Fear And Loathing And The Unseen Celtic Hand.

There’s an old “joke” from pre-war Germany that I think about sometimes, not because it’s particularly funny but because it is brilliantly observed and pertinent today in all kinds of settings, and although it’s making a point about antisemitism that point could just as easily be extended to any situation where a minority group is being scapegoated and harassed and accused all the live long day of all manner of absurd things.

Two elder Jews are sitting in the park, reading newspapers, and one suddenly laughs out loud. The other turns to him in disgust and says “It’s not enough that you read that Nazi rag, but you think there’s humour in there?”

His friend turns to him and says with dark irony, “It’s all humour. When I read your newspaper it’s full of stories about Jews being beaten, Jews being imprisoned, Jews having all their possessions confiscated … but in this one, we Jews control the whole world.”

Regular readers know that I consider 1984 to be a masterpiece, unquestionably one of the greatest novels ever written. That joke could have come from any totalitarian state, even the one Orwell describes right down to the finest detail; certainly, everyone in the Inner Party would have found it amusing and recognised its truth.

The dark heart of that joke is that it’s the way the Jews are presented in the Nazi media which is used to “justify” the pogroms against them. The idea that the Jews had everything was fed to millions of people who had nothing … and they felt that they were entitled to lash out at their so-called “oppressors” as a consequence.

And of course, as the guy reading that paper knows it’s one of the most preposterous lies ever forced on supposedly intelligent people.

The reason that joke, if we’re calling it that, is still with us today is that similar crazy stories are being forced on people all over the world right now, from Britain to America to Russia to North Korea … the tune is the same even if the words are a little different, and the multiple variations of that song have multiple enemies at their core.

In the US, Trump has managed to convince tens of millions of people about the lie of the stolen election, and the grand conspiracy of left-wing agitators and the Deep State, two groups which have nothing in common whatsoever, who are diametrically opposed to one another, which should be obvious to everybody … and yet those tens of millions believe it.

It only sounds uniquely crazy, it only seems like we’ve taken a very dark turn onto uncharted ground, until you consider that back in the 1920’s Hitler was telling people that Jews controlled both capitalism and the Communist movement simultaneously … which is about as nuts as any theory that has ever been proposed anywhere in the world at any time.

The Big Lie will always have an audience. And the bigger the lie the bigger the audience, a great moral failing in the human character which has led us to unspeakable acts over and over again. Human beings are infinitely malleable it seems, infinitely capable of being shaped by demagoguery and appeals to their primal instincts.

I saw a lot of crazy stuff as a political activist and a lot of people who knew me back then are aware that I was active in some left-wing causes that weren’t exactly mainstream. I flirted with direct action stuff, it always had a fascination and an attraction for me because I knew that traditional political activity is slow and laborious and sometimes you just want results in the here and now. I learned a lot of low-down dirty tricks. I moved in strange circles.

I was very familiar with a lot of what was going on with the far-right in Scotland, and I can tell you right now that there’s always been an undercurrent of loyalism and Orangeism in there, not that this will come as any surprise to people, and as such their lunatics have always been a bit out there in ways that your average skin-headed Little Englander isn’t … but I’ve never seen anything like the level of bitterness, hatred and simmering threat, nor the level of ideological retreat from reality which exists right now on the Ibrox fan forums.

Even if you’re used to it, it can absolutely blow your mind. The other day, Phil Mac Giolla Bhain spoke to me and almost laughed himself silly reading me a bizarre social media post he’d seen which suggested – I am not joking – that Brother Walfrid might be Jack The Ripper. It’s funny but there’s a part of you that knows you shouldn’t be laughing, that it’s not a laughing matter.

Because there’s something really wrong with these people. This is not a normal way to live, these are not normal ideas, this is Pizzagate stuff, this is 4Chan and Qanon, this is out there in a way that should be nowhere near the national game. Look at the obsession with child abuse on those forums and the cognitive dissonance to demand “justice”, but only for the victims of one specific case. Their motivation has nothing to do with justice, it’s about hatred.

This is them trying to justify the poison that courses through their veins, and it’s not the only thing they cling to in order to do that. At the centre of much of what festers in those cesspits is a conspiracy theory for the ages; the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand.

