The Road to Justice
THE ROAD TO JUSTICE: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn
This is the time of the shortest days and the darkest nights. The stars in the Caithness sky shine brighter now. The universe looks even more infinite. Our insignificance is compensated by the endless swirling beauty which is the harmony and light of the cosmos. December is always a good time to contemplate what is possible and what is good. This, of course, is difficult as 2024 spins towards its end, as is hoping that 2025 will be better. We can imagine that it could be, but we know it won’t: we know it will be worse. But the world needs idealists and dreamers even though currently it is impossible to imagine anything more contrary to the ideal (of harmony and light) than the forms modern civilisation has assumed. The universe is just too cosmic and we, alas, are just too human. The universe is perfect, even if we actually know very little about it, and humanity is flawed, because we know ourselves. Or so we think.
The register of Saint Augustine’s Seven Deadly Sins, or seven direst vices, first cited by Tertullian, the 2nd century Carthaginian Christian, and immortalised in Dante’s Divine Comedy – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth – are the behaviour and appetite of all empires on the make. In other words: destroy everything. Kill everybody. Consume and steal everything. This is Putin’s plan for peace. This is Netanyahu’s plan for peace. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Xmas. Peace on Earth.
At this Christmas, when the red coat of Santa is not the result of a Coca Cola advertising campaign but is stained by the blood of the innocents, is the only grim consolation to be found in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks? The god of war and courage, Ares, is just, and kills those who kill.
Saint Augustine’s great rival was the Celtic theologian Pelagius – whose name was a Graecized form of “sea-born” (pélagos), rugadh muir in Gaelic or morgan in Welsh. Pelagius believed in attaining “grace” through free will and that everything created by God was good so that there could never have been a “fall”, that there was no such thing as original sin so babies did not need to be baptised for salvation because they were innocent and free of sin. For Pelagius this was the way to human “virtue”, or as the 20th century French philosopher, Simone Weil, put it,
“The distance between the necessary and the good is the distance between the creature and the creator.”
What is necessary is to stop the killing and what is good is to keep the peace. Between those aspirations and reality is a vast chasm. But it is not impossible to bridge this distance if there is the grace and will to do so. To cite Simone Weil again,
“Impossibility is the door of the supernatural. We can knock at it. It is someone else who opens.”
Israel is a young state, a settler society, and as such is insecure and violent. What Israel dreams of is the dream of youth – it is a fantasy – the fantasy of power and the fantasy of victory.
In their endeavour in blood, when energy is blind, what Israel cannot escape, what they cannot contemplate, is justice. Who, or what – other than history – will bring them (and Russia) to justice? It is difficult to see when every United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire is either not supported or abstained on by two of the permanent members of the Security Council: the US and the UK. There are always “conditions” to their rejections and abstaining. What is conditional about the near 50,000 Palestinian dead and the 150,000 and more wounded? Who will bring the US and the UK to justice?
Notional image of the UK?s first commercial spaceport at the Sutherland Site in Melness, Scotland, which will conduct the UK?s first vertical, orbital rocket launch in the early 2020s. (PRNewsfoto/Lockheed Martin)
In this age of greed and wrath – as epitomised by Russia and Israel and their various backers – is the notion of justice merely knocking on the door of the supernatural? But knock we must. For those on the left in Scotland, who seek equality and desire independence, this is a difficult time. Some say our cause is defeated. It is not. It may seem that those in power are deaf to reason. They are. Where do you go and what do you do when every plea and appeal for a fair hearing is met with indifference, when your voice is smothered by cynicism, when your plan for a beautiful future is broken by institutional poverty, racism, poor housing, exhaustion, surveillance, fear and the tyrannical branding of joy? It’s enough to make Saint Augustine’s Seven Deadly Sins look attractive. As old Pelagius might have said, “Dh’innis mi sin dhut.” or “I told you so.”
We, as a society and as individuals, are compelled to change and to move forward. That is the compulsive nature of politics. That is our narrative. Also the road to justice is long and hard. We are unclear about it, ambivalent about the direction, even troubled by it. That is natural but we change in order to live and how we live determines how we behave and how we behave determines how we live. So we keep the faith. There will be an independent Scotland because that is the nature of justice. It cannot be denied.
Be that as it may, the fact is that currently we are locked into the unjust monarchical state of Ukania with its alien medieval Englisch institutions and customs. Within this one sided feudal union resides the real power. As Neal Ascherson acutely described it in the Sunday National article (15/12/24),
“It’s architecture is an astonishing survivor from the European past, from those pre-Enlightenment days of kingdoms and empires. Think of a pyramid with a royal or imperial crown at its apex, is which power flowed downwards from the throne – not upwards from ‘The People’. That idea only took shape with the American and then the French Revolution. But England – in the English-dominated United Kingdom after the 1707 Union with Scotland – drew back from any ‘popular sovereignty’ doctrine, seeing it as a recipe for democratic chaos.”
This unjust flow of power from the top to the bottom is why Scotland is still shackled to England. It is why Ukania is such a dysfunctional state. Nothing works because there is no democratic accountability. The majority do not have a say in planning other than to vote every four years to choose which set of overlords will rule them. The result is corruption and waste.
An example of this I can cite from close to home: namely the Sutherland spaceport on the Moine peninsula, which juts impressively out into the Atlantic. This project was decided upon from on high and the only democratic element to it was whether the Melness Crofters Trust would lease the necessary land to the spaceport. They did with a very close vote of the trustees. So not all harmony and light there. Then at the beginning of December Orbex – the lead contractor and rocket maker – announced it was halting construction work on the £20 million spaceport and instead was “mothballing” the project, which had received a £14.6 million public investment package. Both the UK and Scottish governments had invested heavily in supporting the development of the Sutherland spaceport. Holyrood and Highlands and Islands Enterprise together invested nearly £9m in the project. All you will see of the spaceport, if you go to the Moine, is a long stretch of concrete: a road to nowhere.
Will the people, the tax payers, see any of the £14.6 million repaid? I suggest not. Greed and Sloth tend to covet their treasure. On the Moine power came down and not a rocket went up. There may be a road to nowhere in North Sutherland but the road to justice has to be everywhere. One of the factors I objected to concerning the Sutherland spaceport was the over-riding but unspoken of militarisation of the entire project. Satellites would be sent up and surveillance would come down. Lockheed Martin, one of the biggest miliary suppliers in the world, were to supply Orbex with the payload. 89% of Lockheed Martin’s revenue ($53 billion annually) is from “defence” i.e. the manufacture of armaments. They are the biggest arms manufacturer in the US. This company has received a good share of the £20 million of public money.
Justice will be achieved when the oligarchical, financial and military relationship is dismantled and a more equitable political system is put in place, so that power comes up from the people. It is the power, the force, which comes down from this trinity that enables Israel and Russia to pursue their cruel wars. Wrath, Pride, Greed, Envy, Lust – these are the gods of capital and they fuel the tanks and fighter jets and manufacture the numbing fear and destructive anger of those who worship.
We can make a start in Scotland. We have to. What we are witnessing in the Middle East and in Ukraine and across the world wherever there is a conflict is not “democratic chaos” as feared by the Ancien Régime in Westminster but the chaos of unchecked capital. All this will only increase when Donald Trump gets his tiny fatal hands on power. In Scotland we must look to ourselves. The polls show an increase in support for independence, but if there was a referendum tomorrow we would need at least half a million more Yes voters to succeed. So there is work to be done.
Yet. Despite all of this, the road to justice is opening out before us. The forces that control our lives will not relent because to do so would mean their destruction. In Scotland we have to believe in ourselves. We must say, eventually, to Westminster – this has got to stop you have taken enough; leave us to our future. Now, in December, the skies might be black and the nights endless but the stars above are shining brightly. Look up, and see the wonder. It is you.
©George Gunn 2024
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Cultivate patience and gardens
Plant trees .be kind..this we can do..
hmm, what about the fact that in these islands there is a massive lack of tree species once native and natural to the area, why should we have all these plantations of non native forestry that are serving no good purpose other than to supply big business with timber so that further useless schemes & buildings are thrown up to put folk in the unenvious position of being owned by the bank & in debt till they die
One must assume we are not talking about commercial coniferous plantations but environmentally sensitive native tree planting. This is in fact going on in various places all over the UK.
I would agree though that when you look at figures for tree cover it tends to include those commercial coniferous plantations, very many in Scotland which gives a misleading picture of the overall percentage cover.
Planting out daffodils and tulips …not giving up for a second ….its too important . Thank you George for your effort and style of writing…..assists the darkness to light.
Please consider reflections on the outcomes misogyny….Trump and Putin plus Taliban plus Uk ….women are a major target ….please assist
We live under a military dictatorship. Scottish spaceports will have military applications.
https://theferret.scot/spaceports-scotland-military-spy-satellites/
I think we can discard Christian theology.
I recommend The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh (2021, 2022), and although I don’t agree on every point, there are some powerful chapters on the Dutch massacres of the Bandanese, on modern military threats to the environment, on the characterisation of ‘brutes’ and the silencing of non-human voices. Ghosh proposes a vitalist politics in a promising but underdeveloped and over-mystical chapter (maybe another book?), which makes important points about learning from the natural world’s ability to govern itself. I wouldn’t go as far as embracing Gaia Theory as I understand it, but as the author says, science is building a very strong platform for arguing for some kind of vitalist politics (even if spirits are not real).
For example, Ghosh relates how Gandhi opposed the mechanist metaphysic, as did Diggers, Ranters and Levellers of old: “all revolts against the project of reducing the Earth to a clockwork mechanism in which every kind of being was brutishly mute, except for European elites and Euro-descended settlers.” p235
For NATO, the Earth is their battleground and wholly expendable; if some see this as waging war on Gaia herself, who am I to argue?
“We live under a military dictatorship”. I mean, we don’t, do we? There’s plenty wrong with UK democracy but …
@Editor, we live under a military dictatorship. Perhaps you have stereotypical views of what a military dictatorship looks like, it isn’t all chests of medals, troops on parade, a fawning press (although the British have these). It is a systemic thing.
The British are the bottom Empire to the USAmerican one, their foreign policy largely slaved to that of its master, its military serving the military wing of the Imperial conglomerate, NATO.
You might have noticed how NATO countries have generally become more illiberal, authoritarian and right-wing, and the common factor is not anti-Russian sentiment. Poland, Hungary and Turkey are some examples, but the rest appear to be following a similar broad trend.
Now, the British military swear loyalty to their supreme commander, the hereditary theocratic monarch, who generally appoints family members to highest ranks, and is the ultimate authority for launching some nuclear weapons; while some powers are retained by the USAmerican imperial President. Without a codified Constitution, the British public are largely unaware of these powers, and much goes on in secret.
We don’t normally see these powers exercised; there have been some recent Parliamentary showcases, but they don’t alter the permanent policies in key areas, which are off-limits to democratic influence, and largely off-limits to Parliamentarians too. There are some occasions where the rules are exposed, as in Brexit planning:
“service personnel can deploy under the Royal Prerogative for military tasks”
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8488/
As can be seen, if you study British governance, royal prerogatives and arms such as the Privy Council are the outward signs of military dictatorship, which is effectively the ultimate power, because a state of emergency can be declared by the monarch, parliament suspended or bypassed, at any point these powers are challenged.
You might try to think of any military decision that the British public has been able to influence; I can’t think of a recent one. The MoD (Ministry of Defence) is a case study itself. The diplomatic service is getting even more elitist, with all that entails. There is no justice applicable to high-ranking military officers (one thing that is occasionally exposed to light), while the monarch and perhaps some ministers have legal immunities.
You’ve remarked that hardly any area of policy seems to change by a switch of Conservative and Labour governments. Why do you think that is? Why cannot the British public choose who our friends and enemies are, or to tread the path of non-alignment? Why are dreadful military decisions and toxic cultures tolerated without anyone senior held accountable? Why is the military over-represented in parliament? Why is military planning carried out these with the rather obvious supposition that policy won’t change in future?
National security (allegedly), the ‘special relationship’, and highly-centralised nuclear-weapons command-and-control requirements have been used for a power grab that largely means that public opinion is disabled in these policy areas, and on top of that you have extensive military propaganda and censorship. Of course, a lot of propaganda goes into distracting the public from seeing that they *are* under a military dictatorship, partly by focusing on the court politics of Westminster, partly by framing and omission, partly by seldom asking the right questions.
It will be interesting to see if there is an overlap between the SpyCops saga and the nuclear test veterans, one of whose associations’ leaders was apparently smeared as a ‘Marxist’ or similar, while a pro-establishment candidate challenged them. If you know something about the British security state, you might imagine this challenger was an agent of Her Majesty. This is how things are done, here.
I think it doesn’t do justice to the reality of living under an actual military dictatorship such as, for example, Pinochet, or Franco, or Assad or Putin to pretend that we live in one. There are disastrous and dire structural elements to the UK state – of repression, state violence, surveillance, institutionalised poverty and racism – as I and others have explored on these pages for many many years – however it does imho do a disservice to people who live under even more brutal regimes to pretend that we live in a military dictatorship.
Yep; it belittles their suffering.
@Editor, you are not really getting the ‘Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove’ concept. And plenty of people have suffered horribly under our imperial system, whose suffering you appear to ignore. And everyone lives under the shadow of nuclear annihilation from our weapons. But yes, as long as the mass of British people believe as you do, the caretakers of the system don’t have to exert themselves greatly.
You haven’t given an example of recent popular influence on British military policy.
And why is the story of Prince Andrew’s business adviser openly described in terms of a threat to national security?
There *have* been cases where UK courts have found anti-militarist activists not guilty, for example. The reaction of governments have generally recently been to close off their defence arguments. Plus we may be losing trial-by-jury in many cases. The whole concept of public interest has been repudiated by governments since at least Thatcher’s years as Prime Minister.
I think you need to wake up to the reality, as described here:
Kate Hudson from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) told Declassified: “This spells farewell to even the smallest notion of parliamentary responsibility for Britain’s foreign and defence policies.”
https://www.declassifieduk.org/starmer-permanently-ties-uk-nuclear-arsenal-to-washington/
Well it’s true that the UK hasn’t yet been militarised, but I feel sure that is what’s coming if we don’t watch out. One thing about neofascism is that it comes first in a business suit; but we are still at the Orwellian stage where there is still a pretence of democracy to provide a velvet glove. The iron fist is now starting to appear though in plain sight, with journalists raided, demonstrators locked up simply for demonstrating, and rampant corruption everywhere; and if we are not extremely careful the militarisation of the UK, perhaps especially Scotland, with its nuclear base, its oil and other resources could be much closer than most people think. The UK is already pouring vast amounts of money into ‘defence’ which is why every public service is being de-funded.
The US/ Israel thinks nothing of genocide to get its hands on Gaza’s gas reserves or Syria’s water. or the agricultural land of the west bank.
Let’s see what happens after Trump takes over in the US.
Have to say it depends on which part of UK you live in, if you’re unfortunate enough to live in one of the areas that is essentially owned by the crown and has been commandeered by the British military at the crown’s behest before even you were born or became aware of this being the situation then your view would I think be different. I have to agree with sleepingdog, I think these showbiz personalities/so called politicians we are permitted to elect or not are simply caretakers at best, self serving bampots at worst, & overpaid wafflers by & large. Charlie the Hanoverian remains head of state & at least up here in Moray local indigenous folk that haven’t fled the area remain 2nd, sometimes even 3rd class citizens in the eyes of ‘authorities’ who prioritise the interests of the aristocracy, the military & themselves at everyone else’s expense.
Same here on the (Highland) west coast. We seem to be a quiet out of the way place that government undercover agents retire to, and where dirty business is carried on with little local opposition, out of sight, out of mind. Loch Ewe, where I live, is a nuclear submarine refuelling station. Local crofters get MoD notices to take iodine in case of a nuclear accident. Every year we are subjected to NATO military training exercises with landing craft churning up our beaches and low flying aircraft. The far NW corner of Britain, Cape Wrath is entirely a military training area, where nobody lives, and is regularly bombed for training purposes. (Tain on the east cost has another smaller bombing range). Gruinard Island just a few miles from me was deliberately but secretly infected with Anthrax in the 1940s and not declared anthrax free until 1990 ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60483849) – but do we really believe it? All dirty business, as far away from London as possible, and where there are not enough people around to matter. But designated a ‘rewilding’ area as part of the 30:30 agenda, so our communities and economy are subjected to ‘managed decline’ and all public services are being quietly withdrawn while we become dependent on drive thru tourism which is itself being centralised to Inverness at our expense. And our land is filled with massive hydro plants, wind turbines and pylons (already exporting far more electricity than we can use, while we live in fuel poverty and pay the highest energy prices in the UK), and 4g masts – its all all to deliver obscene profits and power the new technocratic totalitarianism. No objections are accepted: apparently ‘there is no alternative’. Fortunately the recent plans to establish a ‘spaceport’ (US military rocket launching site) on the coast of Sutherland seem to have been mothballed, for now. So although it’s not yet overt in-your-face violence and expulsion, we are heading that way. It’s how it starts; burning people out of their houses comes later. We’ve seen it all before here. People still carry deep wounds down the generations from the ethnic cleansing and genocide that followed the ferocious military conquest of the highlands from the mid 18th c. onwards.
The playboy Duke of Westminster’s huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ estate has been overtaken by the even vaster areas owned by Danish cheap clothing purveyor Anders Povslen, whose NC500 brand is destroying our communities and economy. Local accommodation providers are being hit with new licensing charges and soon a tourist tax, apparently designed to put the competition out of business. The police tell me there are MOUs to permit drive-thru, self-contained tourists to do as they please, where and when they please, in search of a ‘wild escape’ experience, and no signage, even speed limits are enforced ‘anywhere in the Highlands’. They tell me I have ‘no remedy’ at all. It seems if they upset locals and destroy our already inadequate infrastructure it is of no importance at all. Our lack of human rights has recently been picked up by the Scottish Human Rights Commission ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89vjqqk8j3o ) but nobody really cares. There are too few of us left to matter.
We face the prospect of finding ourselves decanted en masse into ‘smart cities’ – destined to become the concentration camps of the future where everything you do, say or think and everywhere you go will be entirely subject to official approval. The vaccine passports were just the trial run.
The Highlands and Islands at least urgently need an independent Scotland that does things differently.
Rant over (for now)
John; maybe what the Highlands and Islands need is more local decision-making and greater independence from both Edinburgh and London.
Yes I think that is what the highlands and islands need. Where I live was Norwegian until 1266, I think a good case could be made for returning there.
Scotland urgently needs decentralised government to reflect its very different regional identities. And the only way to start to achieve that is independence from London.
14 million is about 75% of Screen Scotland’s annual budget… a big chunk of no-strings-attached cash which, typically, the Scottish Gov doesn’t hesitate to throw at some foolhardy scheme while backsliding / handwringing on arts funding…
On another note, Frederic Jameson recently died and I haven’t seen so much as a line about him in any Scottish newpaper or online journal…
Jameson is widely recognized as one of the greatest ever Marxist thinkers, and, in any event, one of the most brilliant cultural critics of our time…
He was a cut above the rest…
To be fair, his passing did merit some mention in the British left-wing press. He was celebrated in a series of spontaneous online postings and in moving tributes in journals like the New Left Review and the London Review of Books, two publications to which he was a frequent contributor. I even read an obituary in the Socialist Worker.
I’d a lot of time for old Fredric. He was one of the most important cultural critics of his generation. He was an intellectual giant, unequalled among his peers. Here’s a wee appreciation of him I penned elsewhere back in October:
Fredric Jameson wrote about literature, cinema, television, economics, politics, art, theatre, and, of course, Marxism. But his most interesting work had to do with architecture. He wrote extensively on architecture in the 1980s and ’90s, the decades during which critical theory was introduced into the architecture academy. This was also perhaps the last period in which the academy was dominated by coherent schools of thought, ideologies, or ‘tendencies’, as they were once called, all of which vied for dominance in the wake of Modernism’s demise. These were the years when ‘starchitects’, surfing the wave of globalisation, jetted from one economic and cultural hub to the next in search of commissions that would be exhibited in shows at major museums and featured in the pages of the world’s magazines and newspaper supplements.
Fredric wrote about all of this, most systematically in his most most widely read book, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he laid out his theory of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, corresponding to a new period of global economic development that many would later call ‘neoliberalism’, and in which he insisted that architecture provided the best examples of the new environments and spaces or ‘hyperspaces’, as he called them, that were the product of this new postmodern period.
Fredric’s influence during this period, among those of us who lived through and remember this overwrought and largely forgotten transition from modernity to our current situation, whatever we may call it, was immense. Among his more influential ideas was the assertion that postmodernism wasn’t a ‘style’; rather, it was the expression of a new, historical period of capitalistic development that began in the 1960s and continued into the late 1990s.
One of the key features of postmodernity was the emergence of spaces that are so disorienting that they foreclose our ability to locate ourselves within a larger whole or ‘grand narrative’ and thus inhibit our ability to navigate from one place to the next or to exit the present and to go ‘somewhere else’. This was Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, the ‘end of history’ that Francis Fukuyama heralded in 1991 as the culmination of the postmodern revolution.
Fredric presented postmodernism/late capitalism as a collapse into a limitless hyperspatial totality in which one’s constantly ‘lost’. In the postmodern world, we no longer possess the ability to map and thus comprehend the totality and thus reveal the outer limits of global capitalism itself. Instead, we ultimately find ourselves stuck in mindsets and worlds so hermetically sealed that there seems to be nothing else, no ‘outside’, no possible alternative. It’s this feeling of absolute closure and lack of alternatives that led him to conclude in one of his more famous assertions ‘that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’.
In response to this situation, Fredric called for an aesthetic of ‘cognitive mapping’, an aesthetic that would enable us to reimagine the world in architecture, economics, and all our other ‘forms of life’, and find alternatives to the dead ends of global capitalism. He called for this aesthetic, not because he thought it would offer us an answer or ‘way out’, but because it motivates us to continue in spite of there appearing to be no way out of our current existential predicaments and global crises. Such an aesthetic offers us hope; it staves off despair and keeps faith alive.
Fredric Jameson didn’t offer solutions to our problems or ‘truth’. Rather he offered a praxis, a way of making that chips away at the sameness and the despair that runs through all the forms of our existence, through the totalitarian culture of late capitalism. He taught us how to ‘philosophise with a hammer’, to not just interpret but change the world in which we find ourselves.
Welcome back.
He also believed that the army should run society along military lines as they were the only organisation capable of doing this in a fair and dis-interested manner. In other words he believed in a totalitarian ‘socialist’ state.
Like virtually all ‘Marxists’ who for whatever reason (?) studied and taught at prestigious Western universities (Yale and Duke in his case) whilst criticising the very societies that gave them well paid, lifetime cushy jobs in academia.
You couldn’t make the hypocrisy up!
