Banned !

This is good and I like the logic that lies behind it. I instinctively feel a great deal of sympathy for this way of thinking. And yes, “reinforcing the legitimacy of the songs” may doubtless be considered as being especially important right now. No arguments there. In fact, full agreement.

Moving on....

This feels true, but I’ll get back to your comparison between Rosa Parks and the actions of present day Irish Republicans at football matches in Scotland in a minute or two (or later on if I run out of time here).

Oh dear. If only I had been that clever or insightful. No, I was citing The Plantation of Ulster (snatched gratefully from my paltry stockpile of “knowledge” about Irish history) in order to mock potential elements of my own argument and also, by extension, the British - or the touchy ones, at least. (It’s a bad habit, I know, but it keeps me interested.) I had merely hoped to show that it might be a bit rich for any British person to complain about Irish political infringement in the affairs of Scottish/British society when the Scots/British may be seen to have indulged in some seriously malicious social engineering in Ireland. You think you have a monopoly on dragging up the past, Irelander? Back. Off.

I think my 17th century joke went well. I should do this stuff more often. It feels great – just great – to have to deconstruct an academic “joke” that bombed in the middle of a serious discussion. (I still feel occasionally queasy that anyone might have thought I was being serious when I told Superhoops that “rape is valid; being raped is equally valid”, perhaps not recognising through the flat delivery that I was entirely lacerating myself and my style of debating whilst slyly confirming, I hope, the truth of the observation that people who try to have exceptionally open minds run the risk of having their brains fall out. Like I say, it’s a bad habit – and it must stop. Memo to self: overcome your revulsion of smileys and start signposting your funnies lest people mark you down as being earnest. Or, you know, don’t.)

Interesting stuff, but now I'm just left wondering how they never made it back?

Anyway, I feel I might even vaguely recognise the name Hugh O’Neill – I have him down in my head as having been somehow involved in the Treaty of Mellifont, but I don’t remember how or why – so this feels like a substantial win.

I suppose I can more or less see why you might have guessed that this was what I was meaning, but your guess was entirely incorrect, unfortunately – this wasn’t my point at all. Throughout all of that section (above) I was simply trying to see if your comparison between Rosa Parks and the circumstance of present day Irish Republicans singing songs at a football match in Scotland was legitimate. But I’ll need to get back to that another time.

 

No. It's too late for placatory stuff. That ship sailed. I'm contractually obliged to stab you at this point.

But yes, of course – and I wasn’t entirely sure if you were doing a funny or not because, on the surface, being “unique” sounds an awful lot better than being merely “special”, after all, and this would cleverly subvert your seeming withdrawal and turn it into an advance (I’m still uptight after my own failed joke, okay, the one you absolutely ruined, and should simply hate to inflict a similar sort of pain on you by missing one of your own fun-time interventions. Chastened, I’ve since forced myself to use a big yellow thumbs-up smiley for the first time in my life whilst making a “joke” over at Rangers. In my anxiety to break my smiley duck, however, I somehow neglected to make the joke pertinent or, indeed, funny, which brings its own kind of pain, as you might imagine.) - it can be said that Celtic's story is "unique", no arguments there. In much the same way that a similar thing may be said for every club. Anywhere. Ever. Sure, we might need to deploy tricky-picky technicalities to come to such an understanding, but sometimes it's probably worth it and I’m always up for a laugh.

Although, on an entirely personal level, I'm not much into exceptionalism or special pleading and find myself constitutionally inclined to look for any similarities that we may share before giving the differences of our (chosen) identities much thought, if I need ever think of them at all. I'm talking very generally about human beings, not restricting myself to those humans who might simply be interested in football. Just to be clear.

Anyway, I’m not forgetting about Rebel’s Rosa Parks Comparison Shame Hell Fiasco Conundrum etc, okay? I’ll hopefully get back to starting on all that – and everything else, obviously – at some point this weekend or early next week. Right now, however, I'm off to the beach and must bid you a day filled with love.

 

Here, have some for free

W W e e E E ww QQ Q QQ QE QEW WE We Qe EE qqq Q Ew W qqq Q eeeWEEEEqQQqwW

 

My "s" is fecked too.

