Returning The Serve - Demolishing the "political" excuse

30 August 2011 12:23
Tom Paine's Bones examines how Scottish football is being held hostage to prejudice dressed up as politics. One thing missed in the FARE furore last season was the fact Celtic escaped scrutiny from UEFA because they were out of two competitions in short order. And while that was at once funny and deeply damaging to finances, one unintended side-effect was that TGFITW escaped attention for their hymns of hate and Falls Road karaoke. All I ask is that they are held to the same standards and benchmarks as Rangers fans we were – it will be interesting, for example, to see if there was a mystery FARE observer in Sion . . .   The organised elements of the Celtic support are, in any case, working on a damage limitation strategy and preparing for a battle to escape sanctions for the chants and songs they sing. Their line is an old refrain, songs are ‘political’ rather than sectarian, racist or illegal. You may remember CST Chair Jeanette Findlay attracting severe public criticism in 2004 from Dr Reid et al when she took this line on radio about singing IRA songs. All that Findlay, O’Rourke, McGillivan and Co can offer these days to excuse the inexcusable is disingenuous, dishonest cant: disingenuous because being ‘political’ is no excuse for anything; and dishonest because empirical evidence shows large sections of the Celtic support to be sectarian bigots.   First of all the ‘political’ excuse. Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao, Mussolini and Pinochet described themselves as politicians. The BNP are a political party. Fascism is seen by adherents as a political ideology. The Norwegian mass murderer Breivik said he was acting for political reasons. Politics in and of itself excuses nothing; and certainly doesn’t excuse supporting a sectarian murder gang like the Provisionals.   Let’s remind First Minister Salmond and anyone else who is hard of hearing or ‘forgets’ - the politics expressed by the Celtic are support for violent Irish Republicanism and the IRA. Celtic fans are perfectly at liberty to express and celebrate Irish roots and supposed or actual Irish ethnicity. This should not be a problem to any decent minded person. The chosen and favoured method of expression, however, is not about culture and history of Ireland and Irish identity.   The Celtic support are not paying homage to a noble struggle for nationhood against an evil imperialist oppressor. Instead, they are expressing support for indiscriminate killing: for the bomb left in a Warrington litter bin that killed 2 school boys, for bombs left under cars, for killing prison officers, for murder in Canary Wharf, for bombing the Bullring in Birmingham, for blowing up the Arndale Centre in Manchester, for kidnapping, kneecapping, organised criminality and sectarian killings by the hundred. . ‘Sean South of Garryowen’ was an anti-semite. ‘Bobby Sands’ a convicted terrorist, the ‘Boys of The Old Brigade’ responsible for carrying out anti-Protestant pogroms in the south of Ireland.     Instead, it is a one-word, one-note song. It is akin to expressing Italian identity by only singing songs about the Northern League. Nor is this about Irish politics. Celtic fans don’t sing about Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats, the Irish Labour Party, the SDLP, the Alliance Party or the Irish Greens. The only organisations supported are Sinn Fein/IRA, occasionally INLA. This is not Irish nationalism, instead it is support for a narrow ideology which relies on violence, murder and fascism in pursuit of a 32 County Ireland.   As ex IRA volunteer Sean O’Callaghan put it in his book “The Informer”: “This was, in reality, a war against Protestants. This was no romantic struggle against British imperialism but a squalid sectarian war directed against the Protestant people of Northern Ireland.” And I’m sorry bhoys, seeing Gerry and Martin wearing suits in Stormont instead of balaclavas and combat jackets doesn’t change that.   Nor are our friends celebrating the peace recently delivered. They celebrate instead those who carried out murders and bombings. Current favourite ‘Roll of Honour’ is a classic example, celebrating as it does the PIRA Hunger Strikers of the H Blocks in 1981: “In those dreary H-Block cages ten brave young Irishmen lay; Hungering for justice while their young lives ebbed away; For their rights as Irish soldiers and to free their native land; They stood beside their leader the gallant Bobby Sands.” For ‘Irish soldiers’ read ‘sectarian murderers’, convicted IRA and INLA members all.   