(Originally published on Kiltr two months ago)
As is often the case, whilst moving house, I unearthed a few curios I’d almost forgotten. Among them were gifts given to me whilst convenor of the Student Representative Council at my local college.
As is often the case, whilst moving house, I unearthed a few curios I’d almost forgotten. Among them were gifts given to me whilst convenor of the Student Representative Council at my local college.
Returning to higher education after a few years living and working in Greece, becoming a parent and returning to the mining villages where I’d grown up, had also brought the formal notification of my Highers, which I’d always thought would mean an easy return to the educative environment, not giving the direct access to university they would have had I ‘cashed them in’ on immediately leaving school. After a few futile rants and rages, it was knuckle down and consider the alternatives.
Whilst I had to go through an Access course, I also discovered the concealed joys of prior accreditation in the Scotvec system and made those Highers count nonetheless. This meant on a full time course I could dedicate some time to community and local student activism at a time when student loans were just being introduced, so further motivations were fairly easily come by.
I’d also become heavily involved in campaigning for upgrades to the village I’d moved to, having discovered the local council, swiftly becoming dominated by New Labour apparatchiks, refused to adopt the roads, pipes and sewage system, originally built by the mine the village was built to house the workers for.
264 residents in a throwback to an age they were desperately attempting to distance themselves from, didn’t appear to matter much to the newly aspirational politicos, whether the ‘roads’ were literally dirt tracks now or the pipework being predominantly lead based, threatening safety and health every day of delay that ensued, or not. Ultimately the campaign was successful, we raised significant sums of money which was matched by the local council, the total then matched by EU funding. It took four years of fight but the upgrades happened.
The gifts I mention came toward the end of that campaign. Each year we’d contributed significantly to the coffers by hosting a free festival on the same day as T in the Park.
The village lay along a route many took in getting to Balado. We took over the local park, next to the Miners Welfare Club, built stages, brought bands in from all around, augmented the sales for the Club with sales of local home brewed wines and all manner of foodstuff offerings, as well as information leaflets on just why we were doing all this, strategically placed next to huge donation collection buckets. It worked. Attendance year on year first doubled then tripled the population of the village. Never once was there more than a genuinely minor skirmish and hordes stayed for the tidy up missions on the night and day afterwards.
Having succeeded in our mission, we intended having just one last festival as a celebration. Artists were brought in to design commemorative murals. We hosted what we billed as the world’s smallest international exhibition by inviting stamp to postcard sized works from artists around the world and exhibiting them in the local phone box. I blurred my roles as chairman of the fundraising board and convenor of the local college student association, by arranging to bus 32 Slovakian exchange students visiting and staying at the college halls for the summer to the festival under my guidance. I even donned a kilt for the initial journey out and gave them my interpretation of a brief singing shortbread tin tour of the local environs. That’s where the gifts came from.
When it came to time for them to leave I was presented with a beautifully illustrated and framed map of Slovakia, a hamper of Slovakian foods and sundries as well as a hardback, coffee table style, photo journalistic record of Slovakia’s return to independent nationhood. They’d all signed the inside cover around a message written by one of them which read ‘We know we will see you again, in your beautiful country or ours. It wont just be in conversations about ethnology, we will see it together and will all be living it’. I was moved to tears and on seeing them so were a few of the students.
It was this book which I’d unearthed during my house move and the circumstances of that last festival which were on my mind. They seemed relevant, precursors to where I found myself in the week post Brexit vote.
You see, the village I lived in then was a smaller satellite of the larger village where I grew up. This latter is the largest of the West Fife mining villages and was built specifically to both take some of what was once reductively called ‘the Glasgow overspill’ and to house workers for what was called ‘The Pithead of the New World’ (I intend to write more on this too but for now the film which was shown in cinemas both as a propaganda/marketing piece and a recruitment drive is shown above. The site is now Fife Council’s longest lasting derelict site, the ground so contaminated with cyanide poisoning nothing much can be done with it.) Virtually all sides of my family, save that of my paternal grandmother and grandfather, are somehow influenced, derived, descended sociologically from that founding and it has long held a personal and academic fascination for me, indeed there was barely an essay in my undergraduate years which didn’t reference it in some way.
