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The Celtic Park Fireworks Bring Into Focus A Contradiction We’re Supposed To Ignore.

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The news that fireworks were let off outside Celtic Park today during the minute’s silence for Prince Philip has generated the usual, the predictable, confected fury over in La La Land.

It will draw some waspish criticism from elsewhere too, no doubt.

I frankly couldn’t give a monkeys what people have to say about it or our supporters, not that any of the curtain twitchers clucking their tongues will bother to actually prove that it was our fans or that there was some nefarious purpose behind it.

Oh what an outrage we are! Oh what horrible people!

Don’t’ even waste your time with it, blow it your arses and save us all the hassle of having to have the debate.

Instead, let’s have another debate instead, one about whether any of us should have to pay respects to either the dead or the dwindling band of survivors of a wretched family line whose very existence in this country is a grotesquery which should have been done away with decades ago.

This is 2021. They serve no function that I can see.

If we’re going to be asked to observe a silence, let’s for a moment examine who Celtic players had to observe it for today.

Let’s examine the brutal reality of what our supporters were expected to pay their own respects to.

Argue as you like about whether it’s crass and insensitive, and just plain wrong, to let off fireworks in apparent celebration of someone’s death … I personally think it’s just another line on a spectrum; undue euphoria on one side and all the tosh and outrageous bullshit which is piled up on the other and which every public tribute only adds to.

Honestly, all this makes me laugh like Hell.

The Peepul who are screaming on social media today are the same ones who want the Slavia Prague player hung drawn and quartered for the racist remark he’s only alleged to have made about Glen Kamara.

All of Scottish football stood in silence for Kamara, including our own club.

Today they stood in silence for Philippos Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg, who’s history of racist language was widespread and notorious.

“He was a throwback to old-school racism. Painting him as a benign, cuddly uncle of the nation is simply untrue,” said Kehinde Andrews, a Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, yesterday on CNN.

That kind of analysis has been entirely absent from the numerous media profiles and testaments paid to him here in the UK since the announcement.

As I’ve said previously, the last few weeks of rallying around Kamara would be nauseating if the subject wasn’t so serious, because there is no way we can legitimately claim that Scottish football takes this issue seriously, and the proof of it is in the black armbands and the fake tributes which were paid to the old racist this afternoon all across the country.

Are we supposed to ignore that the family names he abandoned were notorious Nazis?

Are we meant to pretend we don’t know that he went from one family of bigots to another? Meghan Markhle anybody?

Did these people all miss Oprah and the stories about the casual racism she had to put up with from day one? Philip’s own grandson fled this country with that young woman and in doing so renounced the whole rotten pack of them because of it.

Scottish football really does have an interesting way of ignoring the things that it doesn’t like, and The Peepul are notorious for bending reality into whatever shape suits them.

We know, because we know them so well, that racism is only wrong unless it’s gushing forth from their stands.

I did an analysis of this the other day; they are the only fans in Scotland to have multiple charges of racism against them … from their own players.

They love reminding Celtic fans of the bananas chucked at Mark Walters, but they don’t like to be reminded that sections of their own support made monkey chants at him and a lot of them lost their season tickets as a result.

Maurice Edu was shaken after a European defeat when he left the ground to be racially abused by his own fans …

I wrote some weeks ago about the supporter who went to the press in the aftermath of the Lorenzo Amoruso allegation who said that since the charge was made against the Italian that instances of racism exploded in their stands.

They have spent weeks calling for Slavia to have the book thrown at them; today they are mourning the death of one of the most bigoted men in the country.

There is no consistency to a single thing that they say, no underlying logic to any of their so-called beliefs.

They harness anger and hatred better than anyone, but there’s nothing to ground any of it.

Days like today remind me that for all the rank rotten talk about Catholic schools and how they promote sectarianism (they don’t) that we actually live in a theocracy, and this is why the state pays for Catholic education in the first place … it’s a safeguard because this country is fundamentally Protestant in its institutions and ruling agencies.

So aside from being racist, the House of Windsor is actually the legitimisation of sectarianism as well.

We live in a religious state, with the monarch as the head of the church.

And this is what some of us are being asked to stand in tribute to today, to the idea that this is how it should be in a modern country, where all this garbage should have been left behind a century ago.

You are asking large numbers of people to pay their respects to a hateful man representing a hateful institution which has not the least respect for them.

I am not “glad” that this horror of a human being is dead.

I don’t wish death on anyone, and that man has a family who will miss him and mourn him in spite of how twisted their own belief system might be. I don’t agree with setting off fireworks in celebration of his death, if indeed that’s what took place.

But then I don’t like the phony platitudes and the confected sense of national loss and the wilful decision across much of our media and political class to ignore what they know the reality to be either.

I find both equally offensive and even abhorrent.

That so many otherwise intelligent people cannot wait to express their regrets and try to tell the rest of us how we should be feeling today … you can stow that shit, because millions of us aren’t buying it, and we know that many of those who are mouthing that rancid rot don’t buy it either. Yet they do it, because it’s expected of them somehow.

Well more fool them.

I have more respect for those who are calling round their mates asking “Who had Philip on the Next To Snuff It Sweepstakes?” and who don’t even pretend to care one way or the other.

I have more respect for those republicans who see it as “another one bites the dust” and us moving closer to the rest of the modern world.

So when we’re eating dirt in the next day or two from people in and around Scottish football, ask them if they observed their minute for Glen Kamara, or showed him support online, and then ask them how they square that with the whole of this game and the country in which its played having to show the same respect for a member of a racist and sectarian institution who, himself, had a history of expressing those sentiments.

See what answer you get.

Because as far as I’m concerned that’s a wholly contradictory standpoint … and at least the guys who set off the fireworks can’t be accused of not knowing the ground beneath their feet.

They at least have all of this straight in their heads.

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