"Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." – They ravage, they slaughter, they plunder, and they falsely name it "empire"; they make a wilderness, and call it "peace."
I’m going to take some statements, like this, from The Telegraph’s latest editorial:
After the Brexit vote last June, Miss Sturgeon said another independence vote was inevitable; now she has backed away because she knows she would lose it and scupper the separatist cause for generations. If she really has the interests of her fellow Scots at heart then she would drop this empty threat and help Mrs May deliver a Brexit in the interests of the entire nation, Scotland included.
Some of these statements may have been taken in the past year, in the wake of the First Minister reasserting her existing position regarding a second independence referendum, and her direct interaction with several prominent individuals in the European Union. Some may be from prominent supporters of Scotland as part of the UK; some may be from supporters of Scottish independence. Some of them may have been altered to replace Alex Salmond with Nicola Sturgeon, and are taken not from this week, but years ago.
Since it’s Christmas, I don’t want to make this a critical post. I want to make it a reassuring, positive, uplifting one. It’s going to be difficult – there’s something about the winter that causes a veritable avalanche of organising, panic, and stress – but I’ll give it a go.
If you vote “No” in a referendum on the question “Should Scotland be an independent country,” then you are voting against Scottish independence. This should not be a controversial statement. For those who do not want Scotland to become an independent country again, it is entirely logical. For those who claim to support Scottish independence, it is utterly nonsensical.
So when Jim Fairlie – an “SNP Chief” who has not been in the SNP for 36 years, and in fact stood against the SNP in Perth in the 2007 Scottish Election for the Free Scotland Party – says he will vote No in a second Scottish Independence Referendum:
By tying the second independence referendum to EU membership, it will split the national movement. It will split it right down the middle. Because there are far more SNP supporters who are just as opposed to the EU as they are to being a member of the UK.
If Nicola Sturgeon ties the EU to a second independence referendum, she will lose, because people like me, who have fought for independence since I was 15 years of age, will vote no.
By doing that she has made it impossible for a lot of nationalists to vote for independence, tied to the EU, because it’s not independence. What they’re offering is a choice between two unions, and that’s a false choice.
… I have to wonder if Mr Fairlie understands what the point of Scottish Independence actually is.
I keep reading this in articles, hearing this from talking heads, constantly this repetition of disbelief. All these journalists and commentators and analysts and “experts” who are utterly blind-sided by just how recent events have come to pass. I wrote a post about the false, illogical, and deeply insulting comparison of the Scottish Independence campaign to the worst elements of the Leave and Trump campaigns. Indeed, I found myself rather vindicated by the latest Question Time from Stirling, where Billy Mitchell (who, the BBC neglected to point out, was the UKIP candidate in the 2013 Coatbridge West by-election) actually seemed to agree with my central point:
Donald Trump was elected by the American people, and the people of Britain just can’t understand that the American people believe in democracy. And democracy has been lowered to mob rule; when you don’t like the decision of a referendum, you disagree with it, you go to court, & you get rid of it. The SNP should know this, because we had a referendum: we voted No, they didn’t like it. They had a referendum on Brexit, they didn’t like that, let’s go to court, we don’t like Brexit, and now they don’t like Trump!
Democracy has been overruled by mob rule, and those people have been on the losing side of every single election, and thank God I’ve been on the winning side of every one. Mob rule wins – no democracy, mob rule. The SNP were on the losing side on five different occasions: I’m the winner, they’re the losers, let’s get them out.
Everything he says is true. Well, apart from Trump being elected by the American people, democracy being lowered to “mob rule,” the SNP bringing the indyref result to court, the EU referendum being “overruled” at all, the SNP losing “everysingleelection” (!?!) and most spectacularly, him being the “winner.”
Think he might be a bit sore about that lost deposit?
But he is, indeed, on the “winning side” of the indyref, the EU referendum, and Trump, along with the white nationalists and supremacists celebrating this glorious change in the world’s political climate.
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said,
“Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.”
The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said,
“Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”
“That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
– “The Appointment in Samarra,” as retold by W. Somerset Maugham, 1933
This is an old folk tale of a self-fulfilling prophecy: where the very act of attempting to avoid it coming to pass actually leads to its fruition.
I thought of this story, as I watched the Single Market and Trade (EU Referendum) debate in Holyrood today.
Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and mother. Thus when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother. Well, you are gone both ways.
– Launcelot, “The Merchant of Venice”
As someone who loves his history & mythology, I often think of the trials of Odysseus. The episode of Scylla and Charybdis, the two monstrous terrors which dwell on opposite sides of the Straits of Messina which the Argo must navigate, is one of the more famous tales. On the one side, you had the horrific six-headed Scylla, each frightful head bristling with triple rows of crushing teeth; on the other, the merciless whirlpool of Charybdis, sucking ships down into the black maw. You cannot navigate the Strait down the middle: you have to lean to one side. Do you brave the polycephalic nightmare, or the relentless force of nature? You are gone both ways.
I was thinking of this in regards to yesterday’s post. The Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap could be considered a strait of sorts, with the horrors being man-made rather than mythological. We even have our own Charybdis – guess we know what our Scyllas are.
I don’t mean to do it, but the man just says things that I feel cannot go without challenge.
Mr Findlay’s problem seems to be that Mr Harvie is wrong to say that the “inclusive, civic” Scottish Nationalism is the “polar opposite” to the “racist” nationalism see in England – that it is a display of moral superiority that is unwarranted.
Well, here’s the thing: Mr Harvie did not just compare Scottish nationalism and (presumably) English/British nationalism in their entirety: he specifically said that the “inclusive, civic form of Scottish nationalism” is the polar opposite to “racist nationalism.” I don’t think it’s controversial to say that anything which is “inclusive” and “civic” is indeed not only the polar opposite, but morally and ethically superior to anything which is “racist.”
But even if Mr Harvie did outright say “Scottish nationalism is the polar opposite to English/British nationalism,” what exactly is controversial about that?
