The white poppy tends to cause controversy every year, as people take it as a sign of disrespect for the country’s veterans, and view the campaign as trying to latch on to a traditional memorial. They are not wrong, but instead of being angry about its existence, it might be a smart idea to use it as an example of why the traditional, red poppy remains relevant, and learning about history remains something vitally important.
A competing poppy campaign is something which could only exist after people became disconnected from their past. Their purported message of peace is not that far off, because poppies do inherently support peace – they exist as a memorial and recognition of sacrifices made, but there is also the implied message that if we can avoid having to make such sacrifices, that is what we need to do. The white alternative is naive, but then it’s cropping up in an era which is increasingly distant from major conflicts.
War has not gone away, but it has been made more remote than it has ever been. Fewer people are connected to someone who has experienced armed conflict, the wars being fought today are less easily explained and more difficult to rally behind, and the wars of the past are now further away than they have ever been. That is a situation which allows something like the white poppies to exist, given the remoteness of war and a lack of understanding of history, a campaign to “promote peace” begins to make sense. Once you begin to understand history, it no longer does.
Poppies are an invitation to learn from history. We remember the people lost to conflict, but we also need to remember why they were lost. It’s not just about the soldiers as individuals, but also the entire era, and what lead to their sacrifices in the first place. It’s a message about the importance of peace as a means to prevent a repeat of the global conflicts that made poppies relevant in the first place. The difference is that they are not naive, they recognize the necessity of war while referencing the damage it causes.
Clearly the people who wear the white variation don’t know about this, because if they did they would wear the same poppies as the rest of us. Instead of blasting them for a lack of respect, we should look at why an alternate campaign might exist, and react accordingly. In effect, we need to find a way to get people to connect more strongly with the own history. This is something which gets more difficult every year, as history retreats further into the past, we lose more veterans and get further disconnected from any conflict that happens around us.
But the need to reconnect with that history becomes more important every year as well, because we do need to remember what happened, not just the war itself but the events leading up to it, and we need to understand how a global conflict could happen so we can stop a global conflict from ever happening. Understanding what happened during previous wars and the years in between is a valuable lesson for how we handle any conflict today, and the people who died over seventy years ago are reasons why we need to learn that history and get it right this time around. The red poppy carries a message of peace, because it comes from an era of war.