The ‘overspill’ brought lots of Glasgow with it over and above the willing workers. Two schools were built on either side of a road, one catholic the other protestant. Just to keep things symmetrical a protestant church was built on the same side of the road as the catholic school, whilst the chapel was on the side of the protestant school. As with most of the mining villages, it was built to be self sustaining, had its own array of shops, pubs, clubs and entertainment and its relatively remote location meant its social or sectarian divisions remained contained but unchecked.
Into this milieu, in the early 1970s, I was born to a family nominally Roman Catholic on both sides, though more observing of the faith on my mother’s. Circumstances were such that I only lived with my parents until I was eighteen months old, when I went to live with Aunt, my dad’s sister, while he went to work in Libya. This complicated matters slightly, beyond the personal, since I’d been baptised in the local chapel. My Aunt had married outwith the faith, almost as far as it was possible to go; her husband’s father was ‘master’ of the local town’s most prominent lodge of the Orange Order. I am, therefore, more than passingly acquainted with the strains on familial and community bonds sectarianism places in our society, rooted in those summer days spent reading under the covers whilst first preparations were made and then triumphalist bigotries ensued across the length and breadth of the village as the latest march took place.
I learned all too early to keep quiet, to support neither team, to kick with neither one foot nor the other when asked. Later, defiantly always answering with my own wilful choices of ‘Dunfermline’ and ‘I’m better wi ma heid!’ respectively. It often wasn’t enough and they didn’t much like smart arses either.
At this last festival, people I hadn’t seen nor wanted to for some time, who had grown up through all of this too, as well as the ravages of the Strike of ‘84/’85 and subsequent pit closures, from which a community built around a vocation is unlikely to recover quickly without all of the ensuing neoliberal agenda which was to follow and further marginalise them, who had given in to the easier paths of less resistance during those times, for reasons which I could not determine but which did not augur well, had decided to attend.
I almost smiled when I arrived with the busload of eager Slovakian students, who I’d promised a taste of ‘real’ Scottish culture and as we exited the coach I saw the ghosts of times past, heard them announce their presence to the field of some 600 odd souls with a normally wince inducing, group bellow of 'HULLO, HULLO…’. I turned to the students as they filed past, perhaps the most innocent and demure looking among them, one of the female students most enthused by aspects of the ethnological conversations, smiled at me in the passing and noted, with a satisfaction and positivity I had no heart to question or dissuade her from, ‘Ah, that is so nice, they are greeting us as we arrive!’. If only that had been the sum of it.
Unbeknownst to me there had been a festering sore between rival ‘smack’ dealers locally, a late arrival to the ills visited upon the villages. It just so happened a member of one of the bands playing was adjudged guilty of some slight by association apparently, I learned later, and had been singled out for ‘punishment’ that day, his whereabouts timed specifically that afternoon from the running times on our posters. He also just so happened to kick with the ‘wrong’ foot.
I returned after departing briefly to change out of the kilt (honestly, I just don’t have the legs for it!) to find an argument ensuing close to the stage, inevitably involving the guys from the village where I grew up and the band member they’d come seeking. I ran across the field, foolishly thinking, I know these guys, I can stop this before it becomes something worse. I was within a few yards of them when the most horrific scene I have ever had the misfortune to witness first hand erupted before my eyes.
There’s no hyperbole in saying that, no will here whatsoever to recount the slow motion, graphic detail I remember it in either. Local newspapers followed most of the story if your ghoulish enough to want follow the clues in the narrative here to unearth more details than I’m willing to share.
A baseball bat had been smuggled in. A man’s life was changed irrevocably, his children’s too. Steel plates reconstructing a shattered skull. Brain, neurology, memory beyond repair. Blood spraying across a five year old boy, my son’s friend, soaking his t-shirt to the skin, his eyes wide even though it had sprayed, sticking there too.
