Oscar Wilde
In terms of population and territory, Scotland indisputably punches above its weight.
With a population of just over five million and a surface area of slightly more than 30,000 sq. miles, this cold, relatively infertile northern part of Britain is a small country by any measure.
But that diminutive status has never stopped Scotland being noticed.
Ride roughshod over engineers like James Watt and Thomas “Colossus of Roads” Telford. Forget the literary legacy of Scott and Burns. Dismiss, if you will, the influence of David Hume and his contemporary Adam Smith whose book, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” caused some form of ripple in western political philosophy. Hang up on Alexander Graham Bell; leave John Logie Baird on standby; trade your prescription for Alexander Fleming’s antibiotics on the street corner.
No Scot need relate his or her contemporary life to the legacy of long-dead figures, who may – as far as anybody knows – be figures from mythology.
No, there are vibrant, living, breathing offspring of the Scottish nation whose outlooks more readily relate to those who consider themselves to be the Scottish racial, religious and cultural archetype.
When a new land across the Atlantic was being settled and colonised, Scots made their mark, and especially on the southern states. Scottish folk music laid the foundations of Blue Grass and Country. Scottish slave owners shaped the agricultural economy. They rose with the South in the great secession and Civil War; pledged loyalty to the Confederate States of America; even gave their saltire as a model on which to base a new flag.
When white supremacists found themselves disadvantaged by the victory of the Union forces, the romanticism of Thomas F. Dixon Jr., inspired the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.
Many years before, and thousands of miles from the slave-striven plantations of the South, Scots were seeded in their own plantations. It was Scots who were settled – this time mostly in the North – but the north of Ireland.
They founded a “language”, Ulster Scots, and more effectively an energetic hatred of the Catholic indigenous population that spawned the Orange Order and a plethora of British Loyalist/Anti-Catholic killers and even bigots.
It should be no surprise that the supporters of Rangers should scorn the achievements of great Scots and rather choose to vocally and aggressively express the sentiments most easily associated with the Klan or the Scottish sympathisers with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacists.
After all, this club with a poison at its core is unique in its identity. Without hatred; without a compulsion to denigrate, offend and oppress, there is barely a notion of Rangers as a positive independent entity.
Having revelled in anti-Catholicism, profiteered on hatred of Irish immigrants, Rangers today exists as a Neolithic oddity – devoid of the evolutionary refinements that position most clubs closer to the modern psyche than any regrettable historical embarrassments that shaped their early years.
Today, we are invited to witness that “superiority”, manifest in the utterances of several thousand civilised representatives at Celtic Park.
Starved of success, embittered through subordination by a Celtic that embodies an acceptance and celebration of cultural values they feel compelled to abhor, the songbook of Rangers has somehow become increasingly distasteful since football’s European governors embarrassed the domestic authorities, effectively proscribing ditties measuring supremacy in crude imperial units of Fenian Blood.
In the absence of admonishments from the SFA – and faced with an overwhelming silence in the Scottish mainstream media – it has been reported that Strathclyde Police have advised Rangers that supporters singing, “The famine’s over; why don’t you go home?” will be subject to arrest.
In response, certain Rangers supporters have issued a direct call for defiance of police instructions amounting to direct and wilful incitement to public disorder.
This compulsion to offend and denigrate Scotland’s Irish minority population is apparently so precious to some Rangers supporters that they will actively seek confrontation with the forces of law.
In the meantime, former Rangers player Gordon Smith, who recently expressed concern at disrespect for “God Save the Queen” has yet to be heard on the subject.
Sometimes silence is marked with a heavy price.
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