"The hypnotism of patriotism"
But the story I would recite cannot be included though I would recite it with pride:
The story of a Deserter.
Led like lambs to the slaughter, my grandfather and his comrades were sent for years from place to place in lands they could hardly name, to fight a cause that the century that followed proved fake. In some unknown Balcan field, ill, very ill, he jumped on a train and left. Not out of fear but out of sanity. He was 21. He had been fighting since he was 18. He jumped on a train, and then on another, and then to a village, to herd cows, to marry, to bare children, to have my father, to have me. Died still young. But thirty years later. In an uncharacteristic manner, my father would tell us of his desertion with a laugh, never contempt. He felt proud. Because what pride could there be for him, in a national war, designed and directed by the red right hands of pre WWII politicians, that would probably have slaughtered an 18 year old uneducated boy, desist, he wouldn’t exist.
White Poppy, Red Poppy
Today, two wreath laying ceremonies will take place in the centre of the city.
Wreath and white flowers (I think plastic) will be laid by citizens, usually of an older age, representatives of utopianism, pacifism and non-violent resistance, of God and Man. It will take place in front of the Conscientious Objectors Memorial, a tombstone to those who chose not to fight, even though they died.
Both colours are the colours of death.
Red: blood: violence: violence: physical: screaming: loud: violence: the Shining: Cries and Whispers: American Psycho: red: violent: hell: active.
White: sterile: violence: violence: internalised: silence: quiet: violence: Cuckoo’s nest: Funny Games: Fargo: violent: heaven: irreversible: empty.
This colour coding seems to fit perfectly well the who, when and how of the two ceremonies. The rest of the people, in a mass exercise of conformity or in a mass expression of need for justification and answers, follow afoot.
But it is not a matter of choice, there should be no need for choice. But if I am to be true to myself, and in respect to my grandfather that made me, and as long as anomalies like the rise of fascism in the past and present do not make the pursuit of such ideals impossible, I will quietly only join the ceremony for those ‘who refuse to bow down to their fetish of bullets.’
And in a week, all these wreaths, red and white, will lay dirty, muddy, already decomposing, slowly, expectedly, until they become nothing but an annoyance. Garbage, irritating, cleaned eventually by a reluctant but relieved hand. Dirty, ugly and muddy, in their true colours. Plastic, decaying and fake in their true essence. And we see it. And we hate them.
more info:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUYkPUI-KQ
http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_pdf/Tolstoy/Patriotism_and_Government.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day
http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/index.html
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