Soldiers Holding Up Society — Illustration of a couple on a cliff with soldiers beneath holding up the land over a bloody sea.

Soldiers Holding Up Society

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Published November 15, 2026

Soldiers Holding Up Society refers to "The Price of Peace," a painting by Cornish artist Brian Jay showing fallen British soldiers raising a peaceful seaside town on their shoulders. Circulated on remembrance posts since 2012, the image hit object labeling meme status in March 2018 on /r/dankmemes with a _Freedom2020 post that drew over 36,500 upvotes.

object labeling military memes fine art memes british memes delayed virality memes

Overview

Soldiers Holding Up Society works as an object label template where the ghostly soldiers get tagged with one entity that props up a second entity, labeled on the town above4. The format reads as earnest or ironic depending on the swap, with early 2018 Reddit uses crediting figures like Reddit moderators for holding a community together6. Jay's painting shows the Cornish seaside town of St Ives, so the "society" half of the composition stays visually tied to small-town British life even when the labels reference global pop culture5.

Tone sits between tribute and bathos. Earnest uses still appear on Memorial Day and Armistice Day posts with hashtags like #LestWeForget10, while the dankmemes version plays it for absurd credit assignment, pairing invisible labor with trivial beneficiaries7.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr (early spread) / Reddit (meme format)
Creator
Brian Jay; earliest object label meme posted by Redditor _Freedom2020
Date
2012

Cornish artist Brian Jay finished the unnamed canvas before June 2012, with the scene taken from the seaside town of St Ives5. After a November 13, 2014 YouTube remembrance video for St Ives soldiers set the painting to music, Jay titled it "The Price of Peace"1. The earliest documented online appearance traces to Tumblr user pestenkerani before June 29, 2012, followed the same day by a write-up on the Turkish blog Blog Arti2.

How It Spread

Reposts spread across language boundaries through the mid-2010s. A February 15, 2013 upload to 9GAG gathered over 37,800 points3, and in May 2013 Redditor frostbite225 shared it to /r/MURICA for Memorial Day9. By November 2015, Twitter user @KierenMcmahon paired the image with #LestWeForget10.

Object labeling turned the painting into a format on March 24, 2018, when Redditor _Freedom2020 posted the first known version to /r/dankmemes and received over 36,500 upvotes4. A /r/funny repost the next day reached 17,100 upvotes6. After months of light use, stiffystephan's November 17, 2018 share to /r/memes7 and a November 30 /r/dankmemes post with 9,400 upvotes8 kicked off a late-2018 surge that carried the template into Instagram and other subreddits5.

Timeline

2014-11-13

A St Ives remembrance YouTube video uses the painting; Brian Jay afterward titles it "The Price of Peace."

2015-11-11

Twitter user @KierenMcmahon posts the image with #LestWeForget.

How to Use This Meme

Typical posts caption the soldiers with one unseen support (teachers, open-source maintainers, a specific game character, delivery drivers) and caption the town with the beneficiary (students, tech companies, the wider game, the economy). Earnest versions keep the painting's original sobriety; ironic versions assign absurd labels to make the sincerity land as a joke4.

Frequently Asked Questions