Read time: 8 mins
Tomorrow evening (Thursday 26th Oct, 9 p.m.) OTS will be taking part in a group discussion via a Twitter/X ‘space’ hosted by The Razor’s Edge.
In case there are technical problems, we wanted to set down a summary of what we would like to have said.
Everything, including the Ukraine/Russia war, has been overshadowed by what’s happening in Gaza. By comparison, what’s happening in Scotland feels trivial and we should be grateful for that at least, but the arguments must go on because they all feed into one another and nothing exists in a vacuum,
For example, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy have all waded into very deep water with their comments on the Gaza ‘situation’. There have been desperate efforts to row back on the apparent green-lighting of genocide but a lot of damage has been done and they still seem unable to condemn Israel’s actions. The leader of Labour’s Scottish branch is Anas Sarwar. He is currently trying to get control of disillusioned branch officers who have quit over the national party’s directive that no-one openly discuss the conflict or attend pro-Palestine demonstrations. The leader of the SNP, Humza Yousaf, has been trying to get his wife’s parents out of Gaza since the Israeli bombardment started and claims his pleas for information have been ignored by senior UK diplomats. To his credit, the SNP’s Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn has gone further than most mainstream figures by appealing directly to the Prime Minister for a ceasefire. He was, of course, rebuffed, as he surely knew he would be. But it’s the thought that counts.
The whole tragedy is once again highlighting the democratic deficit at the core of what passes for representative democracy in Scotland: the major parties are either headquartered in London or behaving as unionists. There are also questions arising about the relationship between the SNP hierarchy (in government for 12 years now) and Israeli lobby groups. All of the major British political parties have long-standing close relationships with Israel as formalised in the ‘Friends of Israel’ groupings at Westminster. There has never been such a grouping formally endorsed by the Scottish National Party but that hasn’t prevented Israel interests seeking to access contact with the party of government. ( Who are Friends of Israel? | SACC )
We don’t know precisely what public opinion in Scotland is regarding the ‘conflict’ but we do know that unionist parties generally, and Conservatives in particular, have no right to speak on our behalf. For Sunak, Starmer or anyone else to declare from the HoC despatch box or a TV studio in London that ‘Israel has that right’ or ‘the people of Scotland support Israel’ is an affront to the estimated 50% of voters who have voted repeatedly for independence and a second referendum. We have been palmed-off for the past nine years with an ever-shifting set of goalposts by a government more interested in zany virtue-signalling policies that have all-but destroyed whatever credibility the SNP had managed to amass in its 90-year history. We want these important statements, being made on our behalf, to come from people we elected and who work for parties headquartered in Scotland.
It doesn’t matter whether or not support for Palestine is regarded as a ‘left-wing’ preoccupation. The obvious corollary is that supporting Israel must be ‘right-wing’ and so the same old dichotomy emerges as with so many other issues. We reject this offensively simplistic approach to political discourse. As a relatively new voice in the debate we will surely be subjected to scrutiny from those whose primary concern is to pigeon-hole everyone. So, we welcome analysis and are prepared to argue our stance on any number of issues. Where we have no opinion or lack the expertise to be confident of a specific stance, we will admit as much and remain open to persuasion from those who do know what they’re talking about. If a truly objective reader scans our published material and concludes that we are extreme/moderate left/right, that’s fine by us. Where we happen to be situated on an imagined spectrum is of no interest to us and we will not be badgered by anyone else on that spectrum to shift our position in relation to them due to this or that topical issue. Likewise, we decide who we will converse with. We look forward to finding out what pigeon-hole we end up in.
In the blogpost prior to this one we presented just a small fraction of the voluminous evidence of BBC bias against the Scottish independence movement. It should not be surprising that the British Broadcasting Corporation, when tasked with broadcasting news about the possible secession of its nearest and oldest colony, adopts a ‘British’ editorial voice. What is surprising is that so many Scots still trust that organisation and pay £159 annually for the benefit of being lied-to whilst avoiding a criminal record. What they are also paying for is the misrepresentation of their own views on a whole range of issues, from our participation in wars (declared or otherwise) to the definition of what a ‘woman’ is and the collection of empty glass bottles.
