Ressentiment Sunday. posted by Richard Seymour

Yesterday the anniversay of Armistice passed in the usual fashion - with ever larger and more gormless looking 'poppies' adorning ever larger and more gormless looking people. Not a single television presenter has been without this pathetic adornment for weeks. People have been appending oversized 'poppy'-shaped items to their cars and means of transport. People were actually bearing poppy umbrellas yesterday. Lone buglers bugled and RAF aircrafts performed synchronised movements in the air, as if those death-dealing machines might not contribute to the subterranean population of war victims. And today, politicians, who have created desertfuls of eternal silence, will advance mournfully toward the cenotaph, their prey, lay wreaths of these ersatz flowers, and stand for an obligatory two minutes of fart-defying quietude.

This preposterous open air national church brooks no tittering. Oh no. It's crying out for satire, this puffed up crap, this necrophilic carnival. It begs for comic relief. Anyone in their right mind would address this horseshit with a vigorous one-fingered salute. But no. That would be to disrespect the dead, right? Sure. Blair solemnly remembering the evils of war does not disrespect the dead - that obsequious display does not spit on the memory of those sacrificed by past governments. Television presenters droning on with faces of grim orgasm - that doesn't disrespect the dead. Because the dead have already been pressed into the service of the Crown.

And so, a reminder:

Celebration and commemoration are themselves merely a form of necrophagous cannibalism, the homeopathic form of murder by easy stages. This is the work of heirs, whose ressentiment toward the deceased is boundless. Museums, jubilees, festivals, complete works, the publication of the tiniest of unpublished fragments - all this shows that we are entering an active age of ressentiment and repentance.

So if you're wearing one of those stupid poppies, take it off. Take it off this instant, and stop being such a sap. Give over, and get real. Every time you participate in this outrageous ritual, you abandon your senses and lend your body and mind to official absurdity. The poppy of Remembrance Sunday truly is the opium of the masses. If you want to respect the memory of those murdered in imperialist wars, take Blair out in front of that bloody monument and have him shot, him and his war cabinet, during that two minutes of obedient silence.