So I bought a poppy to wear. A red one.

A depressing number of people – or a number of depressing people – have taken to associating this symbol with a dismal sense of jingoism. They will tell you that the red poppy commemorates all those who died in the cause of liberty and justice, or some such. Largely, they are the people who think they own patriotism, who are proud of British history despite (or because of) not really knowing any; the sort of people who would (and did) happily sell the UK’s future, its economy, its values and its people down the river, so long as they got to wave a Union Flag and look down on foreigners.

So I can’t quarrel with anyone who chooses to wear a white poppy, to try and distance themselves from all this toxic nationalism. And I’m not going to quarrel with anyone who wears no poppy at all, because, after all, why not leave the wars of the last century behind us? Their choices are not my choices, but that doesn’t make them any worse. Only different.

But I bought a red one. Because I do know some history, and I do want to remember.

You can – possibly – argue that World War II was that near-mythical thing, a “just” war. That the evils of Nazi Germany were so great that even the destruction of a war was better than letting them ravage unchecked. So you might argue that soldiers on the Allied side did, in fact, fight for liberty and justice. Though those on the Axis side died too, and in its way, that is just as much a tragedy. Even the most depraved member of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen was a human being, was some mother’s son, was a creature with many possibilities before his life was snuffed out. If they had lived, could they have turned their lives around? Is it possible for them to atone for the crimes they committed? I honestly don’t know. I do know, though, that once they were dead, they couldn’t even try.

But in any case, that’s not what the poppies are about. The poppy, as a symbol, followed the First World War. And nobody in that war died for liberty or justice. Not a single soul. World War I was a clash of imperial houses, competing with each other for money and prestige. Nobody died for liberty. They died for the interests of a morbid handful of aristocrats, families inbred and interbred, arrogating to themselves the ownership of whole nations. They died in a glorified family squabble, an argument about How Their Kevin Got The Fish Knives Nana Always Said Would Go To Our Sharon that somehow got out of hand and chewed up twenty million lives.

And when it was finally over, the survivors looked at the carnage and the devastation, and very sensibly said, Never again.

The poppies grew among the battlefields in Belgium, and they were a symbol in two ways. The red of the flowers was symbolic of the oceans of blood that were spilled. But the fact of the flowers, their simple presence as they grew amid the desolation and destruction, spoke of the resilience of life, of the renewal of hope. And that was the real message of the poppy. To remember the bloodshed, and to hope for better things.

So that’s why I bought, and why I wear, a red poppy. Not out of paltry nationalism. Not to celebrate some transient victory. I wear it in rememberance. In solidarity with the dead, all the dead, all those lives cut short, all those possibilities unrealized. Because the awful cost of war must be remembered. I wear it to say, I remember. And, also, Never again.