Creepy Poppy Day - Spencer is right, as always

The "British people" (i.e. the tax serfs of the UK government) have been celebrating the memory of their military dead (i.e. the government's cannon fodder), especially those who died in recent interventions in the Middle East (i.e. genocidal expeditions of Mr. Tony Blair). To be honest I have had enough of seeing people all wearing poppy flowers on all their clothes, cars, and other property. I guess the poppy has a similar function to the ribbon in the USA. In that both are symbollic ways of glorifying mass murder. Maybe it is something about being raised in a Polish family, I don't know, but I have a thourough disgust for war. Even warlike rhetoric sickens me. I have no respect for any soldiers who died on missions in the Middle East in recent years. They were guns-for-hire who lost their gamble. And if these wars consisted of states fighting states, I may have a neutral stance here. After all, why would I favor one mafia ahead of another? But currently all I see is state (i.e. mafia) armies (i.e. groups of goons) attacking innocent civilian populations. Furthermore, the American government has created concentration camps (we don't know how many in total, but one of them is actually official - Guantanamo) where Afghani goat-herds are being kept and tortured for months and years at a time. The people who freed the Nazi extermination camps after World War II are now establishing similar facilities themselves (maybe not designed for mass murder, but certainly designed for kidnapping, torture, and sometimes probably assassinations).
Just because a man puts on a silly uniform does not mean he is not required to abide by the basic rules of ethics. Green or blue clothes do not entitle you or me to shoot, kill, kidnap, murder, enslave, steal, rape, pillage, or occupy. But the government seems to think it does. Maybe someone should show up at Tony Blair's house wearing green-yellow camo and show him what waterboarding feels like?

To all British citizens I raise this appeal: Think carefully before you put on that poppy. Remember the millions of dead men, women, and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. And remember what probably the greatest British citizen ever, Herbert Spencer, once said of British soldiers who took part in the British-Afghan War in the 19th Century: "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves."