Hope is a Form of Energy
HOPE IS A FORM OF ENERGY: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn
In the pouring rain, in a city far away, a little man emerges from a doorway to cry out for release. The gathered multitude mock him. They can see that behind his pleading lies the human wreckage of a lost generation. Ghost train after ghost train of false promises, wasted time and effort has come off the rails and piled up before him. This catastrophe he mistakes for progress. The little man’s mouth is open wide. He is speaking but no-one can hear him. He is trying to describe what is to come. But he does not know what is coming. It will not be what he imagines. It will be what he fears. His eyes are staring but his face is turned toward the past. It is as if he is made out of glass. Behind the rain blows a terrible wind. It is called the future.
The future is a place without Rishi Sunak.
Meanwhile, in a land even further away, the past continues to pile up catastrophe upon catastrophe. In this land a man is sitting on a road near his own tent, talking with his friends as the Sun sinks down, when suddenly a terrible explosion shakes the ground and lights up the darkening sky.
The man runs towards the sound, terrified for his wife, children and friends. A vision of hell lies before him, so gruesome he starts to shake from shock. He sees bodies everywhere. Children burning. There are heads without bodies. People with no feet. The injured are desperately moving around in pain. Some are barely alive. Others are trapped inside burning tents. There had been no warning.
This was the experience of Zuhair, a 36-year-old Palestinian lawyer, in Rafah on Sunday 26th May, 2024.
According to the New York Times and CNN the attacks were likely caused by US-manufactured GBU-39 missiles, which carry an explosive payload of 17kg. As has already been reported here on Bella the Edinburgh Leonardo weapons factory specialises in ‘high-energy military lasers’, which are rigged to F-35 fighter jets, which Israel have been using extensively to bomb Gaza. These are the bombs. These are the planes. This is the genocide. The US and the UK continue to supply Israel with the means for its continuation.
Nikki Hailey in Israel scribbling “FINISH THEM”on the shells that the IDF is about to fire into Rafah in defiance of the International Court of Justice. Biden provided the shells, Republicans autograph them.
On the 27th May 2024 the Health Ministry in Gaza reported that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 36,000 Palestinians and injured more than 85,000, with some 11,000 missing, trapped under rubble. The body count rises every day.
Trapped under the rubble of corruption are 126 of the Tory party’s 344 MPs who have accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups, according to the Declassified UK website. Their body count will no doubt also rise. The value of the donations or hospitality amounts to over £430,000, with the organisations paying for sitting Conservative MPs to visit Israel on 187 occasions. They are not alone. Declassified UK also went through the register of interests of all sitting Labour MPs, finding that 20 percent of them have accepted money from the Israel lobby, with a total value of over £280,000. (Declassified UK, March 2, 2024)
These revelations come as Rishi Sunak, in the rain, has called a snap general election in which his and Keir Starmer’s unequivocal backing of Israel could cost their parties votes. As the election day of July 4th approaches, you would sincerely hope so. But cruelty has its fans. That, to misquote Morris Blythman, the great Scottish folk poet, is the kink in the human dialectic.
It is a terrible contradiction but it is contradictions that kill people. For example, Israel has declared that it has no intention of staying in Gaza, but it is. Israel has said that it has no intention of becoming the sovereign power in Gaza, but it de facto is. Israel has said it does not not want to be responsible for humanitarian aid to Gaza, but it has broken the relief model so now it must own it. Israel wants, it has stated repeatedly, to remove Hamas politically, not just destroy it militarily, but it hasn’t done either.
As a result and as Yoana Gonen has written in Haaretz (29/5/24),
“Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that’s what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in hand with the ruins of Gaza”
How long will the Palestinian people have to endure this horror? The Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has said (29/5/24) that he expected fighting in Gaza to continue throughout 2024 at the least.
Ireland, our sister country, has just recognised Palestine as a state.
