Nothing says Christmas like WWI
Each Christmas big stores in the UK feel they have to put out eye-wateringly expensive television ads to get the money out of our pockets. John Lewis have their cute penguin this year. Sainsbury’s have a different approach.
Sainsbury’s have taken the idea of the Christmas Truce of 1914, where opposing sides stopped slaughtering each other for a few hours and exchanged gifts. Then they went back to slaughtering. It’s generally considered that this did indeed happen, if sporadically, along the Front, while in other places the shooting only died down for a few hours, or arrangements were made for bodies to be recovered.
Well, nothing says Christmas like the First World War. Nothing gives that Christmas feeling like trenches and guts and mud and rats and trench foot and mass slaughter and going over the top in straight lines into machine gun fire. Nothing is as Christmassy as the destruction of a generation and succeeding generations all across Europe and half the world.
It has the endorsement of the British Legion, so who am I to say it’s a nauseous thing?
IT’S A NAUSEOUS THING.
It is a nauseous thing because pain and destruction and misery have been used with the sole and trivial objective of persuading us to buy groceries from a particular store. And tinsel and crackers and lights and trees and DVDs and clothing and that glut of over-the-top food-buying that stores love an excuse to encourage. I’ve read a lot about the Great War, and specifically about the origins of the Great War. I’m still no expert. Experts can’t agree on the origins of the Great War. But I don’t think it was about supermarket shopping.
The real guys in those trenches, German and British, French, Belgian, colonial, certainly had no idea why they were there. Into that great void of reason came briefly for one afternoon a little sense, whatever the origins of that breakthrough. Superstition triggered by religion, a sudden realization of the banality and corruption of what they were doing, of the un-reason of it all, that it indeed did not have the inevitability they had understood it to have, a suspension of the vainglory of supposed patriotism… for whatever reason the fighting, in some places at least, briefly stopped. That is what Sainsbury’s have decided is a reasonable perspective from which to promote a mass flogging of mince pies and turkeys.
I feel disgust with Sainsbury’s for having made this. I feel disgust with the British Legion for accepting money from this. They have accepted money also from a Joss Stone and Jeff Beck rendering of Eric Bogle’s anti-war song No Man’s Land with the anti-war verses left out. Have they no shame? Would they accept money now from the armament divisions of Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems, the three biggest military armament companies in the world? I guess… well, why not?
It’s supposed to very authentic. The makers say so. The British Legion says so. I’m not so sure. Again, I’m no expert but I’m not seeing the body parts hanging on the wire. I’m not seeing amputated limps, shattered faces, shattered bodies, shattered lives. I’m not seeing rats eating entrails. I’m not seeing men out of their heads with fear. I’m not seeing those at home for whom husbands and sons and brothers will not come back, or come back shattered and changed for ever. Perhaps it’s not so accurate.
Maybe next year Sainsbury’s and the British Legion can get together and come with a nice Hiroshima scene, a Holocaust scene. Perhaps the world flu pandemic of 1918 that infected between 100 to 500 million people, killing between 50 and 100 million, or three to five percent of the world’s population, could be roped in to help sales of Beecham’s Lemsips and Night Nurse?
Of course that’s going too far. No one would really do that, would they?
Well, I didn’t think anyone would exploit the First World War for commercial gain until I saw it. And I don’t hear the objections. I don’t hear the exclamations of disgust. I wish I did.
