Epilogue
I met David years later
in Aberdeen. We’d written a few times after the few days we’d spent together in
Moscow and I’d even spoken to him on the telephone. I’d let him know what had
happened. I didn’t go into any great detail, but he knew that Galina was in
Kaliningrad. He’d told me some of his side of the story. I’d also written to
Vera. She too had been worried about Galina and that was one of the main
reasons why she had gone with her to the retreat. She told me some other things
that I would not have known otherwise. It is in this way that I have been able
to construct the story and include the occasional conversation that I could not
have heard.
Eventually Petr and I
decided it was time to move on. Life in Russia gradually became more difficult.
We had both hoped for something rather better when I moved there and had both
done our best to help bring this about. But there comes a point when you realise
that there’s nothing more than you can do. It’s like building a dam in a river
when you’re a child. You pile up the stones and you keep piling them and the
dam has a sort of shape. But the river keeps pushing the stones away. It all
just keeps collapsing and if you return to the spot the next day it’s hard to
notice quite where it was that you were building your dam.
Someone wanted Petr’s
job. It was rather a good job that paid quite well by Russian standards. He did
a good job, too, but somehow he had lost some of his connections over the
years, or else it was noticed that he had not quite moved with the times. He
didn’t like taking bribes and tried to act honestly. Of course, he had to make
compromises as we all did. But he had limits. Eventually, when it became clear
that there was going to be some sort of fight, he went to see the person he
usually saw in those circumstances. He was told that this time, unfortunately,
he could not be helped. The person who wanted his job was too highly protected.
At this point he knew it was best to give up the fight. If he gave in
gracefully, he would be given something in return. At the very least he would
be left alone.
I told my friends in
Cambridge that it was time for me to come back. They agreed. I had been in
Russia a remarkably long time. It must have been nearly twenty years. These
things never go on forever. Now was as good a time as any to move on.
I was given the choice
of where we could move to. I could go back to Cambridge or more or less
anywhere I felt like. Something would be found for Petr, too. We discussed it a
little bit. We wondered about going somewhere like Australia or New Zealand,
even the United States. But it all seemed so far away and anyway, he didn’t
want to be so far from Russia that it would be a major journey just to go for a
visit. I didn’t want to be too far away either. We had an idea that perhaps we
might retire there. People look on Russia with a lot of misunderstanding. They
see the news about the politics and think life is somehow awful. It was never
awful. They were the best years of my life that I spent in Russia. I loved
nearly every day, not merely because I was with the man I loved.
We chose to go to
Aberdeen. I might have chosen to go elsewhere if I’d known about the battles I
would have to fight here. But I probably wouldn’t. This is what I do. This is
where I am from. After all, I was born nearby and my parents still lived in a
little village in the countryside. A job
was found for me, that didn’t involve too much teaching. I was more or less
left alone. I turned up every day at the University, found my office and wrote
more or less what I felt like writing.
Most people who come
across me assume that I’m Russian. It was far easier for me to be employed with
my Russian passport and so I’m called Zhenya by most of my friends. That is if
they can pronounce it. One or two people who are rather closer to me call me
Effie. My Mum and Dad do, so does Petr and so does David.
I’d lost touch with
David some years earlier and so had no idea how the story ended. I never saw
Galina again. I tried calling her parents a few times, but she refused to take
the call. I might have seen her in the street one time. I couldn’t tell from a
distance, but something always made me want to look out for her in crowds on
the pavement and when you do that, it’s very easy to be mistaken. You end up
seeing people who couldn’t possibly be there, people from a past that is
already long ago.
David told me that he
had continued his correspondence with Galina after leaving her in Moscow. He
kept trying to get to Kaliningrad to see her. But she always found some sort of
way to put him off. He tried to revive the idea of going to India, he was
willing to pay for both of them to go. During the course of a few letters they
made some plans to do so. It even went so far as him getting an Indian visa. He
was just on the point of buying tickets. The date was all but set. In the
meantime he had been finding out as much as he could about what he thought she
believed and so began reading a book that she had mentioned she would like to
read, only it wasn’t translated into Russian.
