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A Disgraceful Stunt And A Repulsive Response

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Somebody, somewhere, must be very chuffed. Job done, idiot. On a weekend when we crushed Sevco so utterly and completely that their entire club has been plunged into turmoil and crisis, their supporter’s reps have a perfect excuse for deflection and the media finds it has just cause to write a negative story about Celtic.

If you’re reading, that’s down to you.

So, I hope you’re proud of it. I hope there was a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation in the pubs and the bars where I’m almost certain you must have been, pissed out of your skull, to have dreamed up something so disgraceful and tasteless in the first place.

I can’t, for the life of me, imagine what goes on in the head of somebody who thinks that’s funny, or clever. I literally cannot wrap my brain around it, and perhaps it’s for that reason that I’m willing to give them what little benefit of the doubt I can.

Because I’m certain that this was not a statement on suicide, far less one that affected a Scottish professional footballer player in the week before the game, something which, on Facebook anyway, provoked a unanimously sympathetic and heartfelt response, not only from Celtic fans but from everyone.

I’ll give them a pass on that, because to have made a wilful conscious decision to mock that … it’s beyond comprehension.

If you do that you’re not a football supporter, you’re a psychopath, someone better off in the jail than being allowed to express your dark fantasies in such a public setting. I don’t believe it for one second. It’s just too much to contemplate.

But really, it doesn’t leave us very much in mitigation, does it?

Because even excluding that dark possibility you aren’t left with anything good.

So, instead, what? A mock lynching?

From the stands at Celtic Park.

Like something you’d see on a Loyalist bonfire in the middle of July. Like something from those old pictures from the American South at the height of the KKK.

Someone thought that was a good idea?

Someone actually planned that and decided it was on the right side of decency?

I can’t express my contempt clearly enough. That person is too stupid, too thoughtless, too without any social understanding or decorum at all, to be allowed in our stadium. I hope Celtic finds him, or them, and removes them once and for all, never to be allowed back.

I’ve read a lot of whatabouttery regarding this stunt, and it all pisses me off as much as the act itself. It’s not that I don’t care what they did to the toilets, I’ve covered that already on this site, on the night of the game, but one thing has nothing to do with the other, and those trying to argue otherwise are wasting their time and the energy they should be saving for unequivocal denunciation of this idiocy. The people who do these things are beyond reach and rationality, but the appalling behaviour of one does not excuse or even out the actions of the other.

All of them are a stain on the national sport.

I have a good mate from the IndyRef campaign, a Sevco supporter named Scott Murray, who’s forever emailing me articles that show the two club’s fans coming together, working side by side, for good causes, and he asks me, constantly, why I never write about that stuff. I don’t know what to tell him; I know that I should, but I just never seem to find an angle where I can fit in the material. I also know there are a lot of people on his side of the fence who think I’m motivated by hate, but it’s a nonsense argument and I defy anyone to justify it.

Scott and I know there are idiots on both sides. A gruesome stunt like this, whatever the intent behind it – I mean the visual itself is appalling, and no rational person could have failed to foresee that with a little consideration – it doesn’t belong anywhere in the civilised world and my despair at the act itself is only heightened by the fury I feel at the people who’ve shamelessly appropriated it to ratchet the hatred up another notch.

The Sun’s headline and story today are shameful, which is what you’d expect from a publication utterly without scruples. The Club 1872 press release, on the other hand, is quite simply deranged. The Sun is trying to sell papers, and that agenda, at least, can be understood and rationalised even if not excused. Club 1872 is playing a much more dangerous, and hateful game, seeking to smear the entire Celtic support for the actions of a select few.

They use the word “dehumanising” a lot over there, so they understand full well what the connotation is. To label every single person in Celtic Park the same way, to ascribe to the entire club an ideology of hatred, is to eradicate the individual entirely and bundle every single one of us up in the same train car, and I make no apology for using that particular term. This is playing to the gallery in a most appalling, abhorrent and dangerous fashion. For ordinary supporters to voice such a view is one thing; for the main shareholders organisation to make such a sweeping generalisation, on its official webpage, is another thing entirely.

I’m thoroughly sick of all this already, of the people on both sides of the divide who seemed almost determined to turn this into what so many of us were denying it was; an Old Firm game, a resumption of a rivalry based on hate.

The Celtic fans, in particular, who wallowed in that cesspit at the weekend need to think long and hard about what they were doing because the whole point in disavowing the Old Firm tag in the first place, the foundation stone of our opposition to the Survival Lie, is based on a need to drain the poison out of our game and in that we’ve failed, utterly, on the basis of the weekend just past, and there are at least two more of these matches to come before the season ends.

The majority of football fans in this country – Celtic fans, Sevco fans, and others – are appalled by acts like this, and equally by the gleeful media treatment of it and the appropriation of the act itself by unscrupulous gits pursuing their own horrible, vicious agenda. It makes us despair, it really does.

This was a disgraceful stunt, followed up by a repulsive response and all of it heedless to the very real, and very awful, social consequences for every single one of us, and one of those consequences will be, I suspect, the failure of the campaign to win the repeal of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act.

I hate that law with every fibre of my being, but today I can see why that campaign might have been holed below the waterline this weekend.

Because seriously, does Scotland really need this in its national life?

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