So the first step in my utopian proposal is, so to speak, the renationalization of the army along the lines of any number of other socialist candidates for nationalization (some of which I mentioned above), by reintroducing the draft to transform the present armed forces back into that popular mass force capable of coexisting successfully with an increasingly unrepresentative “representative government,” and transforming it into a vehicle for mass democracy rather than the representative kind.
Inasmuch as the army continues to be associated with the various coups d’état of modern times all over the world, as well as with all the wars it has been called on to wage in recent years, I will at once specify the most important steps in the process. First of all, the body of eligible draftees would be increased by including everyone from sixteen to fifty, or, if you prefer, sixty years of age: that is, virtually the entire adult population. Such an unmanageable body would henceforth be incapable of waging foreign wars, let alone carrying out successful coups. In order to emphasize the universality of the process, let’s add that the handicapped would all be found appropriate positions in the system, and that pacifist and conscientious objectors would be placed in control of arms development, arms storage, and the like.
Now I need to remind you of the breadth of the military system, particularly under the pre-Rumsfeld dispensation. We have already begun with medical attention, and in particular the veterans’ hospitals, which are currently in desperate straits, at the very moment when hospitals themselves, the private kind, have become big business in the United States. In our new universal system, of course, the military hospitals would become a free national health service open to everyone (insofar as everyone is now a service person or a veteran) and the entire center of gravity of universal health care, and also, I would add, pharmaceutical production, disease control, and experimentation with and production of new medicines, would now be reorganized and situated within the army itself.
We may also assume a reorientation of education itself under military auspices, not merely for the children of this military population but for various advanced degrees. Nowadays it is difficult to think of any kind of advanced training, save perhaps for business schools, that would not be required within this system (the Army Corps of Engineers is the obvious example). We may think of the socialist (or ex-socialist) countries for models of our situation, in which the various armies included such functions as the manufacture of clothing, the production of films, the eventual production of motor vehicles, and even (as in China) a writers’ union, in which intellectuals and writers and artists found their space and income. The army is also notoriously the source of manpower for disaster relief, infrastructural repair and construction and the like; the question of food supply would immediately place this institution (if it can still be called that) in charge of the ordering and supply of food production and therefore in a controlling position for that fundamental dietetic and agronomic activity as well.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/218-an-american-utopia
@Douglas, Verso put out a special announcement, including this collection of essays:
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/jameson-at-90-a-verso-blog-series
I’m not sure the piece on Star Wars is very deep, though.
PS: Jameson’s most famous book is of course, “Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”.
truly we are a nation of backstabbing turncoat munny grubbing arseholes hiding under the blanket of religious doctrine as though that will excuse all the racist imperial slaughter of innocent folk that has occurred & will continue to occur in our name
It is a great pity that the mainstream media in the United Kingdom conflates the Royal Air Force at Lossiemouth with the town of Lossiemouth to such an extent that anyone unfamiliar with this part of the world would be forgiven for being under the impression that all this place is, & ever has been, is one big Royal Air Force base. Reading the newspaper or watching television is unlikely to raise anyone’s awareness of this town’s actual history or inform anyone as to why so little remains of indigenous Lossiemouth. For a start, the appropriation of the town’s name by the Royal Air Force is something of a misnomer. The land RAF Lossiemouth was built on was effectively stolen from people living & working here after many of their able-bodied men were killed during World War One. The method by which the British state secured such land was to have their agents assume the identity of farmers buying land for their families to work on. They did not tell landowners they intended to build military camps & they certainly did not inform tenants who were doing all the work. Having suffered great loss within living memory those tenants were in the process of rebuilding their communities. Having put so much time & effort into the land they lived on & paid rent for they would have been reluctant to leave their homes & concerned that further loss was to befall them. Given the British State’s attitude towards rural & working people at the time anyone who believes bribery & coercion would not have been employed to clear folk from their homes must be naïve to the point of not only denial, but collusion. In the case of RAF Lossiemouth, the land ‘obtained’ included the former parish of Drainie which in earlier times had been created through an amalgam of the even earlier parishes of Kinneddar & Ogstoun. So, like most ‘information’ provided by the Ministry of Defence, even the name RAF Lossiemouth is a deliberate obfuscation by the British state in support of an Anglocentric agenda that has as a core objective the promotion of a false narrative that seeks to deny history & replace it with some ridiculous British nationalist notion of the Royal Air Force & the Little England mentality that accompanies it being here before anyone or anything else. Any surviving descendant of the peasantry should simply bow down before their imperial masters & be grateful those masters do not whip out the guns & execute them on the spot for so much as considering the slightest thought of dissent. It stinks to high heaven, as any colonial intervention by the British state always stinks to high heaven. The run up to World War Two gave the British state the excuse it had long sought to expand its territory & increase its military presence in the far north of Scotland, an area that had proven resistant & sometimes rebellious in the past. The problem both parliaments now governing Scotland are refusing to acknowledge is that there is no reason for the Royal Air Force to be here & there has been no reason for three quarters of a century.
