What has this got to do with Football?

Every year in the British calendar they have an event called Remembrance Sunday.  It's an annual ceremony to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian servicemen and women in the two World Wars and later conflicts.  This is also marked by the wearing of a Poppy, the poppy was first used by the American legion to commemorate American soldiers who died in the first world war.  They were then adopted by military veterans' groups in parts of the former British Empire: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Today, they are mainly used in the UK and Canada to commemorate their servicemen and women who have been killed in all conflicts since 1914. The poppy has now become such a powerful public symbol, it has become an unwritten rule that all public figures must wear them or face opprobrium, just ask James McClean.

This event has changed dramatically since I was a child, having been born in to what we dubbed in Ireland a 'mixed marriage' with a protestant mother and a catholic father, I inevitably had family who where in the Royal British Legion and as a result sold Poppy's every year.  Back in my youth it was done with a lot more tact, whilst there was most certainly public displays of respect, they where done in appropriate places such as a Cenotaph or a war memorial site and if you so choose to wear a poppy or not, you did so without duress.  Sadly today the Poppy and the event of remembering has been hijacked by both right wing fascists and brand development executives looking for easy point scoring.  To the degree now that any dissenting voice about the Disney-fication of this event is instantly labeled disrespectful and verbally abused.

I fail to see how forced mandated respect is respect at all, surely it's nothing more than peer pressured compliance with this tacky "look at me, look at the respect I'm paying" culture.  I see it here in the US all the time, people virtually bowing down in reverence to young men and women in uniform and you wonder, who is that for? I have a friend who served 2 tours of Iraq, he just got out of the Military a year ago and we talked about this.  He explained to me, "look a lot of kids who join the Military are from run down economically deprived areas, they've been looked down on their entire lives.  Once they're in uniform everything changes, it's like they've just become a celebrity, they have girls fawning over them, they have people buying them their dinner, buying them beer, everybody wants to be their friend. Companies are falling over themselves to take care of these guys every whim for fear of being criticized and being accused of being unpatriotic" blah blah blah.  It's not hard to see how intoxicating that is for young men and women.  My friend also went on to explain how that inevitably gives a lot of these kids incredible egos, many of them specifically wear their uniform in public when there is no need because of this adulation, who can blame them?  As a result of the ridiculous exaggeration of todays right wing media about the imminent threat of Muslim terrorists you now have a society that won't tolerate any form of verbal dissention related to "our troops" and shut down all logical thought and discussion surrounding "our troops".  Just look at the amount of money that is made in books and movies for a modern day living John Rambo.  Lone survivor, No Easy Day, it's big big business and what's the point of being John Rambo if you can't tell anyone?

Which brings me to the public spectacle of paying your respects to the deceased service men and women of the British armed forces.  Maybe I've got this all wrong but since when did paying respects to the dead become one step away from a Reality TV show?  Didn't we used to do this sort of thing in private or in an appropriate setting?  What on earth has Premier League Football got to do with Remembrance Sunday?  The Premier League chases every global unit of currency it can get it's hands on, it sells itself as a "Global League", so how did it decide that this was a good idea?  This forced respect is extremely unfair on many who have different views, James McClean for example is strung up every year and publically tried for treason for his refusal to wear a poppy!  You can bet your life there are more who feel the same way but just don't have the courage of James to speak up. 

I know there are many who disagree but what is it you disagree with?  Do you disagree that sometimes sport as a microcosm of society should be a platform for things such as this?  Do you disagree that football shirts have no right to expect immunity? The problem is, if you disagree then you have to agree that ALL views must be accepted, not just the ones you agree with.  Imagine if Glasgow Celtic paid homage to the IRA for fighting and dying for the liberation of Ireland from a foreign occupying army who where guilty of genocide and the deprivation of basic human rights.  In fact go one step further, imagine they wanted the Easter Lilly ( a symbol that commemorates the IRA's Easter rising) sewn into everyone's shirts including Rangers what would happen?  There would be outrage in the British media, this would be seen as a glorification of terrorism and an insult to the dead etc etc etc.  But to many people who where subjected to the most heinous racist and murderous occupation the IRA where their liberators.

There in lies the problem, you can not have the arrogance that only your dead deserves to be commemorated, you can not have the arrogance to say that only your political views are entitled to public respect before a football match if you're not willing to accept every one else's.  I was born in Belfast in the 70's, the height of the troubles.  My experience of the British armed forces was not a positive one, I watched them spit on my mother when I was 7 years old and called her an 'Irish whore" , I watched them collude with unionist murderers to slaughter innocent Catholics, as a child walking to school they would routinely point their guns at us, they slaughtered unarmed innocent protestors, they illegally occupied the country I was born in, tore it to pieces and subjected the Irish to the most deprived denigrated existence, robbed them of their culture, committed genocide and deprived them of their basic human rights.  Many of the people that survived this occupation are left with chronic depression through grief, they have multiple graves to visit and spend the rest of their lives suicidal or addicted to a substance to self medicate the awful mental trauma.  So I'm sure you can understand how many don't hold the same reverence for the British armed forces.

The Premier League is a commercial juggernaut and there is nobody they idolize more than the Americans for how they present their sports.  They are attempting to implement the American model in every capacity possible and there is no doubt about it, the Americans do an exceptional job with selling and marketing sports but they aren't perfect. One of those imperfections is the borderline xenophobia that is present in even a meaningless end of season baseball game.  When I first went to a baseball game in the US, I couldn't believe my eyes.  First there is the national anthem, followed by screaming F-14 Jets over head whilst on the field they have a military marching band playing to the roar of the crowd.  I kept asking myself, what has any of this got to do with baseball and why are people cheering this?  I've been in the US more than a decade now and I still don't have an answer to those questions.

Every once in a while I ask myself, what would be my breaking point that would cause me to start questioning my love of football, well this weekend I got my answer.  I am deeply uncomfortable with forced adulation for the armed forces before a football game.  Listening to commentators issue their usual plethora of clichés like "puts football into perspective" is quite frankly offensive.  The only thing it puts into perspective is the double standard that exists within football and what is kosher politically and what isn't and it puts into perspective how nothing anymore is outside the remit of the Premier League's marketing machine for make no mistake about it, this is much more about being seen to be doing the right thing than actually doing it with any degree of sincerity. 

Philip Brown