And in terms of a more obvious, blatant sectarianism, the Celtic support are regular offenders. Walter Smith, Alex McLeish, Dick Advocaat have all been asked “what can it mean to a sad Orange bastard?” Rangers supporters are always described as ‘Huns’, a grossly offensive sectarian term for a Protestant. Fans of other clubs using the H word is a non-issue, not least because Celtic FC banned the use of the term themselves. The idiotic use of the term by Aberdeen or St Mirren fans does not mean that we ignore the overtly sectarian use of the term. Celtic fans describe fans of Hearts, Kilmarnock and Motherwell - clubs seen by them as having mainly Protestant fans - as ‘mini-Huns’ or ‘Huns without a bus fare’. This shows beyond reasonable doubt that Hun is a sectarian term. The Celtic support sang “Go home ya Huns” to the Hearts fans last season at Celtic Park.   Other examples of sectarian songs? “The One Road”, where the line “Northmen, Southmen, comrades all” is regularly followed by “Soon there’ll be no Protestants at all”. The song “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” contains the line “And when the music stops, f**k King Billy and John Knox, oh it’s great to be a Roman Catholic.”. How do Peter Lawwell or Jeanette Findlay explain those charming ditties?   In terms of racism, we all saw El Hadji Diouf racially abused by Celtic fans this year and of course 2 January 1988 saw the single largest act of collective football-related racism in the UK, by the Celtic support against the black Rangers player Mark Walters. More recently they sang “Mols is a monkey” in their “tell all the Huns you know” song. That isn’t opinion or perspective, it is cold hard fact.   And here are a few more, which show recent spewing about supposedly institutional sectarianism to be an absolute fallacy: In the last 20 years alone Rangers have had a Roman Catholic Director in Bob Brannan, a Roman Catholic Manager in Paul le Guen and a Roman Catholic Captain in Lorenzo Amoruso, and players from all faiths and none. Let’s ignore for a second the hero-worship of Catholic players like Jorg Albertz and Rino Gattuso and remember instead that since 1989, only one set of fans had a problem with Rangers signing a high-profile Scots Roman Catholic in Maurice Johnston, and it wasn’t those wearing blue and white. The days when anyone (other than Celtic fans) cared about the faith of a Rangers player are gone.     Finally, to offer some much needed perspective It is a myth – a deliberately fashioned one – that Rangers supporters are a slavering sectarian and racist horde whilst the Celtic support are a charity-minded Scots/Irish glee club, singing political songs but with ‘a few’ fans who let the side down. This is a grotesque parody of the everyday reality, which is that both sets of fans come from a complex spectrum of individuals drawn from all social classes, backgrounds and ethnic origins, large numbers of whom live and work next to and with each other. Yes, this spectrum includes some bigots, racists and the terminally stupid, but it also includes a majority of decent-minded football fans, who support their club and wish to do so in safety and comfort. The simplistic ‘good guys vs bad guys’ stuff we see churned out says more about those using those terms than it does about the truth.   It is sad but not surprising that the entire dialogue on sectarianism has been deliberately distorted by Celtic’s apologists and I don’t blame them for doing so: Sir David Murray allowed them free rein to do so for almost two decades. It isn’t a propaganda war either, because as Bill Hicks pointed out you need two sides fighting to have a war. Instead, for useful idiots like Graham Spiers and Nicky Campbell this is about excusing one party whilst blaming another. It is a petty-minded miniaturised version of Israel’s siege mentality, where anything done to the Palestinian people, no matter how brutal or unjust, is excused by references to anti-Zionism, the Holocaust and the heroic struggle for nationhood.   There is now a crying need to evaluate the factual evidence which moves us away from the current puerile blame-game, towards an adult examination of what sectarianism is and how it can be marginalised and tackled.   To get there requires a degree of honesty and objectivity not seen to date and, equally importantly, requires the entire Rangers family to recognise that it is miles behind a far better organised and more driven opponent.

Source: FOOTYMAD