It was a long poem called the Gita Gavinda, translated into English as
the Love Song of the Dark Lord. It was a sort of love story involving Krishna
and some female cowherds especially one called Radha. He rather enjoyed it.
There was a sort of eroticism rather like the Song of Songs. It dealt with
Krishna’s faithlessness, but how in the end, he returned to his Radha. David
suggested that he could read it together with her on their trip and that he
could help her translate it into Russian.
Galina wrote back
rather dismissively. He had understood nothing of the text. He had taken it all
too literally. She had never read it, of course, but even if there were no
language barrier, she was at far too low a level to be able to understand it.
Only by reading with the guidance of someone far along the path would it be
possible to read such poetry without falling into error. Perhaps, it was that
David had hinted at a similar intimacy that was possible if after all it was
possible with Krishna and Radha. Perhaps, he had hoped in the process of
translating together that they could have written their own love song. I think
rather he did hope this and for this reason he was so enthusiastic about this
poem. He wasn’t interested in the Dark Lord, but he very much loved his Dark
Lady. He kept hoping against hope that she would sing her love song to him. But
it was too much for Galina. She saw where this was going. She felt how he had
held her. She remembered how he looked at her. She shuddered. She could not
sing.
She wrote to David
about their trip together and made certain necessary conditions. She would only
travel with him if he accepted that the purpose of her travel was the study of
Krishna, that he didn’t continually pester her with his spam about love. Most
important of all she could not bear the way he continually looked at her with
his eyes so needy and so desperate. She felt undressed in his presence and it
was a distraction from what she considered important.
It was always this way
with Galina. Despite cutting her long dark hair so violently, despite trying to
look as unattractive as possible, she liked that David made her feel
attractive. She liked to be loved, but there came a point when she couldn’t
quite bear it. At this point the barriers went up.
David was a man of
great patience, but it was enough. He wrote back. He wrote back very carefully
in the best Russian he could manage. He thought about what he was going to write
for two whole days. At the end he used the word in Russian that means goodbye
forever.
David and I shared what
else we knew about Galina. It didn’t amount to much. I saw her mother some time
later. She told me that Galina had gone back to Moscow and that they did not
know any more than that.
David had spied on her
Russian Vkontanke/facebook page for a little while after his last letter. At
one point he seems to have received some sort of random message from her, but
he wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or just one of those computer generated messages
that sometimes happen when you interact with someone online. In a moment of
weakness he had written to her, but didn’t get a reply. Perhaps, she didn’t
even receive the message as by that time or soon after, she, once more, changed
all her accounts.
That was it really.
After a while we both forgot Galina and it was better so. She was destructive
to him. She hindered him from finding what he was looking for. She had the
potential to draw him into her cult, just as much as he had the power to draw
her out of it. I asked him about this, but he was non-committal. Would he have
joined the Hare Krishnas if that had been the price he had to pay? I think he
just might have taken on a new name, he might have played along, but in his
heart he would always have kept his own faith. It was in the end far stronger.
It had protected him during those few days when he had defended his faith so
very, very well.
When I came back to
Scotland I looked forward to a well-earned rest. There had been a sort of low
level strain for the past number of years. Both Petr and I had lived a life of
being careful and had walked a fine line whose goal was to help both our
countries reach a better understanding.
But we had seen our work fall apart when relations between the UK and Russia
deteriorated beyond our ability to help. We saw the dam break and something
approaching a new Cold War begin. It took a number of years before everyone
recognised it for what it was, but those of us on the ground felt the frost
from the beginning. We had to come in from the cold or be left outside frozen
like towels stiff from frost hanging on a washing line in January.
I hoped to be able to
write some papers, perhaps a book. I hoped to have a few students who I could
help with areas that particularly interested me. I looked forward to giving a
few lectures. I was lucky, as because my funding came from elsewhere, I wasn’t
as scrutinised as some of my colleagues and I didn’t have to do quite all the
nonsense that they sometimes had to do. For the most part I am left alone, one
of those anomalies in higher education that for the most part don’t exist
anymore, but occasionally still do.