Thanks for this – Very well said.
Please just let’s not forget that Scotland is run entirely for private profit at public expense, and that we too are bought and sold for (these days, mainly American) gold. From the big corporations to all our public institutions, governments at all levels right down to community councils, regulators, police, the courts, academia, the lot. No-one can be held to account at all, and corruption now runs so deep there seems to be no-one left able to end it.
It’s easy to blame the medieval ‘UK’ and I certainly don’t believe that Charles and his family see themselves as quaint tourist attractions. Royals believe they have a divine right to rule. But we also need to look closer to home – those who pour our money into spaceports, ‘freeports’, ‘smart’ technology, the electricity grid upgrades, the 5g masts, and the new Clearances. None of these things will really benefit us or save the planet. Its always about wealth and power. Private affluence and public squalor. For people who already have more than enough money to end world poverty completely.
As the northern part of these islands never conquered by Rome, Scotland has always been a contested frontier land with the inevitable tension between centralisation of power and a variety of competing people and interests. It has always been characterised by violence, attempts to divide and rule, and Machiavellianism. Its monarchy has struggled with the medieval royal succession of children which opened up endless opportunities for conspiracy and manipulation. We have had our parcel of rogues for centuries. Modern corporate capitalism owes quite a debt to (Lowland) Scotland.
We have surely reached the point where dividing the planet into tame (‘civilised’, urban, centralised) and ‘wild’ (‘barbarian’, rural, a place to exploit and colonise or ‘escape’ to) is obsolete. With the internet, town and country become one. And the powerful, despite their increasing desperation, cannot control it or keep technology for their exclusive use.
AI, bitcoin, even the modern psychological and bio- weapons will sooner or later destroy those who make and deploy them. As we saw in the Vietnam war, the Afghan wars, and I am sure will see in the current horror in the Middle East and Ukraine, ‘victory’ ( whatever that means) cannot be won by technology. Hearts and minds are necessary. Project Fear is not sustainable.
We need independence not just from Westminster but from colonialism, imperialism, and rampant ‘neoliberalism’. And Stockholm syndrome. We also need to find a decentralised way to bring our diverse regions and cultures together. The Swiss seem to have managed to do this, and maintain independence since the 14th century; I’ve no doubt we could find a model that works for us.
Perhaps we have spent too long looking south and trying to deal with the British Empire. We need a different approach. Let’s look for inspiration to our northern and western neighbours and of course to our own Gaelic /Norse culture, which has suffered sustained attack for centuries, but I think we could learn a great deal from.
Above all please let us start thinking positively about what an independent Scotland might look like. The prospect of more of the same, (too wee too poor too stupid and too fearful to stand up for ourselves) isn’t good enough anymore. Whatever happened to the spirit of the crofter wars, whatever happened to Nae Pasaran?
Anyway thanks again for another excellent piece.
@John Wood, perhaps every nation has its mythology, and the Swiss are no different. But what happens when that mythology seems reactionary to enough of its citizens?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/land-of-myth-and-glory-why-william-tell-is-so-important-for-switzerland/47789096
Surely Switzerland is home to some of the most corrupt features of the international order? Swiss banks were notorious for their role in helping dictators steal vast sums from their own people at the height of neocolonialism, when I studied the subject. Far from being independent, Switzerland was tightly integrated into the world financial system, gaining a reputation as a leading tax haven and banker to organised crime. It is protected by more than mountains.
Yes indeed, I am not holding Switzerland up as a paragon of ethics. But just as an example of a small country that has maintained its independence and balanced the needs of different languages etc. Maybe a poor example.
They also secretly collaborated with the Nazis, agreeing to label Jews as such. They were not neutral at all. This became public not that long ago and was a massive scandal in Switzerland.
Switzerland collaborated with Nazi Germany in a number of ways during World War II, including:
1. Economic collaboration, as a haven for Nazi bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, which often contained property stolen from Jews. Swiss banks also did business with the German Reichsbank and Nazi officials.
2. Political collaboration, tolerating Nazi activities on its territory, including press censorship, and allowing Nazi followers to operate freely.
3. Laundering German plunder, including gold looted from conquered European countries and assets expropriated from Holocaust victims.
4. Providing Germany with an economic lifeline, helping German companies with loans and transacting loans on the international financial markets on their behalf. By the end of the war, Switzerland had amassed at least $1.25 billion in German assets.
Switzerland’s policy of neutrality – like that of Ireland, Spain, and Sweden – allowed it to avoid direct involvement in the war. But it also enabled it to profit from the suffering of others.
