Sevco Fans: The Bigger The Lie, The More They Believe.

“The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” – Joseph Goebbels.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again … Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.” – George Orwell.

“It was easier to dislodge untruths before social media. In social media, people tend to take public positions. When that position turns out to be wrong, it’s embarrassing. And backing down is typically seen as weakness. So they double-down on untrue claims to save face and personal credibility. …” –  Miriam Bowers-Abbott.

The first two of those quotes will be recognisable to avid readers. The third is a little more obscure; it comes from a Salon magazine article entitled “The psychological reason that so many fall for the Big Lie”, which is about the Republican right and their embrace of Trump’s notorious Stolen Election fiction. It might prove to be the most intriguing of the three.

I’ve been interested in the twin principles of Ibrox doublethink – Sevcologic and Sevconomics – for a long time now. Sevcologic would have been easily recognised by Orwell. It is the thought system that props up their own Big Lie, the Survival Lie. It provides the underlying structure for the Victim Lie which acts as a support pillar for its bastard relation.

Sevcologic was on display last week in the story about Malik Tillman.

I would have thought no sane or rational person would have accepted a story like that, but they didn’t just do so they lapped it up. That the mainstream media quickly followed them was breathtakingly cynical. There have to be people in those newsrooms who smelled the bullshit wafting off that, but they ran it anyway and thus promoted an absolute fiction as fact.

Sevconomics was on display too in the lunatic assertion that they were not just £1 million better off but £7 million to the good; the £1 million they think is already bagged, the £1 million they anticipate from Tillman going for a major sum … and the £5 million it would have cost to sign him. These Peepul might as well be playing with Monopoly money for all the reality that enters their thoughts when this stuff is concerned. They live in a fantasy world.

Only absolute fools could have believed that story. It’s as Goebbels said; the policy of the club is to send this stuff out to its “official media partners” and from those gullible outlets it’s only one leap away from going mainstream. Anyone who looks at that story with a critical eye can see that it’s nonsensical. But still, it generated a whole day of news, although the fictional nature of the story did, in fact, make them look utterly ridiculous.

And it dawned on me; the mainstream media is the larger problem here.

If they were better at their jobs, and they dismissed this kind of stuff as soon as it appeared then the Ibrox club would not so readily tell these lies and their fans would not be half as mad as they appear to be. The media has spoon-fed them so much garbage that even the daftest stories appear real to them. Their club takes full advantage of that, as they did this week.

But of course, you cannot absolve those fans of blame entirely.

Because our own fans would never be quite so credulous. A story like that would have been ripped apart by a lot of the fan sites and we’d have wondered just why the club was trying to sell us such tripe. The obvious explanation is that they are deeply embarrassed that their efforts to get Tillman on the cheap have been rebuffed by the Germans and are now trying to put a positive spin on it, but it’s a little like if Celtic had said in the John McGinn aftermath that the whole effort to sign him was a ploy to bring Mulumba’s agent to the table instead … we’d have seen through it in a minute.

Reality scares these Peepul. That much has been obvious for a long time. In their shoes, I might be scared as well. They believe their “culture” is under attack; it is. It is under attack precisely because it is based on delusions of grandeur, a supremacist mind-set which belongs in another century, the latent sectarianism and bigotry and racism at its core.

And although I have zero sympathy for some intellectually stunted lout who gets his rocks off every July marching down Catholic streets and giving the finger to the local chapel, I know how I would feel if I was in his position and seeing the steady erosion of all he holds dear. People have been trying to do it to the Catholics, and the Irish Catholics in particular, for centuries.

Education enables you to thrive, no matter how much they try to keep you down. It helps, though, if your ideology and “culture” was not based on hatred in the first place. One day all that Orange Walk malarkey will be viewed the way people across the world viewed the marchers in Charlottesville, the same way we view the Nuremberg Rallies.

The thing is, that day might have come already but for our mainstream media and their unwillingness to question what goes on at Ibrox. These people have the cheek to take after us for our banning two outlets from the Rodgers presser yesterday; if they stuck to the facts and didn’t feel the need to sensationalise and embellish so often they wouldn’t have credibility problems and this club of ours might not feel it had to take such action to send a message.

The Tillman story broke as it became clear that their club will not find the funds to sign him. Their efforts to move on several players in the current squad – Hagi, Davies, Kamara, Colak – have ended in failure. There is zero re-sale value amongst their current footballers, and it’s not even clear that Cantwell and Raskin would command any.

It is not a coincidence that in the same week the Tillman story appears that some of their media allies are telling them that the free transfer market is the right one to exploit and that the manager is doing the smart thing by shopping there. It’s also the week in which – as we unveiled Rodgers – they put out another piece of PR fluff about doing up Ibrox.

That story made me chuckle, not for the stuff the club wrote but about the fans deranged forum debates about how to raise the £25 million to do it.

The club has no intention of spending that kind of money, but that didn’t make the insane fund raising suggestions any less ridiculous or hilarious to read.

A “ten year season ticket” sold to “wealthier fans” would pay for it … presumably they think there are Arab sheikhs on their waiting list. “6,000 extra ‘10 year’ season tickets at £5k a go raises £30 million on day one, Get it sorted Bisgrove,” reads one lunatic.

Another fan has tallied it up and thinks that it could be paid for by selling tickets at £3000 each … maybe they’ve not noticed the credit crunch or the mortgage crisis?

But it’s been years of this, years of having no-one – except for us – to try and connect them to reality in some way. Their club lies. The media repeats those lies.

Their fan media guys are mostly out of their minds as Dingwall proved this past week as well … and since they don’t listen to us and indeed actively scorn everything we say, you can’t see sanity dawning over there.