Never Mind the Bollocks of the Orange Walk
Today in Glasgow The Orange Order did their usual annual peacock display of ethnic and religious supremacy which is often the scene of violence when conducted in North Ireland and always a scene of hatred when conducted anywhere. Liam O’Hare of CommonSpaces made an official complaint to Scottish police after today’s march in Glasgow was serenaded with The Famine Song, by drunken Scottish blockhead Loyalists, as it has been found by the Courts in 2009 to be racist and thus a breach of public order when sung. Just watch the video cited to police by O’Hare.
Personally I think this is crap and a waste of time. First of all because my own great grandmother in Belfast once told her children not to bother going down to the Orange March and making a fuss, purely out of principal that these poor buggers don’t even understand their own history and are celebrating their own enslavement. She also didn’t think it very wise that her children condone the march by making a fight out of it. Best just to leave them do their thing – imagine for one day that the Empire gives a shit about them. I also think this is a load of shite because the lyric in the song O’Hare is taking issue with is probably the most tame of the whole song: “The famine is over, so why don’t you go home?” He isn’t taking issue with any of the other claims in the song, just this politically incorrect one, because he has an agenda. If people like O’Hare can make it illegal for the Scottish to tell the Irish to go home they’d make it illegal for any peoples’ to tell any racial or ethnic group to go home. They could, instead, be genuinely edgy and revolutionary by drawing attention to any other hateful aspect of the song – or better yet, the premise of the song itself. The idea that there was a famine in Ireland to begin with. To suggest there was is revisionist history trying to further erase the reality of planned starvation and genocide by the forced removal of agricultural produce to Britain. They could point out the irony of Scotland’s own destruction by the hands of the empire and the fact that not one morsel of the food stolen from Ireland was given to a single Scotsman. The song is a celebration of the genocide of a people by the hands of the same people who genocided them!
O’Hare has called for an anti-bigotry march to coincide and probably clash with next year’s Orange Walk in Glasgow. This is stupid. Let hate be hate – it’s not based on anything real and will eventually run its course and die out by virtue of how incredibly stupid it is. As my great grandmother understood, the solution to stupidity is not yet more stupidity, and particularly in this case as the presence of detractors will only make these blockheads even more determined and grow in numbers. We’ve been doing this same stupid shit now for over 100 years and all it’s gotten us is a repeat of the same every decade or so. Let’s not give this handful of drunken morons the illusion of power – they are, after all, a tiny minority in their country, which brings me to my proposed alternative.
Why not, instead of an anti-bigotry march, have a unity march. Many more Scottish will come out in support of a unified Gaelic future than would come out against a tiny minority of their own people. So many Scots are now learning their native tongue, learning of the old ways, their mythology, and their disenfranchisement. Could we please focus on this segment of the population? Could we build bridges between our peoples and resume our ancient collective story? Our future does not lie in police probes, legislation, elections, referendums, protests and riots in the streets. It lies in our uncovering of the past and our empowerment in it.