It is the eve of one of the biggest international football
matches of the calendar, the European Cup Final in which
England
will take on
Spain.
What you see above is a house flying the flag of
Spain;
but this house is not in
Spain,
it is in
Scotland.
Also several of my Facebook friends from
Wales
and
Ireland
posted the memes below last week when
England
were playing the
Netherlands.
In sporting tournaments, people from the so-called, and wrongly called,
"Celtic" countries will often support any team that is playing against
England.
Scotland
is by far the worst of these nations in this way, but it's also a habitual
attitude in my own,
Wales.
Sometimes this is just light-hearted, typical competitive banter; but it
disguises a genuine deep-set historical hatred. I always joke that the only
reason
Italy
was brought into the Six Nations was so that
England
could play just one game that was not a grudge match. I find it sad and
uncomfortable to realize that this hatred is a central part of our national
identity. In fact it has even become, in a strange way, a part of our
self-esteem. It's an addiction in fact, a cult of self-pity. I sometimes wonder
how we Welsh, the Scots and Irish would survive in a world where we were
deprived of that lovely lovely cheesecake called victimhood. They will never
admit it, but I suspect many people couldn't cope. They would lose all sense of
patriotism and national identity. In a perverse way they literally
need England
to exist as an object of resentment so that
they
can exist. Without nasty old
England,
in a worst case scenario, these nations would culturally collapse and cease to
exist as human tribal entities. I don't think that is healthy; it is what the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called "slave morality". What's more,
we've seen it elsewhere. Look at how British special interest groups are
fighting each other over who is to be lauded as the most "oppressed!",
see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-fall-of-diane-abbott.html.
In the case of our lands, this grievance is based on a legitimate interpretation
of the past. It is fair to say that during the last millennium the primary
dialectic of the history of the
British Isles has been
the expansion of
England,
with its culture and language, at the expense of the other native demographics,
but those days are over. In the 21st century we live in a very different world.
The order of nation states is at an end; it has been replaced by a network of
federations, military or corporate alliances and trading blocs; all are
answerable to some undiscussed yet omnipresent world authority. All the nations
of these islands are now just pieces on a globalist chessboard and those who
still talk about "big bad
England"
are living in their own historical fantasy theme park, like the characters in
the film
The Village, see:
https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/village.html.
It is this delusion that has allowed
Wales,
Scotland and
Ireland
to be swallowed up so easily by the modern empire in
Brussels,
see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/05/plaid-cymru-and-eu.html.
I know how important tomorrow is to a dedicated football fan, and there's nothing
wrong with a bit of light-hearted mockery; but please don't take it too
seriously!
