Donald Anderson

Whaur’s Yer Culture Noo?

Now that the cash registers have stopped ringing (for whom?) and Glasgow has to clear up the physical and financial mess, it is time for the city’s loyal voting fodder to consider just what the hell they have been loyal to and where has it got them? Certainly Labour’s agents in the trendy “Marxist” parties won’t be going into the schemes to explain - any more than they explained to the Labour voters of Govan when their Garden Festival went and who profited from that? Culture for these Carnaby Street “revolutionaries” means other people’s revolutions and other people’s imperialism, such as Chilean folk dancers and “inter” national Great British Tokenism. Nothing wrong with that. But, if Scotland is to be the only country on the planet denied its own cultural and political revolution, then they know where they can stick their Peruvian nose flutes.

If this sounds a bit too Rab C. Nesbittish for those sophisticated white “left” settlers, then listen to what Jean Paul Sartre had to say about trendie Parisienne lefties/liberals and their “understanding” of native African Mediterranean revolutionaries in the colonies:

“ ... the natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stick it up their backsides”.

(For those who like footnotes: You’ll find Sartre’s excellent preface in The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. A classic of third world politics.)

What a difference between this French philosopher and the “intellectual”, “academic” political perverts of the British “left” who sneer at Scottish culture in the same manner as their colleagues of the Great British right. The Scots sycophants are the most grovelling offenders, hoping for a pat on the heid from their sugar-feeding boss. Try any London-based “left” group for a serious discussion on Scotland and watch the Great North British monkeys perform for their English organ grinders. Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy described the Irish, Scots and Welsh Screws as trying hard to be more British than the True Brit English and this maxim is just as true for the keepers of our British “Marxist left” in Scotland.

I remember the “inter”national Marxist Group of the late sixties first colonising Glasgow’s university bed-sit land, posing with intellectual wee Trotsky glesses and John (Vladimir?) Lennon caps, raving over tickets for the “Scottish” National Orchestra and the “Scottish” opera. Perhaps English Thespian accents made them homesick. They all knew where Indo-China was but none of them could tell you the bus for Drumchapel. To show their courageous solidarity with the Viet Cong they persuaded the local Woodside Warriors to vote for the Buchan protege and great “pacifist” Neil (Lord) Carmichael and led a torchlit procession through George Square, ignoring some of the natives who shouted: “Take the skwerr. The Skwerr. The Skwerr!”

Later, as would-be councillors, their North British clones went into Drumchapel to support the Great British Devolutionary “socialist” Donald Dewar, of Ross Harper & Murphy fame. Dewar was to claim that if Keith Bovey, the radical CND/SNP lawyer were to be elected, Drummy would lose Stephens Shipyard, Singers, Goodyear Tyres, United Biscuits, etc. etc. Dewar was elected and Drummy lost Stephens Shipyard, Singers, Goodyear Tyres, United Biscuits etc., etc.

The Drumchapels were jerry-built by Labourites when hooses withoot culture was the vogue. Now it’s “culture” alien and yuppy - before hooses. I remember an “anti-capitalist” play, some (English) folk music and poetries in the Old Methodist Church Hall, now Maryhill Community Centre, during the miners’ strike.

I tried to recover from the experience in the Clarendon Bar, down the road, and met by chance some elderly ex-Maryhill miners. I was enthralled by their memories of working-class struggle, of John Maclean and their knowledge of world affairs. And understood their perplexity at having tae suffer “thae English social-worker and student-types boring everybody to death with what they perceived to be ‘workers’ songs”.

Well, Strathclyde University had done its damndest. And one day the proles will have their revenge for all its attempts to impose a bastard culture on its students. My own background as a factory worker, merchant seaman and “Poisoned Dwarf”, guarding the Queen’s oil in the Middle East, helped me resist the brainwashing and propaganda. Though it certainly didn’t do my “career” prospects any good. The Treaty of Union, 1707, was the greatest thing since polystyrene breid. The Highland Clearances never happened and if they did, then you did it to yourselves and it was good for you. We “benefitted” by surviving in the colonies or the hell of the Clyde Industrial revolution along with the other hungry, ungrateful Celts from Ireland who refused to be Anglicised.

English Nationalists and Scottish sycophants controlled the courses and re-wrote Scottish history into a footnote of British history and culture. And the Brit “left” students loved it. Culloden, to them, was progressive and the funny tartans never existed. How a piece of cloth that never existed managed to be proscribed from 1746 to 1783 is just another Great British mystery.

The language and the music were also proscribed. The “war” pipes and clarsach, as a means of communication, were destroyed along with the culture.

Marx wrote in Capital of how whole Irish villages were cleared but in Scotland areas the size of German Principalities were destroyed. His “disciples”, as ever selective in the quotation pastime, prefer to regard a whole people being kicked off the land into a black industrial landscape as “progressive” in that more proles were being created for the Great British State. Great stuff for spies behind the lines and the bastardisation of our culture, with their latter-day Harry Lauder, Billy (the Brit) Connolly, expert on excrement, Labour’s Court Jester.

French Dragoons along with General De Lally’s Irish Piquets and Scots Piquets in French service gallantly defended the Highland defeat at Culloden from Cumberland’s butchers. Those in French service were treated as prisoners of war and given quarter. The Highland “rebels” were murdered or transported. Today Doo Lally’s regiment, having taken the Queen’s shilling, are the butchers - of Scottish working class culture - in support of the mass culture of London “developers”.