Remembrance Poppy: McCrae's Flanders Fields to Poppy Fascism and FIFA Fines

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The red Flanders poppy, Papaver rhoeas, grows where soil has been violently disturbed. Its seeds can lie dormant for decades, and after the Battle of Landen in 1693, where William of Orange left some 20,000 dead, the field burst into scarlet the next summer. In 1915 the Canadian army physician John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields from the voice of the dead beneath the flowers. The American academic Moina Michael vowed in 1918 to wear a red silk poppy, and the French organizer Anna Guérin built the idea into an industry, using war widows to make silk flowers and pitching an Inter-Allied Poppy Day in 1921 to the American Legion, Canadian veterans and Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

A century later the poppy is a trademarked operation turning out 40 to 50 million flowers a year, with designs that differ between Canada, England and Scotland. Choosing not to wear one has become a public act. Broadcaster Jon Snow coined the phrase poppy fascism, Whole Foods reversed a 2020 ban on Canadian staff wearing poppies within days, and Don Cherry was fired in 2019 after using the flower to attack immigrants. Rival colors arose to tell other stories, from the pacifist white poppy to the khadi poppy, and in Palestinian culture the red anemone carries its own meaning of martyrdom and renewal tied to the myth of Adonis.

• Some UK poppy components were assembled by inmates at HM Prison Ford earning 10 pounds a week.
• In Ottawa, the public began leaving their poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the official ceremony.
• FIFA fined UK teams for wearing the poppy, treating it as a banned political symbol.
• Footballer James McClean of Derry refuses the poppy because of Bloody Sunday, and Nemanja Matić because NATO bombed his village in 1999.
• The Co-operative Women's Guild introduced the white poppy in 1933, and Animal Aid's purple poppy honors animals killed in war.