Celtic, The Bloggers, The SFA And What Orwell Got Right About The Lie Of 55.

At the centre of Orwell’s masterpiece is a simple truth;

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

If those in power are able to re-write history then they can frame everything they do against a backdrop of “success” and glory and in doing so, they can set the agenda far ahead of them.

The last few weeks have been great for Celtic fans, as we celebrate the title and look to the future with great enthusiasm. But you don’t have to look too far to see the way that those who think they control the narrative are chipping away at us from every side, including trying either to re-write the past or to disparage our achievements in it.

The most egregious example of this was when they targeted our achievement in 1967, trying to place it in the shadow of Ibrox’s 7 win run to the second tier European final. If they had won that competition that narrative would have gone into overdrive. The full consequences of that would have been with us for the rest of our lives and far beyond.

Yesterday, I did a piece on the media’s efforts to reframe Andy Goram as a good lad who was basically misunderstood.

History is being re-written all around us, and that’s a dangerous thing to allow the media to do.

We need to resist this stuff with all we have.

No lie, of course, is greater than the Lie of 55.

There are some who find the whole debate tiresome, but it’s vitally important that we continue to fight this fight because the size of that lie is so vast that it overshadows every other that’s been told in the history of Scottish football.

To allow the Survival Lie is bad enough, but the one that flows from it – the Victim Lie – is even more dangerous and damaging. That simply cannot be allowed to stand.

The Lie of 55 isn’t just about the alleged survival of their club. It’s about the titles which should have been stripped but were not, about a corrupt stitch up which our club stamped its feet over but never actually properly resisted. There is no other football association anywhere which would have permitted the tainted EBT titles to remain.

The media thinks that it controls the narrative right now, and therefore that they control the past.

But they don’t. Those days are over with.

There is a very real argument for saying that we control the present, and that the final word on the past will belong to the bloggers and those who will write the books about this period in the Scottish game.

I cannot think of a more important function for us.

Being a Celtic blogger is not just about promoting the club.

It is a constant battle against the rewriting of history, a constant struggle against the tide of nonsense and lies, a constant effort to frame the narrative in a way that more resembles the truth.

With the media either on board pushing the lies or remaining dead silent on these issues it is only the work of the Celtic sites which keeps the bullshit from completely swamping us.

The story of how Police Scotland blew the investigations into the liquidation of Rangers show you what we’re up against. An official agency of the state operated in a partisan manner to seek revenge rather than justice.

There are people in the media who will simply never quit trying to undermine us and promote their favourites … and then there’s the governing bodies themselves, who have not reformed and show no inclination to do so.

The struggle is constant, but believe me when I tell you that it’s doing the job it is intended to do. Look at how aggressively Ibrox pushes its fantasies; the 150th anniversary, the 55th title, even this Old Firm nonsense. Why did they promote these things in such an OTT fashion, as if they were trying to convince themselves as much as the rest of us?

They were forced to, because the present is not yet in their control and so they cannot simply create the past narrative that would secure their future. Neither they nor their media allies are in command of the landscape and we won’t allow them to be.

In Orwell’s magnificent political essay “Facing Unpleasant Facts” he stated that;

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

If this club is to be strong in the future, we must fight in the present to offer a clear understanding of what happened in the past. We must restate the obvious, tell Peepul what they don’t want to hear and state the facts again and again and again no matter what.

Is it not a means of scoring points or pushing our own version of events; we are defending the truth itself, on which all future facts and understandings will be built.

That’s not just something we should do reluctantly or merely when suits us but every single day and with vigour.

To be frank, it is our goddamned duty to this club and to future generations of fans.

Those who come after us must inherit a football landscape which resembles reality as closely as it possibly can, not what our enemies would create; a stinking valley of lies.