We go to David’s house
occasionally. He lives quite near to us. He has a Russian wife and we all go
there to speak Russian, or else we meet in Aberdeen in our favourite Indian
restaurant on Belmont Street. There are statues of various deities, but I’m
rather pleased to say that I’ve not seen one of Krishna.
I don’t feel sorry for
David in any way. His wife is far better for him than Galina could ever have
been. Lena loves David. That’s the difference. That’s the only difference that
matters. She knows a little about the story, but only a little. After all, it
was a long time ago now.
It was David who
suggested I write this story. He thought it would be of interest for people
living in Scotland today.
“Why do you think
anyone would want to read about our little adventure in Moscow?” I asked.
“You’ve become quite well known you know, Effie” he
said.
“Hardly. I’m read by a
few thousand people who are interested in the debate about independence. Do you
know, I told some people online that I was a prominent blogger and was
absolutely slaughtered for it.”
“They slaughtered you because it was true.”
“Perhaps, that is so, but what has our story got to
do with Scotland today?”
“There are some parallels with Russia.”
“There are some I
agree, but I wouldn’t overemphasise them,” I said. “We need to be careful that
we maintain our democracy. It’s much more fragile than people think. Nationalism
doesn’t always end well. But Scotland isn’t, in the end, that much like Russia.
But then a comparison often involves just as much that is dissimilar as
familiar.”
“There are some parallels with Krishna,” said David.
“You mean Hare Alex, Hare Nicola?”
He laughed.
“It’s funny, of course,
but there is something just a touch hysterical. Doesn’t it remind you?”
It did. Just a little.
The emptiness that I had met in Russia all those years ago, I likewise have met
in Scotland. Somehow the writing of my story brought into focus some ideas that
perhaps would not have come to the surface otherwise. I described some of these
ideas to David in the course of a few meetings and he suggested I form them
together into a whole.
When the Berlin wall
came down, nearly everyone in Europe and, indeed, the world accepted that
socialism didn’t work. Even the Chinese while keeping the form of the Party
gave up the substance. Gradually, there were only really two places that
continued to believe though in rather different ways. One was North Korea, the
other was Scotland. But Scotland continued to believe in a rather odd way. It
wasn’t as if we enjoyed the fruits of capitalism any less than anyone else. But
somehow our socialism was what made us different even if we didn’t quite
believe in it.
I remember years
earlier enjoying the novels of J.M. Barrie set in and around the town of
Thrums, which was Barrie’s name for Kirriemuir. In one of these novels ‘Sentimental
Tommy’, there is a journey from London to Thrums. The difference between the
two places was only a few hours on a train. But those few hours separated
places that could scarcely be more different. The Londoner would have found
life more familiar in France.
The language of
Barrie’s Thrums was very different indeed from London. English was spoken, more
or less and certainly understood, but there was a rich vocabulary and grammar
that was not English. Moreover, the whole mentality of the people living in
Thrums was quite unlike that of someone from London. It was a mentality and a
morality that had been determined by the Kirk, or rather the kirks. There were
endless disputes about churches that have now been forgotten. They were called
strange names like “Auld Lichts”, or the rather contradictory “United Secession
Kirk”. If you delve into Scottish church history, it is a history of continual
secession, for reasons that today seem trivial. The question of how to govern a
church was deemed as vital as were theological issues that today seem at best
arcane and at worst irrelevant. The Marrow of Modern Divinity which was so
endlessly debated in Scotland, hardly deals with the essence of the issue at
all, but comes across today as rather silly hair-splitting about issues that
are of no consequence, because no-one but a hair-splitter would think they were
issues at all. In Scotland there were sometimes small villages with four or
five kirks, which all more or less believed a variant on the theme of
Presbyterianism. But the debates that kept splitting the churches kept everyone
very occupied indeed. There was absolutely no need for Scots to assert their
Scottishness in those days. It was apparent in everything they said and in
everything they did.
