Events In The US Are Reminder To All Of Us: The Promotion Of Hatred Is Dangerous.

I’m sitting right now and the clock reads 01.38. I have the TV on behind me.

What I am watching is not pleasant in the least.

America was a troubled country, an unravelling country, before the events which are still unfolding as I write this. God knows what darkness might be about to engulf that nation in the aftermath of the attempt to kill Trump, which is certainly what has taken place here. I doubt it will be anything good.

In his second inaugural speech, Lincoln conjured up one of his most awful metaphors.

Speaking about the continuation of the civil war, he invoked the horrible possibility that it would continue until “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” There are some who think that America never really stopped being at war.

All through history, it has been a violent and dangerous country.

Its most sensible politicians are saying all the right things – so far – but I’ve already heard one lunatic from deep MAGA blame Joe Biden for this. That’s where the discourse has gotten. It is the right which has consistently invoked the possibility of, and even threatened, violence. On 6 January those threats became acts. But the right doesn’t have a monopoly on lunacy. American politics is a hateful place now, and in a country with a lot of guns that’s a bad place to be.

When you preach hatred and paranoia and peddle conspiracy theories all day every day some people will take that to heart. Some people will act on it. When you issue not-so-veiled threats about “retribution” and ruling as a dictator, yes even for a day, some people will get angry. Trump and his people have spent a long time playing with fire in a room soaked in gasoline and in which grenades are bagged and stacked in every corner.

They overlooked just one thing; not all the guys with the guns are on their side of the lines. It’s hard not to see this as the act of someone who has taken Never Trump to the darkest possible extreme. It is shocking. It is horrific. It is sickening to watch.

But let’s be honest, in a country so polarised, and with the stakes of this election so high, the kind of highwire behaviour in which the MAGA movement has for so long been engaged was always going to have consequences in one way or another. It could just as easily have manifest itself in someone taking a shot at Biden.

America has been through this before.

John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln, and considered that a patriotic act. At least one newspaper of the time praised the killing as an “act ordained by God.” Right-wingers cheered the murder of JFK accusing him of being a communist.

In the years that followed, after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, the KKK stepped up its campaign of violence with bombings and shootings. In 1968, Kennedy’s brother Bobby was shot whilst running for President. That same year, Martin Luther King was murdered.

Two years later Kent State happened, when National Guardsmen shot and killed demonstrating college students. In 1972, the far-right candidate George Wallace was shot whilst running for President as an independent … political violence is not new in America, but this is the most polarised the country has ever been.

We live in a polarised world, of course.

There are people on both the right and the left here at home who would dearly love to take the “culture wars” out onto the street.

During the Brexit referendum, Jo Cox was shot and killed by a far-right activist; in the aftermath almost every serious politician in the country spoke out about the need for people to moderate the tone of the debate and for a while some form of sanity was restored. It didn’t last.

Before long, you had senior politicians and national newspapers calling judges “enemies of the people” and referring to “treason” and other such hysterical nonsense.

Political violence here in the UK is not rare – unfortunately it’s more common than a lot of people realise – but we have somehow, thankfully, avoided the kind of bloodshed we see elsewhere.

What’s the point of all this?

Well, regular readers will know exactly what the point of it is.

I don’t even have to look at my inbox to recognise that Scottish football has become mired in hatred and I don’t have to tell you that I believe there are a lot of people who bear some responsibility for that. At a time like this, it is wise to take stock of your own actions but this is not the first time I’ve conducted a little personal inventory to make sure I’m not contributing to it.

I am very confident that I’m not, being well aware of where that kind of behaviour can lead. One of the reasons I’m so vocal on certain subjects is that I am not a zealot and don’t view the world through either end of the extreme lens, and I think it behoves all of us to call out those who are.

I feel the same way about Nazi salutes and songs of hate at Ibrox as I do about the PFLP flag at Celtic Park; this stuff has no place in our game.

Hell, this stuff shouldn’t even have any place in our society.

I wish dearly that our media did not give credence to the Victim Lie. Ibrox’s sense of grievance is hazardous and those who promote it are stupid to do so. I also wish that the Ibrox fans more extreme behaviour did not inspire a handful of eejits in our own support to wish to respond in kind. Ordinary people want no part in any of it.

Ibrox has a particular issue with this stuff though. Some of the stuff that proliferates on their forums is seriously unhinged. Their belief in conspiracy theories and this idea that their club is somehow put upon is dangerous. Their flirtation with the alt-right is potentially very, very serious indeed.

The radicalisation of certain elements of their support is a reason for us all to be concerned; the blue gimp brigade might have given us all a few laughs, but would you have been happy to run into that lot on those streets that day wearing a Celtic shirt?

Their hatred of their own country is deranged.

Their ludicrous belief that their “culture” is under attack has been shown up for exactly what it is; we’ve just had the annual horror show of sectarian marches, fully signed off on although we have an SNP led-council here in Glasgow and an SNP First Minister in Holyrood. Some threat to their “culture.”

The behaviour of sections of their fan-base plumb the depths, from their dark obsessions to their naked bigotry. This country does indulge them. It does excuse them. It does tolerate from them far more than it ought to.

You have a club over there which refused to secure the safety of our fans at their ground, which led to us having to take drastic action to bring the matter to a head. The media still refers to the “Old Firm” game, in spite of the clear wishes of Celtic to disassociate itself from that toxic slogan, and a fixture built around hatred. We know it’s promoted on that basis. I decided years ago not to tiptoe around this or pretend not to recognise that.

Their fans put up a banner at a UEFA match last season which paid tribute to a sectarian razor gang. What else is there to say? You could say nothing, I suppose, since that’s what the media said, and what the governing bodies said. It’s unhinged behaviour.

Their “traditional” anthem, the one where they are “up to their knees in fenian blood” is horrific and every instance of it should be subject to prosecution under the new hate crimes bill. And this isn’t just their crazier fans; we have people like Ally McCoist threatening to break that law.

That’s what you’re up against here. When someone in the mainstream can say something like that and avoid any widespread condemnation, I think we’re much further down the road towards serious problems than we realise. I’d rather not complete that journey.

Yet there is a minority of our support which would happily join them in the gutter, with its stuff about dead Ibrox kit-men and other vile stuff which is so close to the more extreme chants from the sewer dweller element across town that it’s a wonder they don’t see each other when they look in the mirror.

Every now and again I see some tweet or read some social media comment about “responding in kind” to provocations and worse … and I just want to grab those people and shake them out of whatever lunacy has them in its grip.

This coming season, I hope that we can all calm down a little. My long lament is that the game here is too full of this stuff, and it does not stop at Glasgow either. Some of the most abysmal stuff directed at our club and its fans has come at grounds other than Ibrox.

The level of bile we’re subjected to in certain of those places should be highlighted much more than it is.

Celtic fans are, by and large, free from this sort of behaviour. Vigilance is called for in making sure it stays like that. We need to be on our guard, always, for the creep of extremism into our fan-base and our yob element needs to be made to feel as unwelcome as possible.

Watching the news right now, it’s obvious that in spite of the best hopes of some people to try and draw some good from this terrible, terrible incident that their hope will be forlorn; Republican Party activists are already blaming the left for promoting hatred against their candidate.

Their cognitive dissonance is astounding.

It’s as if 6 January never happened. It’s as if the rants about Mexican rapists and the demonising of Muslims never took place.

Dr King was right. And he was murdered.

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate…Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

America continues to descend into the madness, and I cannot see an ending without much more of it.

What a tragedy. What a disaster.

We have been warned.