Shh! Hear the irony?

I have long argued on this blog and elsewhere that Celtic fans must make the mainstream media irrelevant by ignoring it.

For too many years, unscrupulous scoffing hacks made their own kind of sport taunting and goading Celtic fans, denigrating the club and its representatives and often succeeding in sparking unrest.

That should come as no surprise – the Scottish media has long been an old-boys network where the lack of a common tie was replaced by questions on the name of prospective employees' schools. That may be changing but extreme nepotism has dictated that white male protestant journalism in Scotland will take many more years to absorb enlightenment.

The breaking of male hegemony has yet to be fully realised while the Catholics, Jews and Muslims stand further back in the queue (the atheists are notionally disbarred due to their inability to become Freemasons). You can expect to see the demise of news titles before any find themselves with a Black or Asian editor.

And, believe it or not, this is relevant today as the White underclass described by Graham Spiers has provided blood stock for the Scottish media for years. There is an old joke that you know you are a redneck if you have more than one brother called Darryl, which is quite apposite when you think of it.

And so, to the point. Before a minute's silence is besmirched, today has already been chronicled as a day in which Celtic fans defiled the honoured dead. Before we even have a chance to paraphrase John Robertson and declare our wars fought on the football field, Celtic supporters are being lined up for their routine haranguing, something which is always pursued with even greater enthusiasm when fans of the R-word disgrace themselves.

Not merely anticipated, the reaction has already begun with attempts to equate this longed-for behaviour with Rangers rioting in Europe's unsuspecting cities.

For my part, I would repudiate anyone who disrupts a memorial as stolidly as I would any authority that tried to dictate that there is only one view of war and prescribe precisely how it must be commemorated. The deeper issues are profound and subtle and therefore lost on the archetypal Scottish newspaper sports hick.

And yet, the one common courtesy observed in thousands of wars over millennia has been the right to reclaim, bury and remember the dead. In conflicts sparked by issues of survival, greed or sheer hatred, only the most savage have failed to observe the protocol of having enemies only amongst the living. (Viz: Michael Stone, Rangers fan helped by British security forces.)

But while the explosion of colour that has become the independent Celtic multimedia environment is bringing us ever closer to that day when the Scottish papers speak only to themselves, fans should remember that protests are better articulated through considered letters than oafish grunts.

But the great irony – one which is unlikely to be observed in the Scottish press – is that this week, it was Celtic who literally faced the Nazi Hun. In Germany, Celtic played a team with a strong German Neo-Nazi element, the SV Hamburger Hitler Fan Club.

Who swelled their ranks? The right-wing “loyalist” supporters of Rangers, who have branded themselves as the “quintessentially British club”, supporters of “our boys” in the armed forces, brandishing their Union Jacks and banners of “no surrender”. While they listen in hope for a single Celtic jeer, their friends will be lamenting the fall of the Third Reich.

Whose side are they on?





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