Move on one hundred
years and the language of Thrums has more or less died out apart from in some
small pockets. It has been killed off by Scotland being less isolated. It has
been killed off by people moving here from elsewhere, but above all, it has
been killed off by television. Now the language of Scotland is English and
nearly everyone speaks it with a somewhat different accent and occasionally a
rather different way of saying certain vowels. The Church in Scotland is in
retreat just as everywhere else in the UK. But with it the Scottish mentality
has been struggling to maintain itself. Whereas the people of Thrums were
fiercely frugal and careful about how others behaved, now like much of the rest
of Western Europe, we preach the idea that anything goes. Whereas the people of
Thrums believed in individualism and endeavour and above all, in sin, we
believe in collectivism and that there should be no negative consequences for
lack of endeavour.
Scotland in the hundred
or so years since Barrie has become more and more like the rest of the UK. We
have the same shops, listen to the same music and drink the same lager. We
watch the same programmes and have more or less the same views about more or
less everything. But whereas when we were really different, we felt no need to
assert it, now precisely because we are the same, we have to shout so loudly
about our difference. This is the emptiness that is at the heart of Scottish
nationalism. It’s the same emptiness
that people felt in Russia.
A few months after the
referendum result was not accepted by the nationalists I wrote something that
likened them to a cult. I described briefly what I have described here at great
length. I think I may have been the first person to have come up with the cult
simile, but I may be wrong about this. All I can say is I didn’t read it about
before writing my article. But it is an obvious enough connection to make, so
others were, no doubt, thinking on the same lines at the same time.
In any such comparison
it is important to realise that it is just that. I was saying that there were
similarities, not that these things were the same. But I still think it’s worth
exploring the issue, not as a means of insulting supporters of the SNP, but as
a way of explaining a phenomenon that has been taking place in Scotland. The
year or so prior to the independence referendum and the time afterwards has
been like a revival meeting that has spread around Scotland. That’s great if you are part of the revival
and want the revival to continue and to grow. But what if you stand on the
outside of the tent and think it’s all a fake?
Why didn’t Scotland
move on like everyone else in 1991? The answer I think is two words that still
have extraordinary power. They are “Tory” and “Thatcher”. Thatcher has become
the Wicked Witch of the West, the goddess Kali and Oliver Cromwell all rolled into
one. The myth of Thatcher has been passed on to Scottish children who are too
young to remember her and she is thought of as if she were General Sherman
marching through Georgia destroying everything in her path. She was a Tory.
Think of how Nicola Sturgeon says that word. Think of all the loathing that
goes into her pronunciation. But not just Nicola, not just Scottish
nationalists, most Scots pronounce the word ‘Tory’ in just the same way and
with just the same intent. But it was Tories or those like them all around the
western world who were proved right in 1991. The ideological struggle between
left and right was won decisively by the right. The intellectual foundation
upon which the left built its beliefs fell apart back then, and there was
nothing much remaining of the old ideas to believe in. Since then what has the
left been left with? It has had protests about globalisation, it has had
protests about banks, it has turned green and it has fought a battle to make
everything permissible. The main successes of the left have been in forcing us
to think carefully about the words we use and above all, the pronouns. They
have successfully changed the meaning of certain words to make them more
inclusive. At times it seems that we are ‘Through the Looking Glass’ in a world
where Black can be White, Male can be Female and words can mean what we want
them to mean. But this success has
mostly been on the surface, because underneath ordinary people outside of
universities, no doubt, believe just what they always have believed, only they
are careful what they say in certain forms of company. These victories of the left, however, have
for the most part been trivial. They have made some people be careful about what
they say, but they haven’t really changed how people think. But while the left
has been playing with words, the right has won on the issue of how to run a
country. On the fundamental issues of the economy no-one sees old style
left-wing economics as a matter worthy of serious concern. The left may try to
tinker around the edges of economics, but socialism as an ideology has been
dead since the wall came down. It was an experiment tested to destruction and
in the end, people voted with their feet.
But Scotland had to
stick to the old religion, for without our hatred of Tories we scarcely would
be Scots. But gradually as Labour moved into the modern world, as Tony Blair
accepted some of what the Tories had said was true, people in Scotland more and
more felt that the true religion was being tainted. How could we be against
Tories (Nicola’s accent) if we agreed with them? So finally it was necessary to
hew off Scotland from all taint of infection from the south. How could we keep
Tories out of Scotland if they were already inside the Labour party? We had to
root out the heresy in Labour. They weren’t in fact Labour at all, they were
Red Tories. We had to revisit our old habit of secession and debate endlessly
matters that were arcane.