According to The Guardian (29/5/24),
“Ireland’s prime minister, Simon Harris, announced his country’s decision to recognise Palestine in the Dáil on Tuesday (28/5/24), a week after Dublin joined Spain and Norway, pledging to do so. Addressing parliamentarians, Harris said: ‘Recognition is a message for those in Palestine who advocate for a future of peace and democracy.’ After he concluded his speech the chamber gave a round of applause.”
Scotland, because of the Treaty of Union and the Scotland Act (1998), is powerless to do similarly. There is no applause for the future of peace and democracy echoing around the Holyrood Parliament. The much derided Humza Yousaf was forthright in his support for the Palestinian people and in calling for an immediate cease fire. John Swinney, the current First Minister, says nothing much other than what is expected. Which is very little. Cautious John, as ever. The Westminster government continue to refuse to recognise the sovereignty of the Scottish people and every legal avenue to achieving independence has been blocked. Whatever John Swinney says during the election campaign little will be said about this. We cannot recognise Palestine as a state because we cannot recognise or acknowledge ourselves. Which is beyond frustrating because everywhere you look in Ukania things are falling apart.
The great English art critic and writer John Berger once wrote, “Hope is not a form of guarantee; it is a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”
It is the beginning of Summer but these are dark times. At best we watch the transitory and the interminable as they infiltrate and combine with one another. The invasion of Ukraine merges into the slaughter in Sudan which in turn merges into the carnage in Gaza. We generate hope, that energy Berger describes, because it is our human duty. But it is not easy, because to hope is to question. Will the Gaza blood-bath in Gaza end, and how? What happens afterwards? And where must Israel and the Palestinians go in the future to make sure this hell never recurs? Why are we ignoring Sudan? Why are we watching Ukraine struggle?
Just what does this snap Ukania election mean when the sitting Prime Minister so obviously does not want to win it and the leader of the opposition so badly does not want to lose it? Why would anyone in Scotland who is politically literate consider voting for a Unionist party when they know that only independence for Scotland can bring us genuine democracy and hope? What is the point of sending SNP MP’s to Westminster in the first place? What happens if the SNP does not achieve a majority of MP’s so cannot open negotiations with Westminster about independence? And if they do achieve a majority what makes the SNP think for one moment that Westminster are interested in negotiating with them about anything, let alone Scottish independence?
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that, “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet…”
Continually doing the same thing and expecting a different result is commonly held to be a form of madness. For Scotland it means decline. In the 1840’s the population of Caithness was 36,800. As of 2021 Caithness has a population of 25,347 and it is expected to fall by 18 per cent by 2040, and that of neighbouring Sutherland is projected to go down by 15 per cent over the same period. Numbers among younger groups, according to NHS Highland, are decreasing Highland-wide, while at the other end of the spectrum there was a rise of more than 60 per cent in those aged 75 and over between 2001 and 2021. In 15 years the school roll in Caithness could drop by as much as 25%.
These statistics are the direct result of poor political choices, chronic governmental mismanagement at both local and national level. Land lies dormant and unproductive and owned by a handful of millionaires. Housing is subject to market forces with new-built social housing scarcer than a unicorn. Renewable energy is generated in huge amounts and flows south to make profits for landowners and energy companies while locals pay through the nose for heat and light to live in an increasingly industrialised landscape. This is the case across the Highlands and the result is depopulation and poverty – the young leave and elderly property owners move in from the South. The 2024 General Election will change none of this. In Caithness and throughout the Highlands the people will remain landless, homeless and exploited with no functioning democracy to give them hope.
As time passes we are walking further out on the ice of the great loch of the world and beneath our feet there is a cracking and trembling. Ukania and Scottish politicians – and leaders across the world – have the tools to free up funds that will help people access housing, food, education, healthcare and jobs. But they are not using them. Why? Because the calculation is that war is more profitable. It is why Israel is getting away, literally, with murder. It is why Russia advances deeper into Ukraine. It is why the world looks away from Sudan. It is why Scotland is haemorrhaging people while at the same time our natural resources are being asset stripped.
