White Poppy Campaign?

[underGRADFlame]

A handful of university students have hopped aboard the left-wing Rideau Institute's "white poppy" campaign for Remembrance Day, promoting their pacifist ideology by piggybacking on the Royal Canadian Legion's red poppy campaign.

"Young people don't want to celebrate war," Celyn Dufay of the University of Ottawa said. "We want to work for peace.

http://www.calgarysun.com/2013/11/04...y-offends-vets

[Northendzone]

dear celyn - you are being an idiot please stop.......

i'd hardly say red poppies celebrate war.......

why do people always feel a need to change tradition......

[habernac]

I've had this argument with a pacifist. I asked if he thought the old vets really wanted to go out and risk their lives. We are celebrating nothing. We are mourning. There is no celebration, only sadness.

[MrMastodonFarm]

Yeah, November 11th isn't about celebration.

[troutman]

Sun Reader comments never disappoint.

[habernac]

Originally Posted by MrMastodonFarm

Yeah, November 11th isn't about celebration.

I turn poppy red with rage when I hear about this crap. My grandfather was in conflict. He lost so many friends. We are so lucky he came back. These poppies are to remember them by. These dicks think the Nazis would have been stopped by a stern scolding.

[Muta]

Remembrance Day is about the veterans and those currently serving. The poppy is a symbolic reminder of the sacrifice they went through to allow us to live the lives we have today.

Why are those students making this day about themselves? It's not about their agendas whatsoever. They've completely missed the point.

[YYC in LAX]

This really saddens me.

[Rathji]

Looks like the idiotic things said in the Sun are not just restricted to page 6 and the comments sections.

[para transit fellow]

some quick research shows that the white poppy dating back to 1926

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_poppy

[killer_carlson]

Pretty unique name. Wonder if HR departments keep an informal "no" lists?

Would you want a guy like this associated with your business?

[troutman]

We may not like Dufay's opinion, but didn't our veterans fight for these freedoms?

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by habernac

I've had this argument with a pacifist. I asked if he thought the old vets really wanted to go out and risk their lives. We are celebrating nothing. We are mourning. There is no celebration, only sadness.

Originally Posted by habernac

I turn poppy red with rage when I hear about this crap. My grandfather was in conflict. He lost so many friends. We are so lucky he came back. These poppies are to remember them by. These dicks think the Nazis would have been stopped by a stern scolding.

I believe this is an honest oversight on your part. Nov 11, while arising from WW1 is for more than remembering soldiers of the two Great Wars.

I will remember:

• Cpl J.M.H. BECHARD, 2PPCLI, UNPROFOR, 06 AUG 1993
• Capt J.P. DECOSTE, 2PPCLI, UNPROFOR, 18 SEP 1993

Neither of these gentlemen came back from my tour. IRRC Cpl Bechard died while about to go on leave to see his new born.

Capt Decoste searched me and my partner out at UN headquarters in Knin, not having seen any other Canadians for weeks. He bought us pizza and beer. We chatted for 2 hours. He died later when his Ilitis was ripped in two. There are also numerous soldiers that were injuried physically and mentally.

This time of year always makes me sad.

[habernac]

Absolutely spot on. For all of our veterans, regardless of which war. You've been through things none of us can ever understand.

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by troutman

We may not like Dufay's opinion, but didn't our veterans fight for these freedoms?

Yes, and?

[Flash Walken]

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.
Bright red they were, with that particularly silly green leaf out of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snow has maintained his dignity by not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and without that ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long black wire snaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave me lots of books about the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47 years before I stood, amid real shellfire, in the real Sarajevo and put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...d-6257416.html

[undercoverbrother]

nm

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by troutman

We may not like Dufay's opinion, but didn't our veterans fight for these freedoms?

Yep, they're using they're freedom for this, and we're using our freedom to call them ****ing idiots. We both win.

[Minnie]

Cripes that pisses me off. My grandpa (maternal) was born in 1890. Fought in WWI. Lots of his medals and such are in the War Museum in Ottawa. I remember him telling us stories of his time in France. Hiding out in a barn from the Germans and then a whole slew of them showed up that night, and bedded down in the other side of the barn, how they had to keep so quiet so as not to get slaughtered, as they were well outnumbered. Things like that.

People aren't celebrating. There is nothing to celebrate. Hence the name, you ding dongs - REMEMBRANCE day. To remember those of our countrymen & women, who have given their service to our country, no matter which war they fought in. Those who left and never returned. I don't know anyone that celebrates war. It's an awful thing.

It irks me so much too, that we don't respect the day the way we used to. Like I impressed upon my daughter, on how women got the vote, I've also impressed upon both her and her brothers, just what people gave up/went through, to insure our freedoms. To ensure this great life we live.

Thankfully, my grandfather made it home, married and had 8 kids. He died when I was 20. I miss him still.

[OffsideSpecialist]

I hate when these elitist snobby students make it sound like they are speaking on behalf of all the student population when they utter their nonsense. The white poppy isn't only offending vets as the article points out, it is also offending their fellow students.