What could have
destroyed Labour in 2015? What force could have made Labour go from being a
monolith of safe seats to being all but wiped out? The answer lies not in
politics, but in religion.
There is a new religion
in Scotland. It is called Scottish nationalism. There is a new promised land
called independence, where all things are possible, where there will be no
poverty and no inequality. What those of us on the outside don’t get is how
joyous it is to take part in this dance of Scottish nationalism. Suddenly, you
are surrounded by likeminded friends who all believe the same things that you
do. You are forced to not think any negative thoughts. You must fill your life
with hope and get rid of all fear. You must repeat “Hope over fear”, “Hope over
fear”. You must repeat. You must repeat.
There are gurus who
have vast numbers of followers. These followers believe every word the guru
says and are willing to be sent to chastise anyone who questions the one true
religion. They work for the guru, even though the guru has no particular
qualities or qualifications that would suggest he was suited to the role. He is
self-appointed, but then so are all gurus.
What use would it be if
I could expose the guru? Another guru would come in his place. Anyway, no-one
would believe my exposé, for the guru can do no wrong.
Just like a
televangelist, just like the guru in Moscow, the acolytes are willing to pay
for the pleasure. The guru only has to say ‘Give me money”, and it pours in.
Well, why shouldn’t he be paid for his work? Why indeed? But it is precisely
this, that he gives little and gets much, this fact that he can live off the
payment of his followers that makes him a guru. It is the defining quality. It
is also this that makes his cause religious, rather than political.
No-one on the other
side of the debate could raise a penny in this way. We have no gurus preaching,
precisely because our side is not a religion. It is both our strength: we use
reason, and our weakness: reason is powerless against religion.
There are mantras that
the acolytes are carefully taught to repeat and the repetition keeps them from
thinking. That after all, is the purpose of a mantra. The most important mantra
of all involves the repetition of the word “Tory”, always pronounced with that
precise nuance of loathing, that also contains just a hint of self-loathing. “You’re
a red, you’re a blue, you’re an orange Tory. Tory, Tory, Tory.” It’s like a
playground chant. Other mantras involve
words like “scaremongering”, others still involve “talking down Scotland”; one
of the most repeated mantras is that opponents of the SNP think that Scotland
is “Too wee, too, poor and too stupid”. But no-one, but a nationalist has ever
said this about Scotland, precisely because this mantra is something that he
must repeat endlessly in his head until it becomes an accurate description not
of Scotland, but of the nationalist who has lost his ability to think because
of the endless repeating of such mantras.
There are simplistic
pamphlets that are produced with easily digested pieces of optimism. Anyone who
comes up with a reasoned argument, pointing out the errors in such pamphlets is
being negative. Above all, nothing must be allowed to damage the hope contained
in our new religion. Pointing out facts cannot damage the hope. There are in
fact no facts on the side of fear. The only facts are on the side of hope. Our
hopeful facts will always trump your negative scaremongering falsehoods. The
truth is in faith, and hope and the charity of foodbanks, which tell everything
you need to know about Tories. There will always be foodbanks so long as there
are Tories, not least because they are so desperately needed to remind us of
the wickedness of Tories. The falsity of statistics and economics lies in its
negativity and how it contradicts our hope. Hope over fear. Hope over fear.
Repeat endlessly.
Defeat in September
2014 did not damage the hope, it made it stronger, but then the lions did not
damage the Christians. The lions may have eaten the Christians, but shortly
afterward the Christians ended up ruling Rome and whatever lions may have been
left out there. If they had wanted to, the Christians could then have eaten the
lions.
Nothing else can
explain the recent phenomenon that is Scottish politics than that it is a
revival. The SNP keeps having open air meetings and rallies. Which other party
in UK history has had quite so many open air rallies in quite so short a time?
The mantra of the rally is always the same, but it gains a certain power by
being repeated together in a group. We weren’t really defeated. That moment of
grief when we expected to win, but instead lost, was not real. We did win.