Scottish independence was devolved in 1997-99. Now in 2024, post this snap election, in the time of the Gaza genocide and the bloody Ukrainian struggle for survival, Scottish independence must positively evolve into a new “ancient” nation. That making a new country out of the broken relics of an old empire will not be easy is an understatement, but it is an expression of hope. It is what we must do. We, as Scots, have no other real protection against the right wing extremists that drive the Conservative and Unionist Party in England, with their witless and shameless lieutenants’ in Scotland and their tribute act in the “British” Labour Party. When we find the political will to bring all the broken pieces of our independence movement together as one energy then we can form our new “ancient” nation, we can recognise Palestine as a state, meaningfully support the Ukrainians, send relief to Sudan and take our place in the world, not on thin ice, but with hope in our hearts and on solid ground.
©George Gunn 2024
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Excellent piece and uplifting in these awful times.
Is there no red line for the Scottish people? What’s it going to take? Tanks on the streets of Edinburgh? Wake up people.
Tanks? The British army has two dozen tanks, and they’re all in Germany.
Finding no one for whom i can put a cross in the box
Any advice?
Always fund your writings pertinent…sadly truthful
You are either happy to be ruled from another country or you are not. If not, then the answer, certainly for now, is pretty clear..
I was about to make the same comment. Independence cannot be the monopoly of the SNP, a parcel of rogues who sell out Scotland to the same criminals who buy and sell the Unionist parties. Or the Scottish Greens who have similarly sold out to corporate interests.
I cannot vote for a party that promotes private affluence at the expense if public squalor – and whatever the fine words and promises, that’s what they all do. There is nothing ‘green’ about a corrupt, responsibility dodging, exploitative ‘freeport’. Our democracy at all levels is a sham. If their vision of independence is just more of the same,
perhaps dressed in a kilt, it’s fake.
We need independence because we beed to do things very differently. We need some political boldness and vision that says ‘Nae pasaran’.
Wester Ross and Skye have now been effectively denied any political representation at Westminster because our huge sprawling but sparsely populated constituency gas been amalgamated with urban Inverness and effectively abolished. And from every candidate we get the same depressing mantra: vote for me to keep someone else out. It seems to me that Scotland’s politicians of all parties really are too poor too wee and too stupid. Both Labour and the SNP seem to think they ‘own’ Scotland.
I cannot associate myself with the centralising, anti-democratic SNP or any other party that just lies through its teeth and betrays its traditional voters ( all of them).
I will contact every candidate in this constituency.
I will ask them to publicly commit to upholding the Claim of Right and to putting constituents before lobbyists, party loyalty or the bullying of the World Economic Forum. I will insist that they stop handing over our sovereignty to Westminster, or the corrupt WHO, and start standing up for us.
I will publish the responses. I am not in a position to stand myself but I hope there will be lots of independent candidates to vote for who will .make such a commitment. If not, as I have said before, I’ll spoil my ballot. And if that means a Unionist gets elected, so be it. I’m heartily sick if being taken for granted as a long term Yes supporter.
Incidentally I expect that the media and the British establishment will engineer a big swing to Labour using behavioural psychology techniques, and then pronounce the death of independence. I wouldn’t be surprised if they cimplete the castration of Holyrood, if not abolish it altogether.
But north and south of the border, amy honeymoon with Labour will be short-lived. I think this is all planned for and will be used to generate civil unrest. To which the neofascists will react as the great saviours of the UK and we will find ourselves in a military dictatorship. Far fetched? Not at all. It’s just the standard playbook. People and planet exist after all just as ‘resources’ to be exploited at will. In this Orwellian world, genocide can’t be questioned when a consortium of oil companies (including BP) have already bought the rights to Gaza’s gas fields – from Israel.
Sadly we are ruled by organised crime. No-one dares stand up to corporate corruption and bullying. It’s just the forelock-tugging Scottish cringe, the result of our colonised history.
As I have said before we need to separate the principle of self-determination from the policies of any one party. If no-one stand up for us, we will gave to do it for ourselves.
As the poet says, Hope is a form of Energy.
John Wood’s anger, demonstrated here and born of understandable frustration with the status quo, is equally a form of energy, but a negative one.
Let’s keep the heid.