Too many figures in public life treat the ‘commoners’ as just that. The palace in Westminster where we are represented bears that same demeaning name. Us ‘commons’ are expected not to trouble ourselves with weighty affairs of state such as war and peace and whether or not a notorious local paedophile should be challenged when he announces that he’s actually a she and starts getting his kit off in front of girls and women in the changing-room. We should be contacting our MPs, MSPs and councillors if we’re upset about rubbish collection, street-lighting and suchlike, not demanding that they raise their voices against the industrial-scale slaughter of defenceless human beings (mostly women and children) being bombed night and day for weeks on end. The decision on ‘the line to take’ about such matters has to be left to those and such as those. All that’s left to us is to protest but even then, as the treatment of Craig Murray demonstrates yet again, we do so at our peril.
Incredibly, I Face Investigation for Terrorism - Defence Funds Appeal - Craig Murray
Right now it feels as if ‘right’ and ‘left’ have no real meaning. Even as a handy tool for bracketing divergent political opinions it is no longer fit for purpose. It may be the inevitable result of the postmodern ‘discursive turn’, where all meanings are negotiable and nothing is really what it seems. But genocide is genocide and a woman is an adult human female and 2+2=4. And when we cannot say these things we know there’s something wrong.
That brings us to a final thought and it concerns Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The image below is taken from the facsimile version, published thirty-five years after novel’s appearance (June 8th 1949) just over a year after the State of Israel was founded (May 14th 1948).
The famous quote about a boot stamping on a human face forever has always been open to interpretation but we know from Orwell’s other writings that it was certainly not a condemnation of either fascism or communism specifically. It was targeting the point at which those extremes meet and become indistinguishable. Who the boot belongs to is, ultimately, irrelevant and is certainly of little immediate interest to the person who is being assaulted. The point is that the unfortunate whose face is being stamped upon is being punished because s/he is not a believer (as opposed to a mere 'Party Member') And it doesn’t matter how this person is labelled: extremist, terrorist, radical, subversive, rabble-rouser etc. They are all guilty of heresy. And Orwell’s choice of that word deserves attention. We know how fastidious he was with language.
Right now the agenda being rolled-out by globalists is being resisted by people, not parties.
‘Hope lay with the proles’. Orwell got that right too. And the proles are letting their governments know that they object to what is being done in their name to the people of Palestine just as they refused to condone the imminent invasion of Iraq on a false premise. But the carrying of a Palestinian flag in the UK, or flying one from one’s home, may now be an offence depending on the viewpoint of the police officer. In Germany the punishment for voicing support is immediate and brutal. And what are Europeans in general supposed to make of Ursula von der Leyen’s insistence that we’re all with Israel? It seems that we have no choice in the matter.
There are heretics everywhere. Not only people who object to the killing of civilians in Gaza and Israel and the meat-grinding in Ukraine. There are those objecting to extreme ‘green’ scaremongering, 15-minute cities, central bank digital currency, transhumanism, covid/vaccine skulduggery, self-ID madness, ‘woke’ ideology generally and any number of other issues which 99% of mainstream politicians daren’t touch with a proverbial until/unless they’ve been given clear instructions from headquarters.
The fight now is not ‘right’ versus ‘left’ and our individual positioning on that scale is meaningless. We know what ‘common decency’ is and that’s enough of a guide for most. Even Orwell struggled to pin it down it precisely but we can define it by its absence, as encapsulated in the expression ‘that isn’t right’.
If saying ‘that isn’t right’ is now heretical then we have to wake up, and soon. Because the definition of ‘heretic’, as explored and wrestled-with by Orwell now covers pretty much anyone who doesn’t champion the WEF agenda.
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