Poll: Wear a White Poppy

[MajoraPersona]

Excellent. People arguing over which colour of plastic flower to wear to remember the dead. Just as Remembrance Day was intended.

 

[Macemaster]

I won't wear a white poppy, it may be a symbol for the civi's, but it's white poppies that make opium...

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

The money from the Red Poppy goes straight to the veterans fund. Where does the money from the white ones go?

*Pats red poppy*

I will never stop wearing the red poppy. It symbolizes the blood spilled to guarantee my freedom.

 

[Fetzenfisch]

 

[Levi93]

id probably sit on the fence and wear both.

 

[tahrey]

I am not trying to glorify or belittle anybody's suffering. All suffering during war is equal, it is equally tragic and unacceptable in any amount no matter who it happens to. I reffered to ww2 specifically becasue it serves as an excellent example of how evil and tragic war was on both sides. It was my intention to point out that civilians were targeted deliberatly, killed enmass and using barbiric techniques (phosperous incindaries, targetting evacuation stations, ect) in order to accompish some vague goal. Not only that, but thier losses are often glazed over, an embarrasing stain on the records of the so-called 'good guys'.
And by the way, i know this is the internet, but please try to excersise some manners. Thanking me for, "giving you something to easily retort against" is in the same classfication of saying "zing" when you feel you have been clever. I would love to discuss this with you, but only as long as it can be done in a respectful and civilised manner.

Just to help you along...looks like civilian casualties just edge it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

military dead 22-25 million
civilian dead 40-52 million.

Sorry if this is me sounding like I lack manners again or whatever, or I'm trying to give you another "zing", but... stop moving the goalposts. We've gone from some half-snarky comment about how allied commanders were told to bomb such as to break civilian morale in the nazi heartlands (by doing so, reducing the output of their industrial-military complex etc) to quoting entire-conflict figures which include the 6 million dead in the holocaust, 26 million in russia and at least 4 million from famine in southeast asia that probably weren't anything to do with allied actions - the nazi regieme carried out the first part (and if we'd better known what they were up to there before the actual liberation, the ass kicking would have been dialed up to 11), and the other nations proved quite effective in dealing massive damage to their own populace.
Or in other words, knocking back the "40-52m" figure quite a lot once the things that aren't even properly involved/relevant are removed. Did you read past the headline figures in that wiki article before you brought it to the table?

I don't want to deny that they happened or belittle the deaths of such huge swathes of humanity - as I already said above - but I don't see the relevance to the argument I was making. I'd rather not be painted as the bad guy for trying to keep it within the lines.

Really, I must thank you for showing me and the rest of the thread the sheer scale of death caused directly and as fallout from this (increasingly cariacturised) horrendous near-global conflict... honestly I had no idea about the SE Asian stuff, for example... but it's not where we were looking.

On the subject of western civilian casualties, without wasting more time rushing off to compile detailed facts and figures (if you really want to get into that, then let's do it - but its really not worth the effort outside of a historical research centre), I'll bring this nugget from the local radio coverage of the rememberance sunday service. A notable local historian put my home city as one of the second-most bombed (British) ones in WW2.
Total loss of life?

2240.

Probably about a day's worth of military losses on one of the major fronts, across six whole years, in the country's second biggest (and arguably highest industrial-output) and second most targeted population centre. I can't see it - plus whichever one eked it out (tossup between London and Coventry, they didn't say which), and the three or four others (Liverpool, various port towns, etc) that would have sustained anything close - adding up to tens of thousands, let alone a million-plus. I don't say this or the rest of what I have and will say lightly, by the way. My grandmother (still kicking) worked riveting wings together on Spitfires, lived in the city centre, cowered from bombs ... had a couple of very close near misses when a house down her street was hit, and another bomb fell on a neighbour's house but proved to be dud (would have taken out that one and the two either side, as they were slum terraces). The problem is, a lot of our industrial capacity used to be right in the city, unlike the modern city-fringe/rural "brownfield" industrial estate setup, so in the days before GPS, laser guided bombing, etc, residential areas often were hit or even targeted as a matter of course to ensure the desired outcome (take out the factory... and/or the workers... we're bound to hit one or the other).
The story may be different in germany, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt in terms of protecting their own civs... for now. (Mind you, I don't know how many the (in)famous Dambusters raid killed - the toll must have been quite high) --- but I do know it was they who pioneered the idea of simply, intensively and indiscriminately flattening an entire city, air blitz style, to ensure it was knocked out, a maneouvre they dubbed "to Coventrate" for reasons I'll let you figure out. We just did the same thing back, as it was evidently now fair game, and a sheer battle of survival.

I've bought my RED poppy... and a replacement when it fell off... and one for my nan who "couldn't find a seller"... and after a few years of looking, one for the car, from a cheerful good old boy who must double as santa over the christmas period. The British Legion tagline on the collection boxes says they "support casualties of war" - a slight paraphrase, as I'm doing it from hazy memory, but the sentiment is the same. Nothing in there that they only look after ex-soldiers. Probably, given the association name, only looking after British (plus commonwealth & ex-empire?) casualties, but it suggests their scope is wider than purely military.

The idea of supporting the civvie victims is one I would happily support, but I see no-where selling the white ones, and, at the moment at least, have a feeling I've already contributed anyway. Given that atrocities on that vast kind of scale are largely a thing of the past (many have tried since, and committed heinous acts, but haven't come close), I'd rather pledge my necessarily scant troth to efforts which may aid either victims of potentially as-massive disasters (e.g. the DEC working in Pakistan/Haiti/etc, Comic Relief...) or civilian causes closer to home, given that we don't have much in the way of civvie street war-wounded any more but DO still have our share of troubles particularly amongst the young and neglected (e.g. Children in Need, Child's Play...).

Besides, although a death is a death is a death, the soldiers are still the ones flinging themselves directly into the hail of bullets so that, hopefully, much greater civ casualties can be averted. I'm not sure how trying to posit their concerted efforts to do so, and to nullify the expansionist ambitions of a number of militaristic leaders with quite abhorrent views on how to treat the civilians under their war-AND-peacetime care, as "stains on the records of the 'so-called good guys'" can be considered a reasonable argument (there's plenty of other nasty stuff we did, if you want to go into it . Without those "so called good guys" as you so mannerfully put it, if you happen to be anything other than straight, cisgendered, christian, of acceptably white (or japanese, I guess) ethnicity, oh and displaying total support for your government and its policies even amongst who you think are your close friends, you'd be having a very unhappy life right now, if you - or your parents - even had enjoyed the chance to be born. Show some goddamn respect for what could have been, and what they prevented - yea, at massive cost on all sides and from all quarters, but with a lasting belief that it was worth it vs the alternative - before you come telling me to not be zingy with you. That's the sort of thing that makes it easy to come back saying you've given me an easy retort-target.

Forgive me if this post is a bit all over the place. It's been boiling away in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks where I haven't had time to spare to come back on any fora, and things I near forgot kept bubbling up... so I shoved them in wherever seemed appropriate.

Round three, ding ding, your turn.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

*SNIP*

Lolwut?

I was just pointing out that there were more civy casualties in WWII than military as that was a small part of whatever you 2 were arguing about. As for the rest of it, I really don't give a fuck.

EDIT: Hmm...I think maybe you quoted the wrong person for your reply?