No poppy this year. And I know that puts me in a bit of a trend (albeit one I haven’t been really watching), but I want to write about why.

I used to be a quite dependable wearer of a poppy (and even a replacement if, as often happened, I lost one), and even observer of the two minutes’ silence. It seemed an acceptable and non-aggressive, but noticeable, way of declaring that war in general is horrible, there has been an awful lot of it especially in the last 150 years, and we as a species should try and avoid increasing the suffering and the war whenever we make decisions.

So from here on in, you need to bear in mind that I’m essentially pacifist (though not to the point of believing my country is always necessarily obligated to stand on the sidelines while other parts of the world engage in de facto war that could be effectively stopped or shortened), and my reasons for previously wearing a poppy were essentially pacifist.

The thing is, I’ve felt for a while that Britain and British culture – everything from tabloid papers to artsy theatre – overemphasises the two world wars and the atrocities of our opponents in them. Usually particularly Nazi Germany actually, though that only halfway lines up with my argument. The problem with this is that leads towards only thinking about the suffering of ‘our side’, and conveniently forgetting the problems and atrocities of other wars: Korea (yes, the UK got involved in messy Cold War proxy conflicts. Just because we weren’t in Vietnam doesn’t mean our hands were clean). The Boer War (where ‘we’ invented the concentration camp, opposed self-determination and sowed the seeds for the reaction that would be apartheid). The Spanish Civil War (more self-interested proxy shadiness, and the warm-up to WWII to boot). It also leads towards forgetting the atrocities committed by ‘our side’: the fire-bombing of Dresden. Flooding countless civilian homes with the Dambuster raids. The only actual uses of nuclear weapons in war.

As we land in the centenary of the first world war, this trend has reached massive new heights. I passed a sign painted on a trailer in a field by a motorway the other day: ‘British and Commonwealth deaths in World War I: [however many]’. But I don’t want to remember just the British and Commonwealth deaths. I want to remember the French, Belgian, Russian deaths. The Italian and Japanese ones no one talks about. Even the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman ones. And I want to remember all of them together as the victims of the war. Because otherwise we’re still engaged in trying to cast blame and paint the other side as the villains, rather than saying ‘never again’.

The Flanders poppies sprang up where war had been, and they did so regardless of whose the territory had been during the fighting. They thrived wherever the ground had been churned up by trench-digging, by tanks and trucks and artillery being moved, by shellfire and explosions. I have worn a poppy in that spirit. But the poppies flooding the moat of the Tower of London seem to move the flower to a nation-based declaration that UK dead were cruelly murdered by foreigners. And I will never wear a poppy in that spirit.