"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.
In December 1543, Henry VII of England declared war on the kingdom of Scotland, ostensibly because King James refused to break with Roman Catholicism as Henry did. In actuality, it was the just latest in a series of attempts by would-be Kings of All Britain to annex or outright destroy the other nations of the isles.
William Ferguson was uncompromising in his appraisal of the war:
Henry VII went berserk and resolved to read the Scots a bitter lesson, one that seemed all the more necessary as England once more stood on the brink of war with France. On 10th April 1544 the Earl of Hertford was accordingly instructed to ravage Scotland where he was to “put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so rased and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon them for their falsehood and disloyalty. Hertford doubted the wisdom of such orders, but his mild protests were brushed aside; and though Henry VIII’s last campaigns against Scotland are usually jocularly dismissed with the Protector Somerset’s under the nuckname of ‘the Rough Wooing’, they were in fact the most savage and devastating of the numerous English invasions of Scotland. In the course of them many of the leading towns of Scotland were sacked and burned, and so were the chief border abbeys and many churches. English policy was simply to pulverise Scotland, to beat her either into acquiescence or out of existence, and Hertford’s campaigns resemble nothing so much as Nazi total warfare – ‘blitzkrieg’, reign of terror, extermination of all resisters, the encouragement of collaborators, and so on.
– Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707
The conflict was initially called the Eight (or Nine) Years’ War, but Henry’s proposal that his son Edward should marry the infant Mary led to its popular modern name – the “rough wooing.” Because of this particularly horrid period in Anglo-Scottish relations, I have an instinctive aversion to the very term “wooing.” I can’t hear or read it without wincing, because for me, it is not a term that evokes love or romance, but political machinations and bloody conquest.
But that’s just me. I realise not everyone reads or hears the word “wooing” and immediately thinks back to the Anglo-Scottish Wars, the weirdos.
2016 was the worst, so the meme goes. So many deaths, so much political upheaval, so many things that just went wrong. My 2016 was not unlike any of the other 32 years of my life so far: good things happened, bad things happened, some great, some terrible. But there’s always something I remember each year.
So, as with last year, I’ll look back on the top posts of this year – 16 this time, in order of publication, while linking to some of my personal favourite posts.
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.
