At the heart of our community stands a fine, lovingly tended war memorial.

The simple fact tells you nothing. All it means is that I could be living anywhere in this country. Only someone attuned to local names, to the truth that hellish loss is always specific, could make a guess at the region.

The edifices are everywhere: we grow up with the fact. When someone mentions Scotland and war, the ubiquitous memorials are invoked. Sometimes, one of the better historians will try to decipher what the sober statements mean as expressions of unthinkable grief and indiscriminate bereavement. You might even be reminded that in the first of the world wars our losses were "disproportionate".

The lists of names, dates, ages and long-gone regiments invite, perhaps demand, remembrance. It is a tricky word. Year by year, those who can truly remember fade from the world. No-one with a physical memory of the 1914-1918 war remains; memories of 1939-1945, and of all the rest, slip away, one after the other. The long march into the past is ceaseless.

The word, though, means something more than memory alone. My dictionary offers "that which serves to bring to or keep in mind; a reminder". That's why the memorials endure. We speak of "acts of remembrance", and of forgetting as a kind of betrayal. So what is it that we bring to mind?

The public language is a compromise. It is acceptable to speak of service and talk of sacrifice. We say, some of us, that they gave their lives so that we might live. We deplore war, always, but honour those who fought. Yet on the second Sunday in November it is a brave soul who says remembrance should encompass mindless bloody slaughter, needless loss, futility, waste and cynicism. That would be "inappropriate".

Each year I put my money in the tin and decline the poppy. It offends me that the money has ever been needed. As for the symbol, I refuse to be conscripted.

Revisionist historians can muster their tin soldier arguments, explain that German aggression made conflict "inevitable" in 1914, or argue that every nation suffered horribly in an unavoidable – so they say – war of attrition. For my part, I'll have nothing to do with anything bearing the mark of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, he who gained a military education at the expense of all those lives. Call me old-fashioned.

Equally, I'll have nothing to do with those who still, even now, exploit the dead, who treat honest emotions as an opportunity to excuse every modern disaster. The poppy implies assent. Wear the poppy and, whatever your private thoughts, you sign up publicly for the lot: good wars, bad wars, wars legal, illegal, or merely insane. The idea of sacrifice is deployed as blackmail.

The poppy has meanwhile become an excuse to manipulate ideas of nationhood, patriotism, faith, community and unity. By these means the 57,000 lost on July 1, 1916 – Haig had "no choice", they'll tell you – become moral guarantors for Iraq and Afghanistan. Honour the slaughtered and you accept every slaughter. Worse than that, worse because it is trivial and barely noticed, the poppy has become compulsory.

Anyone in the public eye who fails to wear one will attract comment. Newsreaders, absurdly, are given no choice in the matter. Politicians long ago learned it is pointless to struggle against manufactured "public opinion" if they are not to be accused of "insult". Remembrance has been turned into a cult and put to political use. So the bereaved, whether they know it or not, are truly insulted, and insulted twice over.

Had I the wherewithal, I could be a corporate partner of the Royal British Legion. If I ran a business, and felt like becoming complicit in a charity mugging, I could "increase sales and competitive advantage"; "maximise brand affinity"; "attract and retain customers and staff". The Legion suggests, in fact, that it would be a smart move to "Give your business poppy appeal". Trust me: the ability to make this up is beyond my talents. Try www.britishlegion.org.uk/support-us/corporate-partnerships.

There, as the centenary of the 1914 debacle approaches, as two more families wait to receive two more of those lost in Afghanistan, you will find the following: "Companies working with us enjoy a host of benefits. With 97% awareness of our poppy brand in the UK and a significant presence overseas we are uniquely placed to tailor partnerships that meet your specific business needs."

The Legion does good work and needs money. The professional fundraisers capable of composing drivel have probably received lectures on sensitivity. But is this what remembrance has become? Are the legions of the dead, ancient and modern, simply marketable items in the modern British sentimentality industry? Are young people killing and dying in foreign fields for the sake of "our poppy brand"?

David Cameron, a marketing man to the tips of his polished toes, has grasped an opportunity of his own. Just before the launch of this year's poppy appeal, with its pop stars and camera-ready petals, he decided to spend £50 million to mark the centenary of Haig's bloodbath. Handily for the Prime Minister, that will fall in 2014, when invocations of Britishness might work wonders on anyone liable to vote for a contrary proposition.

That's no matter. Just over a fortnight ago, Mr Cameron said Britain would mark the 1914 war with a "commemoration that captures our national spirit in every corner of the country, from our schools and workplaces, to our town halls and local communities; a commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations this year, says something about who we are as a people".

In other words, he proposes a series of events to honour the "national spirit" that saw three-quarters of a million dead for no earthly reason. He could have said Britain will spend a moment contemplating shame, regret and remorse for its failure to end the old, hideous cycle. Instead, this voice of the officer class said – I quote from a London report – "an advisory board of former defence secretaries, chiefs of staff and military specialists would bring together ideas for the commemorations". Huzzah.

This is no black satire. The kind who took us to 1914 sense vindication, yet again, for the "spirit" they depend upon. Yet again, they lay claim to ownership of "who we are as a people". Is there really much wonder that the wars go on, one upon the other, endlessly, with nothing learned?

Someone will give me that familiar funny look when I stuff in the note and refuse the poppy. They will interpret the omission as a gesture, and find it offensive. Tough. The poppy was once a symbol of the belief that somehow humanity survives the blood and the mud. It was supposed to say – and when did we forget? – that these things must never happen again. Now it tells us the killing will never end. It is, says Mr Cameron, "who we are".

There is no greater insult to the nameless dead than the refusal to learn a single damned thing from a century of industrialised slaughter. The refusal says, after all, that not one of the lost ever mattered. And how does that count as remembrance?