 

Booo


Hissssssssss

 

I have no idea what any of you are talking about. You communicate in secret Celtic code, surely? <OpusDei>


Rebel, no worries. There are actually a few more of your responses I missed and would like to rake over some more, but I&#8217;ll carry these forward to later on when they may be more appropriate.

In the meantime, however, continuing directly from where I left off&#8230;..

This feels like a curious phrase. You seem to be setting yourself up in opposition to something that doesn&#8217;t appear to exist. Not on these pages, anyway. I mean, I&#8217;m not sure anybody has ever suggested that finding Republicans in Scotland is unusual or inappropriate, have they?

I know that you haven&#8217;t specifically said &#8220;people find it unusual and inappropriate that Republicans may be found in Scotland&#8221;, true, but any onlookers may be forgiven, I hope you&#8217;ll agree, if they feel that the unspoken sentiment behind your actual words comes somewhere pretty close. Otherwise, of course, why say it?

(This tendency to argue against something which is not actually being said is something I&#8217;ve noticed a few Irishy/Republicany/nationalisty type of people doing lately &#8211; on this site, most definitely, and elsewhere (but I&#8217;ll stick to examples from this site) - whilst protecting themselves against a perceived threat. I&#8217;ll come back to this, though, and I think it might leech into some other aspects of what I&#8217;m about to say. If not, like I say, I&#8217;ll get back to it in more specific detail later.)

Right.

I&#8217;m building myself up for the rather tricky job of addressing victimhood and the occasional mindset of those people who wear their perceived &#8211; or actual - oppression like an all-enveloping cloak and allow it to distort their social vision and inflate/disfigure their sense of self. Possibly. Occasionally. If at all. No they don&#8217;t. Wish me luck. To Rosa Parks we go&#8230;..

(Back after lunch and dog-walking.)

 

God. I think this will be the point where this discussion reaches its broadest terms of reference, Rebel, so we may hope that it starts to narrow itself down and concentrates on specifics once the following ideas have been mixed into the fray. And this is a fairly rushed job today, so excuse me. Must be nerves. I’ll come back to absolutely everything, if necessary, and explain it in a more reasoned detail.

Once all the ideas are out there, though, and once I’m sure of precisely what it is that you’re saying (about everything that’s been mentioned from the start – a clear frame of reference, clarity and distinction of the language used, an agreed understanding of what we’re not arguing about/discussing etc), then we can hopefully get down to a proper (and polite) argument. Things are obviously a bit messy at the moment, but I’m more or less keeping tabs. (An idle, baseless boast.)

In trying to get to grips with all those competing ideas I’d like to talk about, I’m reminded of those hateful essay questions that would fuse my head and would often be longer than any given answer. This sort of thing:

The suffocating grip of the culture of victimhood and the psychological difficulties Irish Republicans may have in adjusting to a changing social, moral and political landscape, whilst tilting against a seemingly ineradicable cultural and grass-roots political mindset that very generally sees compromise as a form of surrender, as opposed to an act of civilising humanity and/or urgent social necessity: once a victim, always a victim? Can the Irish Republican psyche adjust itself in time to take heed of changing conditions on the ground and of its own inexorable march towards a lasting historical primacy? Discuss.

Seeing as this is a football forum, however, and because intellectual condescension can be fun (and may be seen to give the person sneering a momentary boost to what we must assume is a seriously flagging sense of self-worth), I’ll try to aim a bit lower:

How we define ourselves and how we present and project this self-image to the world: an examination of the political and cultural narcissism of persistent special pleading and the socially corrosive exceptionalism of identity politics - and the dangers this presents to an already divided northern Irish society when both sides debase themselves by scrabbling over the seemingly cherished right to assume the mantle of victim; and how this fetishism of victimhood may be seen to be tearing Scottish football apart as some Rangers and Celtic fans mimic the endemic and self-defeating political immaturity of the worst parts of (northern) Irish discourse as they try to paint each other as “Scotland’s Shame” and seek to show how institutional decisions are biased against them. Both. At the same time. Tonight, on RTE 2, taking time out from doing good in the world, our guest presenter and friend to the stars, the compellingly earnest coffee-house philosopher Dr Psychosomatic investigates…..

It’s no use. Even when I dumb down, I stay cripplingly smart. Nightmare. (It’s a real burden, you know? I just want to be one of the lads. It’s tearing me apart.)