The first thing you need to realise is that they do genuinely believe this stuff, and they are afraid of it the way kids with great imaginations see dark shapes slithering in their closets and watch as their covers turn into a sea of writhing snakes; their terror of the Unseen Hand is real and they never have the slightest doubt that it is working to harm them.

This is a sickness. Of course, it is. I’m making no excuses for these people; if they would stop and think about some of this stuff critically instead of reacting to it all emotionally, they might be able to snap out of the worst of it. I once wrote that “those who live in fairytales should ever be afraid of dragons”. They have created their own world inside their heads, one where they are a giant thing here in Scotland and beyond, what Murray once called “the biggest institution in this country after the church”: in short, the biggest except for God.

And yet that world is not perfect. They are this enormous and powerful thing … and yet over and over and over again they’re being bitch-slapped repeatedly by us. How does that happen? Well, if you’ll pardon the pun, “enter the dragon.” And that’s our club. But how can our club possibly be this great a threat? They are The Peepul after all.

This is where the theory of the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand comes in, and I have to admit that this is a beauty. The most remarkable thing about it is that it has been fed and nurtured by people who should know better; journalists, politicians, club directors and even officials at the governing bodies of Scottish football.

Ibrox fans have been fed the nonsense that the only reason they are behind Celtic is that we are at the centre of a vast and powerful nexus of interests which on the surface of it have nothing in common at all, but come together every once in a while, with the sole intention of harming their club. This is lunacy, that goes without saying, but these people do believe it and you only have to look at their forums to see that.

We have “infiltrated” every level of society. That’s the claim. Infiltrated. Note the language. There is so much hate in that single word. It’s as if we – the “we” being the Irish, Catholics or basically anyone who doesn’t self-identify as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant – don’t have the right to be part of high profile and important professions. It’s as if we didn’t move into those professions for our own sake, and for a better life for our families but just to spite them.

And not only did we “infiltrate” the highest strata in society, but we bent it to our will. You see why I opened the piece with that old Jewish joke now?

The Catholic community in Scotland, who for years were forced out of every major job in industry, who every July are forced to watch marches on the streets which are expressions of other’s supremacy over us, we who also have to endure Guy Fawkes Day and the anti-Catholic undertones of that (it’s no coincidence that the Marching Season includes its bonfires) have been transformed, in the eyes of these people, into the oppressors, into the real source of all the power in the land … which is very obviously a preposterous idea.

The upper crust in this country – as long as we’re part of this Union, as long as we have the flag and the crown – is not comprised of people like us, let me put it that way. The lodges, both Orange and Masonic, are dominant. The judiciary come from such a narrow sliver of society, not our part, that’s for sure, that it’s no wonder the Shadow Justice Secretary and former journalist Russell Findlay does not believe that any future investigation into the Malicious Prosecutions Scandal can be held in this country because it would just be a cover-up.

And we don’t even need to go into the Malicious Prosecutions Scandal itself, because the details of that are so well known and it could easily be a separate piece.

They blame us for everything. The quest for Scottish independence, which they perceive as a threat to their identity, is not something we want for its own sake, to have a country of our own in which we control its destiny … no, it’s part of a wide-ranging attack on their culture. Not only do we control the SNP, in their eyes, but we control the Labour Party as well. They don’t yet think we control the Tories, or the Lib Dems, but they aren’t going to trust The Green Party, are they?

Glasgow City Council is, to them, Glasgow Catholic Council. But if it was, their supremacist marches wouldn’t be allowed every year; they are a national embarrassment that we should have set aside decades ago.

Still, they go on, which is odd if this an environment we control.

So, they believe that the political class belongs to us.

Needless to say, they believe the same about the media, which is in its own way even more hilarious. Which brings us to football, and their “proof” of the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand … the death of Rangers.

I mentioned 1984 earlier; you will not get a greater example of doublethink than to listen to them talk about those events in the way they do. I maintain, of course, that Scottish football lives in the shadow of the two great lies which exist about that period. Most people talk about one, and they have different names for it with some calling it the Continuation Lie and others the Liquidation Lie or the Relegation Lie … I call it the Survival Lie.

But whichever name you give that fiction, it contains the same glaring contradictions and holes. It contains the same basic problems, what George RR Martin calls the Meereenese Knot, and with a very different meaning than the one in the show. In Martin’s terms, it’s a situation so complicated that you cannot easily untangle one part of it without the whole thing starting to unravel, creating a whole new set of problems for you.

