembrance" that I find most problematic is the one embodied by a post on another forum by a cyclist who is immensely proud that at 11am on Sunday his cycling club members, all wearing club kit (so effectively "in uniform" - this seemed to matter) were the first ones to stand up in the tea-stop café to observe the silence. Apparently other customers stopped talking, but remained seated - prompting the comment, "What's the matter with some people?"

So, it's not enough simply to "remember". One has to be seen to be not only "remembering" but also "remembering enough", as if private remembering and even grieving is insufficient or inauthentic. I couldn't help thinking of the "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" sequence in Cabaret (and the great Diana compost heap). To me, it seems like rank hypocrisy to insist on public hand-wringing about "never again", in a ritual that must conform to an unstated set of rules about perceived sincerity, when wars are raging in other parts of the world every day and other people's children are continually being blown to pieces.

And anyway, aren't we confusing Remembrance with Commemoration? We don't commemorate the end of the Boer War any more, because it has passed out of living consciousness. I hope the same will now start to happen with WWI, and eventually WWII as well. But that does not in any way mean that people won't remember or agree on how dreadful wars are, or think privately about how they affected their ancestors, however distant.

And that's why I don't wear a poppy, and never have (or at least ever since I was old enough to think for myself).

[The Real Ravenhurst]

Here's one in remembrance of Linf...

[Rutabaga]

Another Cabaret link! Doesn't our hero get beaten up for referring to the National Association of Horses' Arses?

[The Real Ravenhurst]

Another Cabaret link! Doesn't our hero get beaten up for referring to the National Association of Horses' Arses?

I don't remember that! Will have to watch it again.

[Rutabaga]

I don't remember that! Will have to watch it again.

So must I, I wonder how much it has dated? I think some people never saw it because they thought it was just another musical, which means they missed a great film with so many resonances. Rupert Everett paid homage to it in The Happy Prince, walking away from Bosie and doing the backwards "I know you're looking at me" Sally Bowles wave.

[ransos]

I will say that the 100 year anniversary does seem to have prompted a great deal of creativity, whether it's the Peter Jackson film, sand sculptures of war poets, or more low-key acts such as the Footnotes to the Great War concert that has been touring Bristol. It feels a long way from the "They gave our lives for us" guff that is guaranteed to get right on my tits.

As an exercise in promoting thought and remembrance, it seems rather more useful than being obliged to follow a set of prescribed rules of observance that seem to be designed more for perception than anything else.

[Rutabaga]

The bit that always grates for me is the notion everyone seems to accept, that the dead somehow 'made a sacrifice' for me. I don't consider this to be a universal truth. I'd be willing to bet that most people who went off to fight felt that they would probably come out of it alive - humans tend to overwhelmingly feel themselves to be more than averagely lucky (it's the same mechanism by which most people think they are above-average drivers). The interviews used in the Peter Jackson film seem to bear this out. The dead mostly did not 'make a sacrifice'; they were sacrificed.

[JohnToo]

The bit that always grates for me is the notion everyone seems to accept, that the dead somehow 'made a sacrifice' for me. I don't consider this to be a universal truth. I'd be willing to bet that most people who went off to fight felt that they would probably come out of it alive - humans tend to overwhelmingly feel themselves to be more than averagely lucky (it's the same mechanism by which most people think they are above-average drivers). The interviews used in the Peter Jackson film seem to bear this out. The dead mostly did not 'make a sacrifice'; they were sacrificed.

Agreed. And I think one also needs to distinguish volunteer armies from conscripts. Every military person I know was desperate to see service in the Falklands, the Gulf , etc.

[Rocky]

The bit that always grates for me is the notion everyone seems to accept, that the dead somehow 'made a sacrifice' for me. I don't consider this to be a universal truth. I'd be willing to bet that most people who went off to fight felt that they would probably come out of it alive - humans tend to overwhelmingly feel themselves to be more than averagely lucky (it's the same mechanism by which most people think they are above-average drivers). The interviews used in the Peter Jackson film seem to bear this out. The dead mostly did not 'make a sacrifice'; they were sacrificed.

I think you are right. My father fought in the Far East in WW2. He signed up (from his minor public school) because that's what all his friends did (as did his brother). He went off to have fun, adventure and see some of the world. He used to admit that he never originally thought about the horrors of war. Many of that generation just didn't think about it. Nor, as Peter Jackson's film of the earlier war suggests, did they talk about it afterwards.

[Rutabaga]

I heard a very interesting analysis recently (Radio 4) of the idea that veterans 'did not talk about' their experiences; I think Jackson's film touches on it as well. It was suggested that many of them did want desperately to talk about what they had seen and done, but their families didn't want to hear it ('Not the war again, Dad' - I know I did that a bit with my own father when I was a child). Among the saddest testimony on Jackson's soundtrack, I thought, was the poor man who limped home after the armistice, and met a former work colleague in the street who said, 'I say! Have you been on nights?'

They couldn't talk about it all except with others who had been there, because most people had not the faintest idea what it was really like. I thought that was one of the strengths of the film, in that it edged closer to giving us an idea of what it might have really been like - it didn't pull many punches, I thought.

[Rocky]

The other sad bit was the interview with the soldier who came home to live with his parents and found when he tried to talk about his experiences that his father kept contradicting him. That must be the ultimate in mansplaining.

[Rutabaga]

There's a short (half-hour) documentary about Peter Jackson on BBC4 tonight at 7.30 that follows him during a year in which he was working on this film. Might be interesting in a 'how they did it' way?

[Rutabaga]

There's a short (half-hour) documentary about Peter Jackson on BBC4 tonight at 7.30 that follows him during a year in which he was working on this film. Might be interesting in a 'how they did it' way?

It was very good - could have been much longer I think.