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Resolution 12: The End Of Scottish Football’s “Post Truth Era”

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Three things stand out today on the issue of Resolution 12.

First is the way the Requisitioners are handling themselves. They’re keeping their powder dry even whilst others are howling at the moon. Some are advising them to jump early and tell the rest of Scottish football what they know, before they’ve fully got a handle on what’s in front of them.

This stuff is too complex to simply release as it stands without presenting the context. Too many of our supporters are still strangers to what the issue is about; an early release of truly transformative information wouldn’t help anyone if it was handled wrong.

Second is the sudden interest of the media in a matter which they’ve been blatantly ignoring for well over a year. They have some balls suddenly to present themselves as experts on this matter, and their decision to declare it “case closed” is one of the dumbest I’ve seen in well over a year reporting on the campaign.

They simply haven’t a clue.

Their credibility in this one is absolutely shot, but they could have made a move towards restoring at least some of it with fair and balanced coverage of this matter. That they haven’t even bothered to correct the misconception that this is a campaign aimed at Sevco is proof positive of how little they care about the facts.

Third is the reaction of the Sevco supporters to STV’s exclusive. Theirs is the biggest miscalculation of all, missing the real point by miles and coming not even close to grasping what this means for them. Their ability to deny reality continues to astound us all, but it can only last so long.

Reality is coming.

The truth they’ve long been keeping at bay is going to force its way into their world, and that is going to be shattering for a very, very many of them.

Let’s have a look at reality for a moment.

In 2012 Scottish football saw Rangers collapse and vanish from the world completely. This was far and away the biggest event in the recent history of the game here.

In the run up to HMRC’s refusal to grant the club a CVA we were told, repeatedly, by every news outlet, fans group and individual connected to the matter what that meant. It confirmed everything we knew of company law, SFA regulations, UEFA statutes and historical precedent.

Liquidation meant death. It was as simple as that.

Yet almost from the moment Charles Green bought the assets of the dead club a new narrative started to establish itself, to the utter disbelief of every person who wasn’t a devotee of the late Ibrox operation. That narrative wasn’t even that somehow death had not been the end; indeed it was that death had not happened at all. That somehow Sevco and Rangers was one and the same, that football clubs here were not, as we’d long thought and as convention had established, bricks and mortar institutions of corporeal form but ethereal entities instead, which could be carried on in spite of what befell their “holding companies”.

This went beyond mere football regulations and branched into the realm of metaphysics; somewhere, in a parallel reality, with hooks into our own, Gretna is still playing games, alongside Third Lanark, Airdrie and Clydebank. There they are just waiting for a businessman with the requisite know-how to come along and return them to the leagues.

The idea is farcical, of course, but this is what we’re asked to accept, and in order to support this utter fiction an entire structure of lies has been constructed and piled high around it.

The Survival Myth beget the Victim Myth.

The Five Way Agreement, which underpins the lies, is itself a complete put up job, which needs stripped down to the fundamentals and exposed as such … a task which is, in itself, long overdue.

Scottish football has existed amidst this – a toxic cloud of lies – for the past four years, where we’re asked to behave as if a warped version of history and a distorted view of the present day was in any way legitimate.

Bad enough that we’re being asked to ignore this; they now want the rest of us to “move on” which is to say what they really want is for us to endorse it.

Not in this lifetime.

Because lies have become the norm here and we simply can’t leave the historical record looking like that, with lies piled on lies, sustaining more lies.

I understand the motives of some of those involved; Sevco fans who badly want to believe their club lives on; SFA technocrats who think the game has no value without “Rangers” in it; hacks who simply want an easy life … but the integrity of our sport comes first and for the rest of us we’re just not going to go along with this bullshit any longer.

In politics they are calling this the “post fact age”, where the dissemination of absolutely untrue information is poisoning every debate and discussion on our future.

In Scottish football the same thing applies, and if the Resolution 12 campaign accomplishes nothing more than torching this towering masterpiece of misrepresentations and burning it to the bedrock once and for all then it will have done more than many of us even dared to dream.

The post-truth age in Scottish football is almost over.

Get ready for the dawn.

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