And the Survival Lie cannot stand without some way to account for all those problems. The only way the Survival Lie makes sense is if you create an entire new level of lies to sustain it … and that’s why I always talk about the second lie, the Victim Lie, which maintains that they were not liquidated but relegated, that maintains that they were not the ones to blame for that mess but that it was created by others to punish them for their successes.

And the Victim Lie is enormous and far more complicated than the Survival Lie, and it is far, far more dangerous. The Victim Lie is why this article is being written, because everything we’ve seen in the past seven days, all the variations of madness we’ve been watching for years now, spring directly from it and the way that it has toxified our national game.

Ibrox’s present level of self-pity and unremitting fury, every battle they’ve had with the governing bodies, every attempt they have made to subvert our sport, is based on their thirst for revenge, which they justify by telling themselves that it was the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand which sent them to the lower divisions and now seeks to thwart every move they make.

Just the other day, James Dornan put a motion in front of the Scottish Parliament which, on the surface of it, presented them with exactly what they’ve spent an entire week banging their heads against the wall to get.

It is the most high-profile bit of support they’ve had, and they should be grateful for it because if they look around Scottish football, their conduct in this case is such a cause for concern that they’re pretty much alone, with even some of their so-called friends running the other way. The hacks who spent the first half of the week backing them vocally cannot get out of the road quickly enough as the blowback threatens to level everything around them.

James Dornan isn’t motivated by any regard for or love for their club; that’s a fact and they are right not to trust that this has an altruistic motive. It’s exactly as I wrote early last week; their conduct has presented us and others with an opportunity that is too good to resist. Dornan supports SFA reform and this is a perfect way to put it on the table.

But this is where the true lunacy of Ibrox’s position comes out most clearly.

You look at the reaction on Celtic cyberspace to Dornan’s motion and apart from a few people who can’t read between the lines or who are incapable of recognising when someone is doing us a favour, there is nearly universal support for it although it opens with an expression of support for their club and takes their side in this fight. We don’t care that this gives them what they allegedly want … this is what we want, this is what we’ve been clamouring for and we don’t care whether it gives them a temporary victory or not. That’s the difference between us and them.

Because for most of them, the very fact that it’s Dornan is reason enough not to want his backing. They think he was part of the conspiracy and so his support can only mean that this is just another front in the war they think is being waged against them.

Put it this way, Celtic fans know what we want from full transparency. It will level the playing field. If we’re right about the anti-Celtic culture at the SFA that makes it tougher for that sort of culture to thrive. Other Scottish clubs who believe that “the Glasgow clubs” get everything should want this because it makes the game fairer from their point of view, which is why I’m surprised that more of them are not chipping in on this, although perhaps Ibrox’s conduct is seen as so toxic that no club wants to put its name to anything with theirs on it.

But the real shocker here is that their fans are so paranoid, so convinced in the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand that they are ready to reject what they have spent the whole week clamouring for because a suspected enemy of their club has proposed it. The idea of transparency? They suddenly think it benefits us. The campaign to get a regulator? “It’ll be One Of Them, they’ve already got it arranged” is the sort of attitude they’re taking.

Let me tell you; I think transparency does benefit us.

But that belief comes from the place where I think the SFA and the SPFL have been unfair on us. If they believe the same, wouldn’t transparency benefit them? If they believe they are the victims, why does the case for reform not speak for itself, instead of turning into another source of paranoia?

This is what I’ve never been able to understand about these Peepul; all these years we’ve been asking for referees to declare allegiances, for the SFA to undergo a major revolution, for refereeing to be taken out of the hands of Hampden … this is because there is evidence which suggests strongly that we get a raw deal. If they believe in the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand would they not be right there with us in wanting those changes?

It is not enough to demand “transparency” only when it suits you. At the start of this week, when most people in the media were banging the drum on Ibrox’s behalf, we had no real way of knowing how it would all turn out; maybe there was some conspiracy in our favour which we’d have been better off leaving alone, eah? But our sites never wavered in demanding that same transparency, even though in this case we got the decision.

