Today there’s a story online that said Hitler had a micro-penis.
I can’t imagine how this information has come to light and I can’t imagine anyone who would care enough to find out.
You know why? Cause it neither explains anything nor makes the slightest bit of difference to the verdict of history.
We know what Hitler was.
World War II wasn’t started because of the size of his manhood; if war really is the ultimate dick-swinging contest I can barely imagine a dafter way to start one than a guy pulling his out and saying “Look how small it is!”
Flippancy aside, I’m being serious here.
Whatever we uncover about this guy, I can’t conceive of any revelation about him or his life that would alter my opinion of him one iota.
Scottish football is full of people who think fluff and ephemera can change the verdict of history.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard Neil Doncaster talk about how he’s opposed to proposed changes by the European Club Association, in an effort to make it look as if he cares about what happens to our game. We’ve also seen him pat himself on the back over the deal to show SPL games in China.
None of it matters.
This is a guy who’s lucky to still be in his job; indeed, there’s not one of us can fathom how he stays there.
Nothing he can do or say will erase the opinion we have of him, and the verdict of history to come, which will remember the “administrator” who almost destroyed our national game and whose fingerprints are on the LNS scandal, the Five Way Agreement and other crimes against sporting integrity.
No-one will care what minor advances we make from here until the day he packs up his pencils and goes.
If we found out tomorrow that he adopts abandoned puppies in his spare time, so what?
Our opinion won’t change.
Scottish football has people in it who excel at reinterpreting history, but the supporters aren’t amongst them.
We know what happened, we know who was there and we know who benefited.
No new fact will emerge that will clear everything up for us, explaining what they did in a way that makes us forget our hostility towards them, the people who almost ruined the game.
Nor will we forget that one club is at the centre of it all.
The behaviour of those at that club has been astoundingly crass and arrogant.
It’s not enough that they maintain the Survival Myth, but they’ve wrapped it around the Victim Myth too in the ultimate insult to the rest of us, and made themselves out to be the ones who suffered most.
Every club in Scotland lost out during the EBT cheating years; that alone required title stripping.
Every club in the country would have been disenfranchised had the newco been allowed into the SPL.
Fans would have been dismissed as hate-filled cranks had the clubs not backed them, and even then we had media personalities telling us that we were jealous and bitter and taking some kind of inferiority complex to historic levels.
They were supposed to talk up our sport; instead they ploughed it under, and hurt its credibility badly.
Many of them still do.
Nothing these people write in “optimistic” language will make us forget that.
Sevco allegedly wants to “re-join the Scottish football community” and be an “active participant” in the decision making process.
In the last week alone their club has demanded the banning of plastic playing surfaces and blamed an injury to a key player on one. They know any proposal to do that would hurt other clubs; their selfishness is profound and unbelievable.
This is what they mean when they say they want to re-engage.
They want to run things as Rangers once did, and not for the benefit of the game as a whole.
Last month Sky Sports Scotland, which is becoming more and more like a PR arm for the club (they even had Warburton commenting on the Barcelona – Arsenal game today), ran a lovely little feature on one of Sevco’s community initiatives; Mark Hateley fronted it, and made sure to fold it nicely into the Survival Myth by getting on the record that it was founded whilst Rangers was in existence and is still running, only on less finance.
Watching it was vaguely nauseating, because as much as I welcome any football club giving something back I couldn’t help but think if the oldco had paid its taxes a lot of community organisations would have thrived who otherwise went under.
That’s what history will ultimately remember about them; they were the club that defrauded the Exchequer and deprived the country of nearly £80 million in tax revenues due, and they did it to win football matches and feed a superiority complex so profound that you just know it’s actually a mask on enormous feelings of inferiority.
Rangers operated a sectarian signing policy. The man who built the club in its modern form, David Murray, ought one day to stand in a courtroom and account for his own series of sins. He can wear the Queen’s honour like a medal around his neck, but his contribution to Scottish business was a course in unethical practices and unhealthy relationships which, like the verdict on his club, will be remembered by history in a very different light from that which he’s seen in now.
So what if he owns a vineyard? Who cares about his alleged charisma or his skills at media management?
Craig Whyte wasn’t bad at that either. Dave King owns a lovely collection of fine wine.
But one is due to appear in court and the other’s already been convicted by one, and called a “glib and shameless liar” by a judge.
All the rest is noise, designed to make you forget the facts.
Well not in this lifetime.
And not by the future either.