Honestly, we didn’t think they thought like that – not really, and not so ordinarily. We had our suspicions, but we had no way of knowing just how idiotic and wonderfully deluded the opinion of the average Englishman is. Boasting of empire and the conquest of half the world, taking pride in something analogous to robbing half the houses on Highfield Road, is a special kind of craziness. It betrays the ignorance at the heart of England’s memory of empire, an obnoxious and dark period of British history in which thoughts of racial supremacism led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Sectarianism is a Thing Again
Granted, most of us pay this garbage little attention, and for good reason – but let me put it to you that this might be something of a mistake. In the replies to some of these bigoted comments independentistas have pointed out that religion is all but dead in Scotland. Insofar as we read these sentiments as an appeal to religious loyalties, they are meaningless. Protestantism and Catholicism have become redundant terms to a majority secular Scotland. This is where we are getting it wrong; these appeals are not to faith traditions or religious loyalties.
Nigel Farage: The Threat to Democracy
Students of the far-right are well acquainted with this strategy of waiting. Since Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, all the essential ingredients of true ideological racism – white supremacism and fascism – have been patiently waiting in the undergrowth, moving through a series of permutations; the National Front, the BNP, UKIP, and the Brexit Party – to name a few. Farage is not like the more obvious racists. He’s not like Nick Griffin or Tommy Robinson.
Brexit’s Neon-Nazis
In may respects, Brexit and all the turmoil and chaos that has brought Britain to this point has brought us full circle, right back to the revolutionary potential of the late 20s and 30s. The political left has disengaged from the politics of the street and the centre has completely come apart. The only real political strength in England today is the right and the racist far-right. Given this, the yellow vests movement – with its overt “neon-Nazi” leanings – should be a cause for serious concern.
Independence Road
The vision of independence is one of a through road on which power is brought back to Scotland, enabling us to tackle the problems neither Westminster nor Scotland’s unionists have any interest in addressing. The bottom line is that we can do nothing to better Scotland without first returning state power to the country. We may be able to see the problems we face. We might even see the causes of these problems. But there is precious little we can do to change things without first winning independence and in so doing taking the power we need to effect the change we want.
Not Wearing a Poppy
Yet the poppy, from the joke it was – no matter how ordinary innocent people feel about wearing it, has been “hijacked,” or so we are told. It has now become the totem of hyper-aggressive, right-wing racist British nationalism. On the football field it has become the weapon of choice to be deployed against non-British outsiders; Irish Catholics and Argentinians – very much victims of British imperial and colonial violence – who play for English clubs. On the lapels of knuckle-dragging thugs it has become a compliment to the Nazi swastika tattooed on their necks.
Brace Yourself, Effie
Her depiction of the European Union as a new threat from the continent; as an existential battle against Euro-Nazism, is no exaggeration. The featured image of the blog post is nothing less than an updated version of the Dad’s Army map – the one with little union jack arrows being chased out of Europe by swastika arrows. In her map Great Britain (Mmm)TM is surrounded by the evil EU empire on all sides, forever dug-in in its perennially entrenched salient. Her monomaniacal representation of Europe, however, betrays her vast ignorance of history.
JK Rowling’s ‘Blame on Both Sides’ Argument
Rowling is an expert in fascism, social inequality, and racism. She wrote an entire series of children’s books propagating the virtues of British classist elitism, racial supremacism, and fascistic totalitarianism. Have we forgotten that? The world of Harry Potter, as explained by Professor Sunny Singh of the London Metropolitan University, is an idealised fictionalisation of Rowling’s interior universe; a world of private schools, white privilege, plutocracy, and coercion – Britain.
Random Public Journal 