PLUS CA CHANGE: FEAR & LOATHING IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA


I have decided to revive my old blog which, as you might see, has been lying dormant for the last six years. 

Since September 2014 I have been focusing all my energy on promoting Scotland's independence through Facebook and more recently MeWe. I did this in the belief that using the social media provided us in the Yes Movement with a powerful new tool for change. A tool that has been used successfully by movements all over the Planet.

As well as that an awareness of modern history pointed to something very powerful unfolding in the events taking place in this country which took me back to my earlier days as an organizer and campaigner in England during the Peace Movement of the 1980's.

The peace movement we created in those days was extraordinary. Growing spontaneously it not only covered the entire UK but continental Europe as well as the rest of the world. Women played a major role and my former Russian-speaking wife played a significant part when she and others travelled to St Petersburg (still Leningrad in those days) to build bridges of friendship with the local Peace Committee. We did all that without the help of the Internet.

During those days I well remember the radical historian, E.P. Thompson, who spoke about European disarmament and the Cold War being propagated by US President Ronald Reagan and Britain's Margaret Thatcher as the very mirror image of what President Brezhnev of the USSR was projecting on his side of the iron curtain. It was only much after the fall and dissolution of the Soviet Union that we were to discover that a major reason for its collapse was that the Soviet Union was no longer able to keep up with the level of arms production and deployment at the frightening pace being set by the US Military-Industrial-Complex.

Moreover US intelligence knew this and was upping the arms race with the deliberate intention of breaking the USSR in this manner. And of course they succeeded in doing just that. In that game of brinkmanship the USA played an aggressive proactive role whilst the USSR was reduced to playing an unsuccessful reactive one.

Talking as he did about how both sides of the Cold War were throwing-up and reacting to a mirror-image of themselves he went further. He pointed to the growth of a liberation movement within the Soviet Bloc and Solidarnosc in Poland. He predicted that this movement which, at the time, was active within the eastern bloc would inevitably spill over into western Europe and mirror itself west of the Berlin Wall.

Well, it didn't happen as neatly as that but the Scottish Referendum in 2014 brought back his prediction to mind. Just as movements like the Polish Solidarnosc were in a struggle to overturn Soviet imperialism here it was now happening in western Europe where a people were going about something not unsimilar in their attempt to rid themselves of the vestiges of another old empire, the British one.

At last the revolutionary times that Thompson predicted had come. In its own way what Scotland faced in September 2014 was the prospect of a peaceful revolution and the end of a 307-year era of occupation by a foreign power. And though we were denied that chance at the ballot-box that first campaign sparked a flame in the heart of Scots which has burned and grown ever since. The inevitability of big changes was something too great to be extinguished.

That's what took me to Facebook and the social media. Just as had happened in other countries, I saw the social media as the tool for organising and mobilising our own movement for liberation. Perhaps I was being far too idealistic about what I thought we could achieve through the Net. While I am sure that it has helped to attract support to the rallies and marches it has done little else.

Instead of growing and maturing into a vehicle with a life of its own the Yes Movement on the internet remains nothing more than a disparate bunch of individuals who, collectively, remain beholden to the whims and fancies of a small clique of leaders in a political party which keeps us at arm's length while preoccupying itself with the reading of opinion polls and the production of revisionist economic reports that pander to no one but the obscenely-rich 1% and their neoliberal servants.

Anyone who dares to question this status quo is screamed at and called a plant, a yoon or similar. They are rubbished, marginalized and treated like lepers. That's the price you have to pay for speaking out of turn about the SNP or its government.

Up until now I have consistently made it clear that I do not and will not comment about the rank-and-file membership of the SNP but that I reserved the right to criticize its leadership. All that fell on deaf ears with too many cybernats appearing to be unable to distinguish between the two. To these people the SNP and its leaders have taken an almost god-like role. 'Trust in Nicola, she knows best!' has become a rallying-call to the foot soldiers and anyone who won't do as they're told is dismissed willy nilly as some kind of low life that has no place in the Yes Movement. Instead of the politicians serving the people it is we who are being expected to kowtow to the politicians.

Well, so much for Scotland's revolution! The more hysterical cybernats doing this remind me of a story that the Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once told of a meeting when Stalin made a speech and the Soviet deputies kept applauding him endlessly, each of them afraid of being the first one to stop clapping. Until they were falling down in sheer exhaustion! Too afraid to think for themselves or to admit that they might be mistaken, the zealots in our Yes Movement would like us all to toe the same Stalinist line or else.

This was not quite the mirror-image that Thompson foresaw. Nor the one that I had hoped would start to grow in Scotland on that fateful day in September 2014. 'Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose' seems a far more appropriate pointer to the future if the chorus-group of name-callers are to have their way. I really have to struggle these days to be an optimist about where we're being led. The Promised Land that beckons may well turn out to be nothing more than a mirage with the name callers finding yet more scapegoats to blame for their own failures.