AN ANARCHIST INTERPRETATION OF IN FLANDERS FIELDS

A Meditation for Remembrance Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

-John McRae, Canadian soldier killed in World War I

Hey folks,

You probably weren’t expecting this from me, but I’d like to wish you all a Happy Remembrance Day.

It will come as a surprise to my readers that In Flanders Fields is one of my favourite poems.

Part of this may just be the fact that I’ve known it by heart for almost my whole life.

I memorized it for a school assembly when I was in grade school, and I have never forgotten it.

Given that today is Remembrance Day, I thought that it would be interesting to reflect upon why I love this poem despite the fact that it is commonly used in nationalistic ceremonies.

I should point out that I have been vehemently opposed to war for my entire life.

When I became an anarchist at the age of 15, it was because of my opposition to war.

I was involved in a group called Ottawa-Outaouais Students Against War (OOSAW), which was created to protest the planned invasion of Iraq.

At the time, Canada’s Liberal government, which was led by every millennial’s favourite PM, Jean Chretien, was under a lot of pressure from the Americans to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The vast majority of Canadians were completely opposed to this war of aggression.

It was because of my involvement in anti-war activism while still in high school that I was exposed to anarchist ideas for the first time. At one of our OOSAW meetings, I met a girl named Gwen who took an interest in curing me of Marxism.

At the time, I called myself a communist. I had read Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Naomi Klein’s No Logo and concluded that I was against capitalism. Therefore I figured that I was a communist, because communism is the opposite of capitalism, right?

That’s how they get you. If you talk to enough anarchists, you’ll discover that many went through a communist phase. Some grow out of it quicker than others.

Anyway, this girl named Gwen was a few years older than me and had spent time squatting in Europe. She had a blog and I started following it. I guess I had a pretty big crush on her but nothing ever came of that. I don’t think I ever saw her in person more than a couple of times. But she changed my life.

I started following her blog and through it, was exposed both to anarchist ideas and a mysterious world of an anarchist counter-culture that was out there waiting to be discovered. I got turned on to Ani DiFranco, Utah Phillips and Against Me! from her blog and learned about sex-positive feminism, Big Pharma, the war machine, propaganda, and the unity of means and ends at the core of anarchist theory.

Thinking about it now, it’s pretty crazy how big of an influence her blog had on me. I whether Nevermore has had a comparable impact on anyone’s life. I hope so.

I’m getting really off track, though. The reason that I brought up Gwen was to point out that I came to anarchism through my anti-war activism.

My belief that war is wrong is one of my core beliefs. I was raised to believe this, and I have never seen any reason to reassess it.

I grew up in the Mennonite Church, which is pacifist. Mennonites won’t necessarily tell you this now, but traditionally Mennonites believe that all the governments of the world are evil because they engage in war, which is basically the worst sin that humans can engage in.

So perhaps I never converted to anarchism. Maybe I was always an anarchist. If you basically believe that all governments are evil, that’s pretty dang close to anarchism, wouldn’t you say? If you boil anarchism to its simplest form, it’s opposition to statecraft, and the essence of statecraft is war.

People didn’t all get together one day and decide to designate a ruling class with the power to kill them, extort them, imprison them, and force them to send their sons to go kill and be killed in endless wars.

Think about it. How do you think statecraft came to be the dominant paradigm of governance on the planet? Obviously, it was imposed by force by people who used violence to subjugate the masses so they could systematically rob them.

Anyway, when I became an anarchist, I didn’t stop liking the poem In Flanders Fields. I know that it is used in nationalistic ceremonies, but what in the actual poem is there for an anarchist to object to?

Have another look at it:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

To me, this is far from being a celebration of war. The only line in the poem that is arguably pro-war is the part about taking up the quarrel with the foe, but I see a possible anarchist interpretation of this line.

Could it be that “the foe” that the poet was referring to was not the Germans, but the the masters of war who were feeding the people of many countries into the proverbial meat grinder for their own selfish purposes?

It is worth noting that in the poem, the poet says “To you to from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high.”

But the British won WWI, didn’t they? Why did John McRae consider their failure a foregone conclusion?

Perhaps all of this is wishful thinking, but I really think that I might be on to something. Remember, we’re talking about WWI, not WWII. In the case of WWII, the Allies had the excuse that the Nazis were trying to take over the world. But what was WWI all about? Do you not think that the people sent to die in the trenches were asking themselves that?

Legend has it that McRae wrote the poem the day after one of his best friends was killed in battle.

To me, it sure doesn’t seem like the poet is celebrating war, but mourning it. Could McRae have been lamenting the fact that his friend’s life had been lost for no good reason, because British imperialists sent Canadians to die overseas in order to serve their insatiable appetite for power and profit?

Perhaps some historian will correct me and tell me that John McRae really was a patriotic, pro-war Canadian.

Even if this is so, my point is that another interpretation of In Flanders Fields is possible. It’s a beautiful poem, and to this day it speaks to my soul. Take that for what you will.

Personally, I’m not big on slogans, but one slogan I do like is NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR.

For thousands for years, the ordinary people of every country have been extorted and brutalized so that the rich can wage war.

By doing so, the rich are not only waging war on foreign lands, who historically have often been ruled by their blood relatives, but on the working class of their own countries.

People nowadays don’t tend to think about this very much, but the essence of statecraft is controlling the perception of the poor so they don’t murder the rich. Statecraft is one continuous war on the poor.

In good times, this is mostly an information war. Good citizens must pay their taxes to care for poor neglected orphans, keep the barbarians from overrunning civilization, etc. When times get tough, though, the glove comes off and rule by brute force returns.

More than anything, though, the rich rule by the age-old tactic of “divide-and-conquer”.

Before WWI, there was a thriving internationalist socialist movement (in which anarchists played a prominent role) which threatened to overthrow the ruling classes of Europe.

WWI was waged for multiple reasons, but one of the convenient outcomes that it had was to destroy international solidarity and to divide people according to their nationalities.

Unfortunately, nationalism works.

Every war is also a war of the rich against the poor. No sane person wants to travel overseas to kill people they’ve never met, who have never done them any specific wrong. They have to be brainwashed with nationalist propaganda first.

Who conducts the propaganda campaigns to convince them to go murder foreigners?

Well, the rich, obviously. Do you see my point?

The state claims the right to conscript people and force them to become murderers. This alone is proof of the illegitimacy of the state.

Statist education exists to make lies seem respectable, murder seem inevitable, and war seem just.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is no justification for the existence of the state’s right to people to kill and to be killed at their whims other than one, which all statist propaganda exists to conceal.

That justification is “Might Makes Right”, and it is the duty of all free people to reject this mockery of morality and to instead make decisions based on their own consciences rather than on the diktats of the robber barons who rule over us.

So whether or not my interpretation is in line with John McRae’s intentions, I urge people to catch the torch of what he so eloquently wrote.

As for myself, I shall take up the quarrel with the foe by refusing to support war in any way, and by dedicating my life to exposing statecraft as the abomination it is.

Happy Remembrance Day!

NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR!

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