Political poppies and not letting the Dogs of war silp

Following some intriguing discussions at University in the staff discussion group, it was interesting to find Ray Gaston reposting this article on FB.

Poppy chatter is a distraction from remembrance of the living | Libby Brooks | Comment is free | The Guardian:

One of the bits that got my attention did so because I had felt surprisingly outraged by the suggestion in some of the debate in the media that poppy-wearing is not political:

To deny that the poppy exists in a political context, as well as a historical and cultural one, is to exhibit quite baffling levels of wilful ignorance. It's also insulting to the armed services themselves, given how eager politicians of various stripes are to co-opt them to their particular agendas

Quite so, and furthermore: try wearing a white poppy or even ostentatiously not wearing a poppy and you'll find out what kind of political assumptions are carried.

I'm particularly keen that we keep this original motivation near the heart of our thinking about the matter, at the risk of commiting the cultural equivalent of the etymological fallacy. (I think I can avoid committing it because this is actually a negotiation about meaning in the contempory):

Remembrance commemorations have of course been controversial as early as 1919, when many returning soldiers were appalled by what they saw as the glorification of a squalid and meaningless loss of life

A thought echoed by one correspondan:

One former serviceman explained: "I don't wear a poppy with pride but as a duty to remember all those who died in so many stupid and wasteful wars where young men had to pay for the mistakes of politicians."

The point of the article seems to be to note the need to have a proper care for those our society asks, encourages or sometimes effectively forces into brutal and traumatic mental and physical situations.

veterans continue to be over-represented among rough sleepers; the suicide rate among younger ex-servicemen is four times the national average; the effects of deployment on mental health, often compounded by alcohol misuse, can take years to surface, long after the limited Ministry of Defence support has ended

War is bloody hell; if 'we' justify it then we should jolly well accept to do something about these kinds of consequences.

It makes me wonder whether we should pass legislation to make sure that decisions on the part of governments to deploy troops should be reflexivised: that somehow the consequences of that decisions should be capable of being visited on the decision-makers in order to help them not to make them lightly (of course they will claim they don't anyway, but in the light of Iraq, you've got to wonder whether the stakes for them personally are high enough).

When the previous government was talking about raising the period of detention without trial to 90 days, I suggested that we should tell the politicians that they could do that only if they were willing to to be bound to serve any of the time equivalent to that endured wrongfully by any and all those who might be held under those laws. I suggest a similar reflexivity be found in the case of deploying troops. Not sure what a proper reflex should be; perhaps something like, they would personally have to break the news of the death or do service in a veterans' hospital .... or, well, what would your suggestion be?