I digress. But not by much, actually, as those are just some of the issues that come to (my) mind when hearing Irish Republicans comparing their actions to those of Rosa Parks whilst (specifically) talking about singing songs at a football match in present-day Scotland.

The publicly projected self-image – and don’t worry, I saw and accepted the part where you said you may be tending towards a melodrama with the comparison – of those who feel certain of the justness of their cause and actions, may be seen by others as a very soft-focus (and possibly self-delusional) attempt at self-examination; not something to be taken terribly seriously, in any event, as we all like to think we’re pretty special and in describing ourselves we will all tend to be rather self-delusional. (Or I certainly am, that’s for sure, but the fact that I admit to such a thing makes me cuddly. So I’m exempt.)

But an attempt to make other people buy into the self-image we have painted for ourselves might sometimes be met with resistance by the broader community, even if they sympathise with our cause, for the very simple reason that nobody really likes to hear someone else banging on about their own goodness (or I certainly don’t). It grates. And it certainly makes for uncomfortable viewing. It may even take away the breath of those who might wonder at what levels of detachment it must take to talk about oneself so highly and presume (or at least speculate over) an imagined future place in history (alongside the established and recognised greats).

The thought of saying to others that I’m brave, noble and trail-blazing, for example, simply makes me die inside. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I don’t know. In fact, I think the people in the middle of an ongoing ruck may be the least well-equipped to give a balanced overview of their place in history.

And Rosa Parks was certainly brave, noble and trail-blazing, if you like that sort of thing - which I do. And this is the problem (for me) on the most basic level, before we even get onto forcibly projected self-image/psyche/special pleading/victimhood identification and all the rest of it (which I may need to leave for another day), I simply don’t see how the fans at Celtic Park are any of these things (above) or how they might have the ability to class themselves as such. Can you see why I might have some difficulty? And can you see why it might be reasonable (of me) to have such reservations?

Well yes, true, but in order to directly compare my own actions with those of Rosa Parks, I would possibly be very uncomfortable overlooking her courage and bravery whilst doing so, and this would lead me to ask myself how much courage it took to sing Irish Republican songs at a football match in Scotland, surrounded by tens of thousands of my fellow fans against a political backdrop (in Ireland) that may be said to be lurching inexorably (if painfully slowly for some) in an Irish Republican direction. I don’t necessarily see this as brave or trailblazing or inspiring and, whilst in no way attempting to diminish the effort or dismiss it out of hand, I feel it may be rather fanciful to imagine the actions of some present-day fans at a football match in Glasgow being looked upon by future generations as having played any significant role – or any role whatsoever, perhaps – in the present-day Irish political process. (Just in the last decade, for example, in what specific way have those people singing songs at Celtic shaped the peace process or practically and demonstrably furthered those causes they may sing about by singing about them in the first place?)

And if we (momentarily) allow that these songs are part of a broader “exchange of political ideals”, what then? What happens next? If I listened to all the songs and found myself moved in some way or another, what would you then have me do? And I’ll be classed as an Irish citizen soon, brother, so be careful how you go.

I need to stop. Some further points (just so I don’t forget, nothing else):

The disproportionately massive role the Irish played in western imperialism and the (frankly weird) reluctance of some Irish to acknowledge such a thing and how this may be seen to be at odds with the promoted self-image (by some Irish) of the perpetual underdog and/or oppressed, champions of the cause of all victims etc; the way the Irish themselves treat expressions of cultural or racial difference in Ireland (I’m thinking of the poor travellers and Jews and some rather nauseating legislation through the ages and the reliance on weasel words) and how this sits at odds with the demand that the Irish or their descendants be treated differently in other cultures/countries whilst showing a scattered indifference throughout the classes towards injustice carried out in their names; the curious blindspot that sees many equate Irishness with Republicanism when all manner of political outlooks may thrive on the island; the dangerous ideas of racial politics and how some Republicans seek to set themselves as a race apart, perhaps forgetting the lessons of history and taking exceptionalism to a horrible new level…….

No, I really do need to stop. I’ll get back to it all when I take a breath. (A lot of the last paragraph may be classed as “whataboutery”, in any event, although I think some of it may actually be relevant for once. We’ll see.)

And yes, I know, it's possible to class Rosa Parks as a champion, not a victim, but I'm almost certain people will know what I mean. (Famous last words.)