Celtic Is A Club With Enemies We Will Never Be Able To Appease.

Today, Ange sat in front of the media and gave a perfect press conference in spite of hacks desperately fishing for a story. The best they got is that he said the club wants fans to respect the minute’s applause on Sunday.

But of course they do. This is not news.

But the press has tried to make it news, and some of them have written their own version of it, to further poison the discourse and to try to involve him in something that is none of his doing.

“Ange Postecoglou calls for Celtic respectful tribute to The Queen but has not apologised for Warsaw banners” screams the headline in The Scottish Daily Express, one of the papers I explicitly pointed out is not friendly towards out club.

Even by this rag’s diabolical lack of standards, that headline is a disgrace.

But it makes it clear that those who are demanding that our club toe some line or another would not be satisfied even if we did. These people hate us. Nothing we can do is going to change that. Nothing we can say will make a blind bit of difference to it.

Trying to appease them is like trying to appease a ravenous wolf by offering it your ham sandwich. It’s not futile as much as it’s just plain stupid.

Do not kid yourselves that if there had been no banner on Wednesday night that we would not, right now, be reading headlines attacking our club. From the moment she popped her clogs last Friday, the pencils have been sharp and ready to stab us with.

Even before it had happened, we were being slammed all over the place.

Some in the right wing media were blaming us for the fact that no games took place last weekend, saying that the SFA and the EPL had decided that Liverpool and Celtic fans could not be trusted. Then it was attacks because the club issued a statement via its website but didn’t put that statement out on social media. Then it was because Warsaw wasn’t holding a minute’s silence, for which our club was blamed for being part of the negotiations.

Do you get the drift here? It isn’t hard to see.

We would have been attacked regardless, because we were being attacked anyway.

We have enemies. There is no use trying to appeal to their better nature.

They will not be sated until they are up to their knees in our blood. You can hear that song over and over again until it loses all meaning; but it means what it says. Understand it here and now.

That’s what it is that we are dealing with, and you better never forget that.

Even the coverage of the banners themselves gives the game away. They were “hateful” and dishonoured the Queen. She was not mentioned in either. In fact, the fans who put those banners together went out of their way not to; the slogan said “fuck the crown”. The last I heard that was a wholly legitimate view shared by many millions of people.

The fans could have done nothing, of course.

This is the rationale you hear all over the place.

“Better to stay silent if you’ve nothing good to say.”

Oh what bullshit.

Look at some of the people who are attacking our club; Farage, Eden, Kyle, Morgan. If these people held to that maxim we would never hear from them again, period. Cause all they do is spew poison and bile all day, every day, to a vampiric, curtain twitching, spiteful, nasty audience.

These people make their living from “punching down.” I am not going to be cowed or broken or silenced by this gallery of goons. None of us should.

Besides, let’s be honest here; for the last seven days every person who lives in this country has had to skim big sections of the newspapers, ignore entire hours of the telly and in some way or another had our lives disrupted by all this palaver.

Operations have been cancelled in hospitals.

A holiday resort planned to evict every single one of its guests for the day of the funeral, and only relented after outrage.

Supermarket chains are closing their doors, and these are the “open 24 hours” places which didn’t even shut during COVID.

And yes, football fixtures were cancelled across the boards, subjecting all of us to last weekend’s monotony.

And we’re expected to take that in equanimity and silence?

Easier to do when this isn’t get rammed down your throat all day, every day, with no escape, and accompanied by what amounts to a demand that we play ball lest we be ostracised by these toerags and everybody else with a grievance to air.

This hostile atmosphere to any dissent from the “national mood” has been noted by many in the mainstream press and the commentariat, by the way. Polly Toynbee of The Guardian punched back against it yesterday.

“When you next hear them trying to stir up bogus ‘cancel culture’ indignation about a few students no-platforming some speaker on a college campus somewhere, remember what real cancelling is, how dangerous, nasty and powerful,” she said. “It is the megaphones of the right intimidating a whole country by seizing on minor peccadillos, mild anti-royalism or anti-colonial sentiment.”

That and, across the boards, a hatred of our club and what it represents.

Who amongst our number thought we really had friends, or could make any, amongst those people or the constituency they pander to? Who amongst our number genuinely believes that those who know and respect us know something new and so respect us any less?

Our club has not been damaged one bit.

The club didn’t do this, a group of fans did, and those same fans have honoured the hunger strikers, sang about the Irish War of Independence, compared William Wallace to Bobby Sands and numerous other things over the years … not a single person who knows a single thing about those fans is even surprised by those banners far less shocked by them.

Our club has maintained its friendships and allegiances and worldwide recognition through all of it, and it’s why so many of these thuggish clowns are lumbering about attacking us today … they’ve been waiting to do it for years.

Do you honestly think we’re losing allies and partners and respect because our fans are amongst the only ones in Britain who will not be hammered into playing along with this complete farce?

This is the 21st century.

We should not need to pander and pretend that the idea of a hereditary monarch “ruling over us” is not outdated, bigoted claptrap which this country should have grown out of decades ago. The crown itself is the representation of an imperialist, sectarian and racist institution and we should not have to pretend to honour or even respect it.

For God’s sake … this only enhances the esteem in which our international friends hold us.

How do you think we got these friends in the first place?

“Oh, it’s appalling,” screams social media and swathes of the mainstream press.

In Scotland. In Britain.

We know these people well enough to know where they stand.

These people detest us and everything we stand for so why, suddenly, do so many people care what they think?

We’ve never cared before, so why start now?

The only people genuinely surprised are those too lazy to do their homework.

Others just love to be offended and aren’t happy unless they have someone to scream at.

And if you’re non-white or Irish all the better for them.

These people are bullies, the worst sort of trash, and they specialise in intimidating people into silence and acquiescence.

They picked the wrong targets this time.

Others, as I’ve pointed out over and over again, have been rubbing their hands together waiting for something to crow about.

I couldn’t care less what these Peepul think.

Because I already know what they think and I’ve known it since I was old enough to hear the first insults, the first wave of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bile being directed at me and mine.

This is not about respect, and it never was.

This is the enemies of Celtic believing that they can either intimidate us into toeing the line or seeking to punish us if we don’t, and they can go straight to Hell because some of us won’t bend and will throw it right back at them, calling them out on their hypocrisy, their history and their bigotry.