Don’t have any fear that we soon will win. Look around, everyone else here
feels the same thing. It’s inevitable. Those unionists are doomed. They’ve
already lost. We will bury you. It’s hope in the face of every set back. It’s a refusal to listen to the small voice
of fear that must sometimes whisper doubts. But the way to quieten the small
voice of doubt is to repeat the mantra. Thousands of voices join in unison to
share the triumph of hope over fear. Any waverers immediately fall into line.
Fear once more is banished. Hope once more triumphs. Hope over fear. Hope over
fear repeats itself continually in the minds of the followers.
Which other UK
politician than Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond could pack out a venue with
thousands of devotees? Could Clement Atlee do this? Could Winston Churchill?
Could Margaret Thatcher or David Lloyd George? But then, they would not have
wanted to. But then, Scottish nationalism isn’t about politics anymore and its
leaders are not politicians at all, but rather gurus.
It isn’t as if the SNP
have done such a staggeringly wonderful job of running Scotland. It isn’t even
as if they actually want independence any time soon. I suspect many quite
senior SNP politicians are secretly very glad indeed that they lost the
referendum in September 2014. You see, the numbers just don’t add up. But none
of this matters, because independence is no longer about politics, it is no
longer even about achieving independence in practical terms. It’s an ideal.
After so many incarnations and reincarnations we may just be worthy of a part
in the national collective. At this point our individuality will cease. The Maya,
that is our sense of individuality, will be merged with all the other Scots who
have been journeying towards this loss of selfhood. Finally, we will merge with
Alex, we will form a union with Nicola, or at least, we will be worker bees
scurrying around the queen. When we die, or at least when we have achieved the
requisite level, after perhaps many reincarnations, we will reach the end
point, the goal and the telos towards which we have for so long been tending.
Some have described this as Nirvana. But in Scotland we have another word for
it. We will live forever in independence.
I cannot rescue
Scotland. How can I put half of Scotland on a flight and take it back home to
its parents? And what good would it do anyway? Sometimes such rescues succeed,
but as in my example frequently people are beyond rescuing. In the end, I could
not compete with religion. I cannot compete with religion.
But I’m not unduly
pessimistic. A cult is always less
powerful than it thinks it is. This is not least the case because it has lost
its relationship to truth. When the foundation is a mantra that does not
correspond to reality, it can easily all come tumbling down. The hysteria will
cease, the emotion will quiet, the guru can always be exposed, and the leader
shown to be not quite so perfect and indeed quite capable of error. One hundred
years from now people will write about the oddness of the great revival that
took place in Scotland.
How might the history
of the years between 1980 and 2030 eventually be written? There might be
something about the collapse of the old social structure of the Central Belt.
When the heavy industry of coal mining and steel works ceased and when
Christianity became more a matter of sectarian division than church going, there
was an emptiness that needed to be filled. The old certainties whether they
were provided by the Kirk or by the idea that you would do the same job as your
father did became more and more uncertain. Finally, faith became a matter of
weddings and funerals and few believed any of the words that were said at such
ceremonies. It was the lack of faith that people had in the old religion that
left the room for the new religion of Scotland. To fill up the emptiness in
peoples’ hearts they were promised a new promised land where there would be
abundance, where there would be enough for all and there would be equality.
This didn’t require any sort of hard work, it didn’t require anyone, but the
rich to pay higher taxes. It required one single word. You just had to say ‘Yes’.
When I compare those
days I spent with the Hare Krishnas with the past years in Scotland, I see
similarities. But it wasn’t the same. How could anything be quite like those
dances we danced in Moscow where everyone had glazed eyes and minds full of
only a mantra. But I have come across enough closed minds in Scotland to be
worried. I’ve seen what nationalism has done to the Soviet Union, and I’ve seen
what a closed mind could do to someone I once cared about quite deeply.
I had set out to rescue
Galina and I succeeded. I could not have done more, but I knew even at the time
it was never going to be enough. My rescue failed. So, too, did David’s. In the
end, he was glad that it failed, for she had the power to take him with her.
