Martin Kettle (If we can celebrate Agincourt without jingoism, why not the great war too?, 23 October) doesn’t have to wear a poppy if he doesn’t want to – no one does. Britain’s tradition of remembrance is popular, indeed increasingly so, but it’s not “oppressive”. When tens of thousands travelled to the Tower of London last year to see its moat filled with poppies, there was no Stasi just out of shot with machine guns trained on the crowd. People went there, often with their kids, because they think remembering our history is important.
British Future’s research on attitudes to remembrance asked them why. We found that it’s not because they want to glory in past victories. It because they want their children to know our history, to mark the sacrifices their forebears made and to underline the value – and the cost – of peace.
They also thought that raising awareness of the 1.5 million Commonwealth soldiers who fought for Britain in 1914 could help social cohesion today. That has already started to happen – before the centenary we found most people unaware of the huge contribution from Indian and other Commonwealth soldiers in the first world war but that has now become majority knowledge.
“Poppy shamers” who want to force public figures to wear a poppy, and start an unseemly culture war, are missing the point and misreading British culture. But so are those who are disdainful of the way modern Britain comes together – quietly and inclusively – to remember our shared past.
Sunder Katwala
Director, British Future
• Martin Kettle eloquently expresses the ahistorical exceptionalism of these events, without addressing the structural hypocrisy at their heart. How ever could the official ceremony around war, dominated by the military and state church, of a historically hegemonic country not represent war one-sidedly, speaking, rightly, of courage and self-sacrifice, but never of inhumanity and barbarousness as well, and certainly never our own? In Flanders Fields, the very poem that inspired the poppy, which the Royal British Legion promulgates without the least irony, exhorts us as the war dead’s successors to “Take up [their] quarrel with the foe”, never to ask why “foes” need to see themselves as such, or whose interests are served by their doing so. We need a new Thinking About War day conceived on a very much more plural base. And we need a poem that’s honest in addressing war’s roots – William Blake’s A Poison Tree.
Michael Ayton
Durham
• Martin Kettle’s arguments concerning our remembrance of Agincourt are well made and valid. But he misses the point in arguing that we need to “let go” of the Remembrance Sunday “rituals”. While these had their origins in the remembrance of the first world war, they continue in large measure because they commemorate those who fought and died in all subsequent wars too, including many in living memory. It will not help the cause of peace if we dismiss these events as “unnecessarily oppressive”.
Andy Ford
Marlow, Buckinghamshire
• If Jeremy Corbyn accepts Martin Kettle’s advice that it is too soon for “people in public roles” not to conform and wear a red poppy, I hope he will wear a white poppy alongside it. In part to highlight free speech; but mainly to emphasise “never again” and the pursuit of peace as essential elements of remembrance. Without contemplation of these, the respect being shown for the loss of individuals and the sacrifice made by them and their families – as symbolised by the red – is incomplete.
Richard Stainton
Whitstable, Kent
• Henry V had no legitimate claim on the French throne as he was the son of a usurper and therefore had no de jure right to the English throne either. His invasion of France was as much an act of aggression as Hitler’s on Poland. As Hazlitt says, “He was a hero, that is he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of others.” And it can be argued that Shakespeare’s attitude to him was much more critical than most people have taken it to be.
One needn’t go as far as Gerald Gould, writing after the first world war, who argued that Shakespeare was satirising Henry. But if one is to play Henry in the Olivier way one has to cut the text, as Henry’s threats as to what he will do to the people of Harfleur if it doesn’t surrender are pure terrorism. And when Henry, incognito, tests the morale among the troops on the night before Agincourt and puts a leading question to Bates about the justice of the king’s war, he is met with the answer, “That’s more than we know”, and Bates proceeds to make some powerful points about the sin of fighting an unjust war.
Moreover, Shakespeare makes the Archbishop’s speech justifying the attack on France ludicrously strained and unconvincing. The attorney general, Tony Blair and Iraq come to mind. After all, didn’t Ben Jonson say of Shakespeare he was “not of an age but for all time”?
Malcolm Pittock
Bolton
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