I think it a mistake to conflate the constitutional arrangements with the policies a country adopts, If it were true it would be as good a reason as any for getting rid of the UK altogether.
I agree, John. (Who’s conflating policy and regime?)
Written an excellent piece yourself here with this comment. I like what you said about culture, I think that was the best aspect of the first pre Scottish referendum campaign, the focus on culture and learning ourselves about who we are & where we might originate from. A lot of this work can and always has been done privately by individuals who reach a point in life when they want answers but it was nice to see it go mainstream for a while. The problem as usual is those in positions of authority who will always look at how they can exploit any trend to suit their own ego driven agenda. Hate to say it but if you don’t make your own health, safety & sanity your own first priority you’re unlikely to be here long enough to help or advise anyone else least of all yourself. That is at least the world I live in & I have to say to me it seems to be getting worse rather than better.
Thanks for that, and I agree absolutely about looking after your own health and safety. But I can’t separate my health and safety from other people’s.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Martin Niemöller
It is worth saying that the British Empire also very much means Scotland (as does the British slave trade). Arguably Scotland actually punched above its weight in such matters. This cannot be swept under the carpet in Scotland any more than it can in England.
This is true; the ‘British Empire’ was largely Scotland’s empire. It took off after the nascent Scottish bourgeoisie won access to English markets through the Union of 1707. It amassed vast fortunes through subsequent trade, which funded both further commercial expansion into Africa and Asia and the industrial development of the British Isles. This ‘British Empire’ (itself a canny piece of Scottish branding) was largely administered, defended, and colonised by Scots and supported by political institutions in which Scots enjoyed disproportionate power and influence.
The Scottish bourgeoisie dragged England, with its handful of plantations in the Americas, kicking and screaming into a corporation that it subsequently grew into the greatest business empire the world had hitherto seen and, in doing so, created a vast nationless proletarian underclass (the ‘wretched of the earth’), which might yet be its undoing.
Yes of course the ‘British’ Empire, like all others, was built by an establishment that included people from across the Empire. And those nearest to the seat of power (London) geographically and also socially and economically, were (and still are) in the driving seat. There will always be people who seek to serve the powerful for protection and advancement. There were Scots who made a fortune out of the Empire, including the slave trade. There were also Scots who protested and fought against the Union, and others who were ruthlessly cleared from their homes and land and murdered or driven into exile. And in England there were ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ too. It is I suggest a mistake to try to characterise a country by the actions of one part of its population. Earlier I used Switzerland as an example of a country where power has been internally decentralised for hundreds of years. This should not be taken to imply I agree with the policies that country adopted, any more than I agree with anything the ‘British’ Empire did – whether the actual agents were Scots, Canadian, Australian, Indian, or for that matter the ancestors of Kemi Badenoch who sold their own people into slavery.
Those who are closest to the bureaucratic centres (e.g. London, Edinburgh) like to think they’re in the driving seat, but they’re just as dependent as the rest of us are on the vast, impersonal economic forces that drive history.
But I agree: polities in which decisions are arrived at through more deliberative and inclusive democratic processes are much more likely to produce policies that are more in accordance with the general will of their citizens than those arrived at through less deliberative and inclusive processes. I’d hate to cite Habermas again…
Agreed. There is far too much sweeping under carpets going on across the board. Which is why Bella is such a Good Thing.
hmm, there was also a trade in kidnapping rural children from Aberdeenshire & elsewhere & launching them off to the ‘new world’ from the docks at Aberdeen so please do not use dragging up crimes long buried to excuse, distract or deflect from what should by any standard be regarded as the criminal actions of our political leaders in our own lifetime
I think Mr Gunn’s favourite tune is Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.
Thank you George. Throughout 2024 your writing has told it like it is but, at the same time, given me great hope.
Well said Mark.
Another excellent article. We all need hope – except for the tiny minority of those in power who hope only to increase their wealth at all costs, including the destruction of Earth and all living things (while they take off in their space ships).
While on the topic of the UK & particularly Scotland’s steady climb into realising its true potential as a fully militarised right wing fascist dictatorship I should also have mentioned the snp’s decision after 30 years of reversing its position on NATO and embracing it with all that this entails in terms of making the snp and the scottish government pretty much identical to the unionist parties up here and their respective larger parties south of the border, the youth wing of the snp has also decided to back nato following Russia’s entanglement with Ukraine which NATO largely made happen through its usual nefarious methods. So, not that I really enjoy depressing anyone further, least of all myself, but until the snp grows a pair & ditches their allegiance to this warmongering organisation that has cost the lives of so many millions of civilians, service personnel, women & children I don’t really see how anyone can with a clear conscience vote for them unless they recognise themselves as being a bloodthirsty psychotic with such a misanthropic cynical worldview that they don’t expect any better from anybody else.