Unionist Propaganda

One of the Unionists favourite tricks is to try and link the nationalism of peaceful self-determination with the aggression and genocide carried out by 1930s Germany and 1990s Serbia. They will tell you that nationalism, as a concept, is dangerous and might lead to something akin to the horrors of the Balkan war. Indeed the term “Balkanization of Britain” has, on many occasions, been used in this regard. Yet the irony is that the Balkan war was actually the result of Serbia (the largest nation in multi-ethic Yugoslavia) attempting to extinguish the self-determination of its neighbours.

Likewise, Germany’s attempts to extinguish the self-determination of its neighbours in the 1930s led to the Second World War. If anything is to be learned from history, it is that it is not the independence of nations that causes wars, but rather a lack of respect for the self determination of small nations by larger, more powerful nations.

That British Unionists’ attempts to tarnish Scottish nationalism by linking it to the aggressive and genocidal nationalism of Germany and Serbia shows just how desperate they really are. The independence of Iceland, Norway and Slovakia, for example, all happened peacefully and the world hasn’t stopped turning. Likewise, Scottish Nationalism has always been a peaceful political process.

British Unionists know a thing or two about spreading misunderstanding and fear through the use of propaganda. The careful use of semantics plays a huge part in this. For example, they talk of Balkanization, separation and divorce, all terms with negative connotations, to spread fear amongst those who dare stray towards believing in an independent Scotland. Of course, one can’t be too hard on them for doing so. After all they’ve been doing it for centuries, being as it is an absolute necessity for the building and maintaining of an empire.

The British Unionist will tell that small nations can’t survive, citing Iceland’s recent economic difficulties as an example. Of course, they never mention Denmark, another country of 5 million and with a land area smaller than Scotland who seem to be managing rather well without being politically united to their southern neighbour, Germany. Then there’s Norway (4 million), Switzerland (7 million), New Zealand (4 million) and Ireland (4 million), who despite recent economic woes, is still better off than its Celtic neighbours who remain part of the UK.

Then, of course, there’s Luxembourg, an independent country surrounded entirely by larger neighbours, with a population of less than half a million people, yet who happen to have the highest GDP per capita in the world. British Unionists tend to avoid mentioning that one, of course.

Perhaps the greatest irony of those who proclaim loyalty to the Union, whilst decrying nationalism, is that the very existence of the UK is a result of hundreds of years of aggressive English nationalism. Wales was conquered and absorbed into the Kingdom of England. Ireland was colonised and Scotland, for its part, was essentially bribed into the Union when its ruling class were offered very generous titles, land and cash in exchange for closing down the Scottish parliament. The English coupled this with the removal of the threat of war – a war that Scotland could not have stomached at the time, given that it in the throes of trying to recover from the Darien Disaster.

It would be fair to say that the existence of the United Kingdom did not come about though a harmonious coming together of peoples. It is a product of war and the divide-and-rule aggressive nationalism of by-gone times and as such, it is an anachronism; a fading remnant of the empire building of past centuries.