Moreover, it was only his final ability to stand up for himself and say ‘no’ to
Galina that led him to find Lena, who I came to admire far more than I ever did
Galina.
There was something
close-minded about Galina, that hindered her thought. Finally, it became dull.
She just repeated what she had been told, rather than discovering and thinking for
herself. There would be flashes of her old self, when she ceased her mantra,
when her eyes flashed instead of being full of dull clouds. But soon enough she
would be Garudi again, soon enough she would just repeat the same old mantra.
It was boring. I meet this every day in Scotland. I endlessly meet those who
simply repeat what they have been told from nationalist crib sheets. I hear the
same old arguments endlessly, the same old insults and the same old pattern of
hive behaviour. Nationalists on the war path, offended by something that I have
written, buzz and try to sting, but it all becomes very tedious very quickly.
It rapidly ceases to be
interesting when opponents are close-minded without even realising it. It gets
to the stage when you begin to know exactly what they are going say next. There
will be a point in a conversation when the usual clichés will be repeated. No
matter how often you make a counterargument, it has no effect and is simply
ignored. I find myself repeating the same arguments endlessly and to no purpose.
The conversation becomes a matter of jabber jabber Trident, jabber jabber
Westminster paedophiles, jabber jabber foodbanks, jabber jabber next part of
the SNP crib sheet. It all became very
glib, and I find myself tuning out as if I was watching a Gaelic programme on
television and only heard words like “helicopter” that were not translated.
I worry about Scotland
when so many people have lost touch with reality, when the relationship with
truth has become something that is mediated by politicians and who treat the
public as if they were infants unable to face the truth.
It sometimes scares me
living here. There is something impotent about online abuse, but everyone who
is attacked by a mob sometimes worries that it could become offline abuse. Even
then it can be stressful and psychologically exhausting to be under relentless
attack. So even if for the most part I find it boring, it does scare me when I
am attacked for speaking out. It scares me when reasoned argument is met by
hatred, for I worry about a cause that leads people to behave in this way. The
nationalists take my criticism personally even if it is only directed against
the party they support. It’s this identification of person with party and party
with country that scares me the most. But then I reflect that I’ve been through
much worse and faced much tougher opponents than any of these “gnats”. They
simply can’t imagine. By comparison, Scottish nationalism looks rather trivial.
So bring it on. I can take anything you throw at me.
But long term I won’t
live in a country that has closed its mind. It would be too much like those few
days in Moscow where all I could hear was people whispering their mantra. It’s
all somehow like the worst aspects of life in the Soviet Union, but at least
they didn’t vote for a one party state, they had it forced upon them.
In the end, my solution
to every problem is existential. We always used to say that the solution to the
problems of the Soviet Union is to leave. Sometimes this is the only answer. I
will keep piling up stones in the river, but sometimes the dam just breaks. In
that case I would recommend Russia. I’m trying to persuade David and Lena to
come, too. It’s relatively cheap now that the rouble has collapsed; you just
have to spend a little while learning the alphabet and the grammar.
Hare Alex, Hare Nicola.
It’s Scotland that needs rescuing now. I will continue to put forward the case
for the UK. I will try to write reasoned considered articles and I may just be
able to have some influence beyond those who already agree with me. I don’t
expect independence any time soon if at all, because really the whole idea of
independence in our ever more interconnected world is close to being
meaningless. It all rather misses the point. But that, no doubt, is to look at
the whole thing far too rationally. I’ve already realised that my arguments
have no power, perhaps, even no point. That is one of the main reasons why I’ve
written this story. Perhaps, just perhaps it will be able to get through to
people in a way that argument can’t.
My powers of rescue
have already been shown to be limited. My words have no power against those of
the mantra. When I brought Galina back
to her parents, they were delighted and surprised that I could do what had
seemed to them impossible. I had brought back their daughter and during those
moments I must have felt a sense of success. But I also saw she was too far
gone. Only love could have brought this dark haired lady back from her dark
lord and perhaps, no human love was strong enough to compete. So there will be
no more rescues for those who are too far gone. This dance must continue or
stop of its own accord. Even when the guru is a charlatan, his followers still
follow.
The end