Because we are genuine about this, we believe it’s the right thing to do. Our position on it is entirely consistent whether we’re winning or whether we’re losing, whether we’re getting decisions or whether they are going against us. We don’t use this as a smokescreen.

We’re also not consumed by paranoia, although we are always accused of it.

When Celtic fans talk about the culture at Hampden, we can base our belief on actual events and accumulated evidence. We recognise that something isn’t right, but few of us are talking about the whole SFA being a raging centre of anti-Celtic hatred because it’s very obvious that it isn’t. There are big problems with officiating, but as I’ve said on this site they don’t have to be down to bias; there could be some other form of corruption here, and I’ve even been willing to accept that maybe our officials are just terrible at their jobs.

I know that the current leadership at Hampden – the leadership – don’t have any love for Ibrox. How could they, considering all the trouble that club has caused? But these guys have made no effort at all to change the culture there or tackle Ibrox’s many, ,many sins in any meaningful way, and it doesn’t really matter why they won’t do it; this game continues to suffer for the toxic behaviour of that club thinking it can get away with anything.

In short, we’re basically open-minded about this stuff, we’re always looking for cause and effect, we’re always looking for answers rather than just leaping to conclusions. And here’s the important bit; we avoid paranoia because we recognise that whichever of those things is true, the solutions are the same. Openness, transparency, better training, higher pay … and if the SFA can’t or won’t deliver those things then it needs to be taken away from them entirely.

More than that, though, we are not consumed 24/7 with hatred. And hatred, as this blog has said many times, is their key defining characteristic. They hate reflexively, limitlessly, because they’ve been told that the world is against them and they believe that.

Everything that club does is based on fear and loathing. Everything. Fear of their myriad enemies, loathing at the world which apparently only exists to make them suffer.

But above all else, it’s fear and loathing of the Unseen Fenian Hand, which is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The hand that runs UEFA, FIFA, the Labour Party, the SNP, the SFA and owns the Scottish media. The hand that controlled HMRC when it put the first Ibrox club into administration and then liquidated it. That HMRC was literally Her Majesty’s Revenue And Customs didn’t affect their thinking one bit.

Maybe she was in on The Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand too?

It’s this retreat from any sort of reform, it’s this refusal to see anybody proposing reform as an enemy, to view the quest to change things in football here as just another part of the Grand Plan to keep them down that blows your mind though.

They really are convinced that the very thing they claim to want here will somehow be twisted and used against them by us. Because we run everything.

Hey, it doesn’t have to make sense.

When serious commentators were asked if they believed Russia would invade Ukraine most of them said no because there was no way for Russia to get what it wanted out of that; Ukraine was always going to move closer to NATO, sanctions would follow, countries on the Western border which hadn’t joined the Alliance would do so … it was too stupid to be real.

On the night Operation Barbarosa began, German divisions were going one way and supply trains from Russia, carrying grain to feed German civilians were going the other way, just one of the many benefits of the non-aggression pact between the two countries.

Julius Caesar was able to take and keep power largely because the people of Rome thought that he had expanded the empire for them, and was promising them a bright new future. Yet the Senators who murdered him expected those same people to greet them like heroes because they had assassinated a tyrant and they had to flee the city in terror when that didn’t happen.

Millions of Americans believe that Joe Biden stole the last election and that the Democratic Party is in league with Wall Street to keep the working man in servitude and that it’s a crooked alleged billionaire with a gold elevator in his house who is the warrior they have been waiting for to rescue them, the same guy who gave billionaires the biggest tax cut in American history the last time he was in office. Those people believe that he’s the last great hope of the Constitution he is publicly threatening to shred on his first day back if he’s elected again.

And here in Britain, we voted to leave the EU because a guy slapped a lie onto the side of a bus and a bunch of elitists educated at private schools told working class communites that those communities would be better off if they voted to leave the world’s largest free trade block, and a great many of those people believed that.

Nobody said the world has to make any sense. A lot of it doesn’t.

So look around you folks and just accept it; all this is ours.

We are the not-so-secret rulers of the world.

We control it all, and we somehow manage to do this whilst winning football matches at the same time. And because we run literally everything there is nothing you can offer these Peepul which they will accept … because they see it as all part of the same plan.

That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’ve endured the last week.

Fear and loathing of the Unseen Celtic Hand.

It sure does keep busy.

Where do we find the time?