Scotland
in the
heat
The Cafe 2
I read in what I can’t think was the best item ever published in Scottish Review the bald averral that persons who might be called non-nationalists:
‘…sincerely believe they are not anti-Scottish, just as the vain person sincerely rejects accusations of vanity as he checks his profile in the mirror for the nth time; but they are anti-Scottish all the same and their other words and deeds reveal them to be so.’
I can match that assertion: ‘naw, they urnae; and their ither words and deeds dinnae’. The issue is simply one of what arrangements for government and administration, given the actual individual human beings available, able to maintain, apply and scrutinise these, will be the most productive, of benefit for the human and sundry other inhabitants of Scotland.
It is all too easily conceivable, and for some even imaginable, that the only party calling itself nationalist could be quite as bad for quite as many residents of Scotland as avowed non-nationalists have claimed for years the actual SNP would be. I mean a hypothetical nationalist party, not Ms Sturgeon and co.
Would it be anti-Scottish to oppose such a party, promising say a North Britain approximating to North Korea?
Saunders Lewis, poet and playwright, and scholar, is generally regarded as the father of Welsh nationalism. The greatest enemy of Wales, he said and wrote more than once ‘is nationalism’. It is not obligatory to be a nationalist to be a supporter of the SNP (N for ‘National’) or even in favour of the establishment of an independent self-governing Scottish state.
The real question of independent statehood for Scotland is a specific practical political one. It has nothing to do with believing something general about far-off countries of which one does not know enough to speak. Or equal generalisations about the territory you happen to live in.
It should never be confused with a programme for mass psychotherapy or fostering the sort of confused self-confidence which metaphorically keeps people looking in mirrors and which can turn them into tools of a prevailing ignorance and confusion.
John Macmurray wisely observed long ago that deciding who to vote for should have a lot in common with deciding which tradesman to engage to work on your house.
Robert R Calder
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Today’s banner
Creel, Isle of Mull
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
A woman from the human
rights office disappeared.
Because of me? Maybe
John Forsyth
Listening to the separate BBC radio interviews last weekend of Sunday Times photographer, Paul Conroy, and his wife, Kate, I felt for them not just in every expression of shock and barely expressible gratitude at the lives that had been sacrificed in smuggling him out of the Babr Amr hell, but also their determination to continue to ‘be witness’ to the attrocities of recent weeks. It was all they could do and it was what they owed.
I know some of the journalists and peacekeepers who experienced the same personal turmoil of gratitude, admiration, guilt, anger and inadequacy in Bosnia. My own experience of all of these emotions was brought back to the surface by those interviews.
In 1982 I was head of the press office of Oxfam. The cold war was being fought out in Central America – ‘America’s backyard’. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and determined to stop the march of the evil empire to the last drop of someone else’s blood. It was difficult for anyone to tell the difference between spontaneous rebellion against repressive, corrupt regimes and ideologically-inspired, externally supported insurrection. In Central America as, I guess in Syria, it was a mixture of both.
US policy was to fight a war by proxy pouring millions of dollars of arms and cash into the rogues’ gallery of dictators and by funding the Contras, the mercenaries. The men, women and children caught in the crossfire, of course, were just as dead whether it was a proxy bullet or fully authorised and certificated.
I recall a sharp reply from one of Oxfam’s Central American staff to a telex from Oxford asking him to list the main health problems in his area. ‘Lead poisoning’ rattled back on the machine.
Thirty years ago this month elections were scheduled to be held in El Salvador. Massive world media attention focused on the ballot as a marker in this wider conflict. The US state department provided overt and covert support for Napoleon Duarte, then head of the revolutionary government Junta, that had been engaged for over a year in a violent civil war with the FMLN, the Faribundo Marti Liberation Front, in front of them and the death squads associated with Major Roberto D’Aubuisson’s ARENA party at their back.
There was massive repression of the civilian population with refugees treking over the borders of neighbouring countries but many more ‘internally displaced’ in makeshift camps in church grounds and ‘safe’ areas of countryside. Journalists were killed and there was worldwide revulsion at the murder of church men and women including, in 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero in his one of his own churches and three American nuns and a lay sister who were kidnapped, raped and killed.
Oxfam had supported a number of low-level projects in El Salvador and throughout Central America and, with other agencies, tried to support some of the camps for the internal ‘refugees’. As the election approached the world media camped in El Salvador. Satellite uplinks were new and for the first time were flashing news pictures around the world in a way that has become commonplace since.
But it was a hard burden to bear. I heard later, back in Oxford, that at least one of the women from the human rights office had disappeared. Because of me? Maybe. Maybe not.
John Forsyth has worked for BBC Radio and TV in London and ran his own independent production company in Scotland for 10 years, supplying programmes to BBC Radio 2, 3 4, 5 Live, Radio Scotland and the World Service. He’s a former political editor of Scotland on Sunday and is now a freelance journalist and editorial consultant.
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