AUSTERITY & NUKES: THE PRICE WE WILL PAY FOR INDEPENDENCE?

'The party leadership plans to adopt vast majority of Growth Commissions recommendations.'

Do people realise what that will mean? It means that they will be adopting the plans for a neoliberal economy, no different to the neoliberal economies causing so much misery and strife the world-over. That and the SNP leadership's sworn allegiance to the Atlantic Alliance with a possible change of policy over nukes means that there will be little or no change after their post-independence plans.

I'm willing to bet serious money that one of the major concessions that will follow will be to allow the UK to keep its nuclear weapons indefinitely on Scottish soil. Similarly they will be forced to make concessions about the UK's continued access to North Sea oil.

The price Eire had to pay for her independence was to give away the six counties to the Brits. No doubt they will demand a similar sacrifice from Scotland over oil and nukes.

JUST MORE CARROT-DANGLING?

Sturgeon and the SNP have had almost five years to prepare for a second referendum.

They've done sweet FA in all that time. Now they're calling for citizen's assemblies! What are they playing at? What are they afraid of? When support for indy is at least 50% of the population why do they continue to behave in this feart fashion?

Are they feart of the public or of WM, or both?? How far do the polls have to move before she'll do anything? And why, unlike Alex Salmond, is she not out in the streets drumming up support? Is she serious about indy or is it all just another carrot-dangling exercise?

FACEBOOK'S VENAL NATURE

I'm told that Mark Zuckerberg's great grandfather is Lord Rothschild. Whether true or not this man's greed and venal nature has no limits.

Not satisfied with banning a perfectly democratic blog for supposedly being abusive (!) I have now received this from their administration. Meanwhile all my appeals to FB to review their ludicrous ban remain ignored.

For the Yes Family to continue with this FB dictatorship is like turkeys voting for Christmas. We really must find an alternative platform and soon.

BACK TO ANIMAL FARM

Oh the irony!

The very same people in the Yes Movement who quite rightly rail 24/7 against the tyranny of  British unionism are now turning on any individual on Facebook's Yes pages. We are being banned from Yes pages and now even our private blogs are being blocked from being posted.

Since the summer of 2017 I have become increasingly outspoken about the manner in which the SNP's leadership have mismanaged the movement for Scotland's independence. It was that summer that my eyes were opened to their defeatism and consistent refusal to fight a general election on the indy ticket. Well, once one's eyes have been opened it's very difficult to close them again and the revelation was accompanied by a constant stream of abuse that it was my pleasure to receive on Facebook pages.

That's when I was shocked into asking myself the question, what is wrong with these people that they cannot stand the slightest bit of criticism or dissent? Why are they so intolerant of others who do not share the exact same views as they do? And just who are they who enjoy spending their time screaming at each other?

I believe there are at least two groups: firstly those who really are no different to sectarian football fans who treat independence and the SNP as a football club where everyone else is there to be abused and shat upon; and secondly a silent group of privileged, well-educated people with some degree of vested interest in promoting the SNP and keeping it in permanent power.

It is that second group which concerns me because I believe that they do not work alone and that they coordinate campaigns to isolate, marginalize and eliminate anyone who dares to criticize the party on the social media. It is this second group which I believe is responsible for the treatment that is being meted out to those who dissent.

The latest episode started with my being banned from a Yes group called Uncensored for Scotland. No reason or notification was given for the ban but as this was the second time it had happened on this page it was pretty clear that the reason for their ban was that, in their eyes, my posts were having a 'divisive' effect on other members! Quite how I was causing division was, of course, never divulged!

Following that I decided to revive my old blog, Chimes of Freedom, which had been lying dormant for several years. Yet, no sooner had I done that and posted blog articles to FB, I was again banned, this time not for my FB posts but for those from my own private blog! The reason given by FB was that I was 'spamming'!

That's when the penny dropped. Someone was reporting my posts as spam and FB was acting on their complaints. Every ban has been challenged and I await FB's decision. You will understand why I'm not holding my breath!

Now, while all this might strike you to be a rather childish game I believe it is rather more serious than that. Are this second group, the more well-heeled ones, acting alone? Or are they part of a coordinated informal campaign which can be traced back to the New SNP's headquarters? My intuition tells me that's more than likely and that this is the way the New SNP apparat seeks to control opinion on the social media.

That apparat knows only too well how to turn to their advantage the algorithms of the FB polis by firing off a volley of spam reports against anyone whose posts they don't like and who they wish to silence. That is exactly what happened to me.

Now I am all too aware that this claim will be immediately denounced by their vigilantes to be nothing more than a crazy conspiracy theory. But I've heard that accusation made only too often by people with something to hide. So all I request from those who read this is simply to keep in mind what I say, even if you don't buy the whole story.

I am just as keen as these zealots to see the day dawn when Scotland will be free again. But where they and I part company is that I would like our freedom to be real, to mean something in our everyday lives and not just to become another means to keep a political party packed with privileged technocrats in charge of the Animal Farm.

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.