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Judas Johnston: Unforgiven, Now & Forever

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It’s interesting when someone you haven’t heard from in years suddenly turns up.

This weekend, like something that crawled out from under a rock, one such individual has reared his ugly head. I refer, of course, to Maurice Johnston, Judas to put it plainly, who younger generations won’t remember but whose name, and memory, is seared in the souls of those who do.

I loved the guy for years before he stabbed us in the back.

I’m well aware that love spurned is not half as toxic as love betrayed, and yes, there’s a little bit of that in my anger and the way it has abided all these years, outlasting how I feel about other people who’ve done the dirty on me in more personal (and even painful) ways.

But it’s never just been about that.

Players have left Celtic, players have turned down the chance to sign for us.

Some have inflicted deep wounds of their own.

Take Scott McDonald, who scored the goals that made Black Sunday such an awful part of our collective memory. He later signed for us, and I loved every second he was in the Hoops. The memory of that day doesn’t fade or get easier, but I no longer deplore the player who made it happen.

I feel as viscerally angry towards Johnston as I did the day it happened, and I ought to have been too young to harbour such ideas. Over time I confess my dislike for him has only increased, especially now that I’m old enough and savvy enough to grasp the full scope and nature of what he actually did here.

This wasn’t a simple case of appearing in a Celtic shirt one day and then changing his mind at the last second and going somewhere else.

That would have been bad enough, but I would have got over it.

I don’t even think my anger stems from the fact that it was Rangers he signed for.

Kenny Miller went from Rangers to eventually playing for Celtic and has made the journey back the other way.

I feel no animosity towards him for that at all.

I never rated him that highly anyway.

What Johnston did is different, in part because it was a public humiliation to Celtic and that lingers longer in the memory than other things might have. He had to know how bad it would make us look, and he had no respect for the club or the supporters whatsoever.

It took a great big piss on us; I can’t put it more bluntly than that.

More, his conduct afterwards revealed a dreadful, sickening character flaw which was on display even in the articles which have appeared in the papers today. In those, he talks about how he went to Linfield for an end of season dinner even though he’d been advised not to.

During his time there he freely admits to getting fully involved in the occasion.

“I sang the songs,” he says, and then, pathetically adds, “I had to.”

You had to? Really? You had to sing the songs?

And why exactly did you have to do that?

Any “courage” it took to go over there was erased the minute he sang about being up to his knees in blood. What might have been a gutsy move turned into one characterised by spinelessness and worse, an ethical “flexibility” which ought to make any right thinking person vomit.

Johnston makes it clear that he had no morality at all.

It appalls me most that he was “one of us” and pulled on a Rangers shirt, then not content with switching sides, and kicking us when we were down he then went on to become the very antithesis of everything  he came from. He, like Nacho the Rat, embraced the worst elements of Hunnic gutter scum.

El Rat revels in it to this day, but Johnston doesn’t get a pass just because he stopped the moment he was out of a Rangers shirt.

I think it makes him worse in many ways.

Since he’s spent much of the last twenty odd years living in the United States he’ll understand where I’m coming from when I say that if the KKK ran a football team he’s the kind of guy who would have signed for them. More than that, his statements about embracing the Rangers “culture” make it clear he’d have donned a white sheet without a second thought. Who knows? He might even have volunteered to take part in a few lynching’s.

Just to fit in, you understand.

I can just about see how someone from a backward background and who doesn’t know anything different can grow up singing the anthems of hate. What I can’t quite wrap my brain around is the kind of person who would do it for convenience sake, as some kind of career choice, and then act as if it was nothing.

It’s not a surprise that the media lets him away with this kind of crap, but it galls me when they try to paint him as some kind of hero figure for daring to defy the bigots. It sticks in the craw cause he’s one of them; a part time bigot, but a bigot just the same, and that’s somehow worse to me, more offensive, than someone who wears the badge full time.

There won’t ever be a day when the mere mention of his name doesn’t make me want to spit.

Call me a bad person, call me what you will.

I can’t stand the guy, and his entrée to this weekend’s general chaos is just another reason for me wanting to take a long shower when it’s done.

I hope this is the last time we hear of him, or from him.

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