"I Refuse to Buy A Poppy"

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http://pulsemedia.org/2009/11/05/i-refuse-to-buy-a-poppy/#more-16372

Part of article below; whole thing at link above.

This war [Afghanistan] is not sustainable, not for the West and certainly not for Afghanistan and Pakistan. One way of seeing it is as a skewed civil war in which the West backs a coalition of ethnic minorities against Afghanistan’s single biggest group – the Pushtoons. Another way: the West backs and incites an urban elite against a rural majority. The Taliban is no longer a US-Saudi-Pakistan backed Wahhabi fundamentalist force but an evolving coalition of those who hate murderous US-led intervention. When US official Matthew Hoh resigned his post, he described the Afghan resistance in terms not even of nationalism but of “localism” or “valleyism”. We return to the obvious truth: nobody likes armed foreigners swaggering in their streets. Even if by some miracle the Taliban leadership accepted the NATO occupation, ordinary Afghan farmers would not.

I refuse to buy a poppy for remembrance day, because Britain hasn’t remembered anything at all. Sentimental rituals such as poppy-wearing only help the collective amnesia. We don’t remember that Britain was defeated in Afghanistan twice in the 19^th century, that the mighty Soviet Union was defeated there a couple of decades ago. We don’t remember, or we never learnt, that imperialism is fundamentally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, in every case. And stupid. We don’t remember that imperialism only ever makes social conditions worse and increases the hatred of the imperialised for the imperialiser. If Britain had learned this simple lesson it would not have stumbled into the US-Israeli war in Iraq or into Afghanistan years before an al-Qa’ida attack here. If Britain knew and remembered that people can only develop their social mores in their own way and at their own pace it wouldn’t accept for a moment the noxious propaganda that we are bombing Afghan women in order to liberate them. If Britain understood that people of darker complexion are just as attached to their land and rights as white people it would never have supported apartheid in Palestine and Zionist assaults on Lebanon.

Here is what I will do to support British soldiers. I encourage them to desert, so that they may become true heroes.