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Will you wear a poppy, be it red or white?
As Poppy Day approaches, PETER FROST explains some of the history of that bright evocative flower
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
THE curious summer we have had, be it through human-made climate change, or just luck as President Donald Trump would have you believe, means that the red corn poppy, Britain’s most colourful weed, is still to be seen on roadside verges even as we approach November 11 — Armistice Day.
Poppies will be a big part of the events that mark the centenary of the end of the war to end all wars — but sadly the war that didn’t end wars at all. Over that century the simple poppy came to mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people and not always for the best.
So which will you wear? My wife Ann always wears a red poppy. She wears it in proud memory of her dad Fred who always wore his red poppy in memory of his own father, another Fred, Ann’s grandfather.
Similar stories
In his fortnightly Borderlands column, MARK SEDDON visits overgrown forts along Offa’s Dyke and reflects on wars past and present
TONY FOX reports from a commemoration of the legendary Battle of Jarama in which four Stockton-on-Tees volunteers fell
WILL DRY speaks to three former members of the armed forces about the political hypocrisy surrounding Armistice Day, how war is a function of class society, and the far right’s use of militarism and nationalism to divide working people
