Scottish Independence: Now Is The Time.
We are all citizens of the world now.
Potentially the internet interconnects everyone on the planet. International trade forms a network of interlinked states. Weapons are so powerful that local war could bring death anywhere on the globe. The fate of the planet is interlinked with the fate of each one of us.
All this renders the old concepts of nationalism meaningless; the view that we look after our own interests regardless of its effect on others.
None of this means that groups should not govern themselves if they have the capacity and will to do so. The closer to home decisions are made the more likely they are to meet the needs and aspirations of the people. Autonomous states can co-exist in harmony with necessary overarching bodies whose function is to ensure peace and justice, such as a democratic, free from corruption, United Nations and World Trade Organisation.
The existence of smaller autonomous units such as the 5.2 million citizens of Scotland has the opportunity to develop improved forms of democracy. The need to become autonomous becomes particularly urgent when the state is currently tied to a government run by a privileged millionaire elite who focus on the aggrandisement of themselves rather than the wellbeing of the citizens.
Scotland is currently tied to such a government. The Westminster elite is benighted by long outmoded fantasies of Empire. It enacts a chaotic and value-free foreign policy with grotesquely distorted priorities. After Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, Cameron wants to burden the British taxpayer with the guilt and cost of yet another war in the Middle East. 'Britain gears up for war on Isi s', was the Daily Telegraph front page headline on 5th September. A nd while our government is 'policing' the Middle East, at home our police forces are giving up, presumably from lack of funds, on solving high-volume crimes such as car crimes, criminal damage and non-residential burglaries. A headline in the Guardian newspaper (4.9.14) reads 'Police tell victims to solve crimes themselves'. And while all this is going on the UK government's new 'Minister for Civil Society' (!), Brooks Newmark, sneers at active British citizens by telling them to stay out of politics and 'stick to your knitting'1. It is not clear if this phrase was used simply to show general contempt for the concerned public or whether it is a reference to the seven mile long scarf which was knitted by activists against the obscenity (as Desmond Tutu called them) of nuclear weapons and stretched between Aldermaston and burghfield in Berkshire.
The Westminster elite sells vast quantities of arms to the proselytising dictators in Saudi Arabia. This is irresponsible in the extreme. Then there is our selling arms to, and support for, Israel in the teeth of behaviour which sickens decent people round the world. This is only explicable in term of a craven subservience to the wishes of the White House neocons, themselves in thrall to the rich Jewish US lobby. The rise of the Islamic State and the brutal murder of James Foley indicates a lesson which the militarists in Westminster and Washington never learn. The illegal use of aggressive force has uncontrollable consequences. The rise to prominence of fanatical jihadists and murderers are the consequence of our gratuitous attacks on the sovereign states of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Westminster village thought it could invade and kill in the Middle East with impunity. It can't. Their actions have given birth to a monstrous response.
A free Scotland will not be morally or economically responsible for all this. It will be able to spend the wealth of its citizens on the wellbeing of its citizens, not on gratuitous wars and a grossly inflated Westminster military machine.
Moreover a free Scotland will be in a position to curb the greed and excesses of the banking, big business, media and advertising conglomerates which relentlessly trivialise living and focus attention exclusively on acquisitiveness.
In this, as in so much else, they slavishly follow trends in the US. Of the US Noam Chomsky writes.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
