2 minutes silence today

[Old Timer]

Isn't that the point of freedom? As soon as you start forcing these types of views on people they quickly lose their impact.

The Armistice day remembrance is a fairly recent thing. Its impact has grown over recent years, please don't spoil that by forcing your views on others that don't see it from your point of view.

I am not forcing a view on others, I am simply demonstrating my antipathy at someone who cannot even be bothered to stop for two minutes in a year to reflect on those who lost their lives fighting for the freedoms were have.

As for your comment about Armistace Day being "a fairly recent things", this is something I find jaw dropping and says much for our education system, assuming you have passed through this.

For the record, and for speed from the Wickipedia site.

On 8 May 1919 EDward Honey, a former soldier and journalist who was working in London at the time, wrote a letter to the London Evening News newspaper under the pen name Warren Foster suggesting an appropriate commemoration for the first anniversary of The Armistice Treaty which signalled the end of World War I, signed on 11 November 1918 at the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."

In the letter he said, "Five little minutes only. Five silent minutes of national remembrance. A very sacred intercession. Communion with the Glorious Dead who won us peace, and from the communion new strength, hope and faith in the morrow. Church services, too, if you will, but in the street, the home, the theatre, anywhere, indeed, where Englishmen and their women chance to be, surely in this five minutes of bitter-sweet silence there will be service enough."

Honey had been prompted to make the suggestion as he had been angered by the way in which people had celebrated with dancing in the streets on the day of the Armistice, and believed a period of silence to be a far more appropriate gesture in memory of those who had died at war.

Honey's letter did not immediately create the Remembrance Day traditions, but on 27 October 1919, a suggestion from Sir Percy Fitzpatrick of a similar idea for a moment of silence was forwarded to George V, then King of the United Kingdom, who on 7 November 1919, proclaimed "that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities … so that in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead."

In 1939 Armistace Day was moved to the nearest Sunday so as not to interfere with wartime production.

 

[Oswyntail]

..
As for your comment about Armistace Day being "a fairly recent things", this is something I find jaw dropping and says much for our education system, assuming you have passed through this.....

However, the profile of the event HAS changed In the 50s, IIRC, Remembrance Day was still always 11/11; sometime in the 60s, the idea of Remembrance Sunday was introduced to avoid the disruption and inconvenience of a weekday "silence" (as in 1939, as Old noted); it is also worth remembering that the WW1 generation was at that stage beginning to fade from the scene and the WW2 generation was seemingly not yet ready for "Remembrance", as a lot of the experiences were even then too fresh. With that, the profile tailed off (presumably as it was no longer as noticeable) until about the time of the Falklands War, when a new spirit of militarism seemed to reinvigorate it (to some of us, David, 1985 is recent ) This coincided, generally, with the WW2 generation reaching their 60s. We now seem to have two days, each with their "silence".

 

[YorkshireBear]

i didnt really want to argue the point on this, just think that people should respect other peoples wishes to remember, if they didnt want to stay silent go outside....