A few minutes later, the field emptied of more than half its crowd, everyone left, waiting, looking but doing nothing. A group had closed a circle around him. I walked across to the scrub at the edge of the field, where they paced, and on seeing us thought about running.
The two policemen I was with, one of them coincidentally having also grown up together with me, and everyone in the group caught between a pacing bravado and skulking guilt, quickened stride. They’d been there, having just been driving around the village, likely how a window of hideous opportunity had presented itself. I matched their pace.
‘Him, him, him…’, I’d already given a statement, two other police officers were coming up behind us. ‘What the f*$k, ya f%^&£n wee (insert vile sectarian invective I hadn’t heard directly since I was, at the oldest, fourteen), you’ll ken aw aboot this soon enough!’.
I turned away and headed for the bands area at the back of the stage, the only way to change any of it now being to make sure they played on. I didn’t even feel stupid telling the guy who’s story that actually is, when the ambulance came and he was heading away, that the bands were still going to play. Its probably why, in that moment, foul curses ringing in my ears, I made sure they would.
For all the visceral memory of that though, I don’t think of what happened as a sectarian crime. The hallmarks of all the societal pressures visited on the villages, even then, among the angry, the disillusioned, the dispossessed, were playing out and the language of hate gave its misguided vindication, was an enabler. None of those guys were ardent supporters of any cause. They used the language they associated with violence to help justify their actions, whether to themselves or anyone watching, I really cant say. I do know I saw the easy connection between that kind of violent eruption and the language of hate.
As the ambulance left a small group of Slovakian students approached me and I immediately began apologising for them having to see such ugly spectacle and insisting this wasn’t representative of Scottish life or culture. I should really have given more consideration to the sum of their past experience. Of course they were concerned for the injured man. One or two asked about the children standing nearby. They insisted they didn’t want to know what was being shouted, during and afterwards, but suspected its nature. Then they, almost as a group decision, quite suddenly decided that to understand why they actually had just wandered over mainly to ask if the bands were still going to play, without it meaning they weren’t concerned, I would need to understand their country a little more and what they’d lived through. We resolved to have those conversations over that day and the few more I would see them for.
Of what relevance now is that act, happening nearly twenty years ago? Well, because try as we might, whilst many things have changed, many things have stayed the same. Where Scotland has voted to Remain overall, where do we think those Leave votes came from? Aside from the misdirected protest vote, where does the message of insular British Nationalism land in Scotland? If Scotland finds a way to become something else, what of those who resonate with it, are emboldened by it, are they likely to quietly keep their feelings, their ideologies to themselves, change their minds, let the type of venom shown in George Sq post 2014 referendum vote dissipate? Maybe the historical antecedents of manipulation, of exploitation in religious intolerance for overtly political ends by financial elites, which it is so clearly rooted in, will be recognised playing out again in the protest votes for Brexit, the echoes, the irony seen; maybe one, William, vying for power among the princes of Europe will be seen for the demagoguery he pursued, it's toxic legacy acknowledged, or the later one's outright, started a Glasgow branch of the British Union of Fascists outright, fascism admitted by his self proclaimed 'boys', then again, maybe not.
Just two months ago, having been visiting a friend who still lives in the village where I grew up, taking the bus back to town (I know, I know, I've noticed shit always goes down on the bus too!), it was there again, misdirected, misappropriated, barely understood but trotted out in the same vindicated, triumphalist fashion. Only four of us on the bus, an elderly fella across the aisle from me on the other priority seats, two early twenties lads, one in hoody, the other in football shirt, you can guess the team colours. 'HULLO, HULLO...', 'Could ye go a chicken supper...', and as I got up for my stop, 'Here, mate, mate, what team d'ye support?'.
Really? Still, now? So blatantly and not a word of warning from the bus driver, despite the older man looking clearly intimidated and the driver having to know, from both our bus passes, his for a pensioner mine as a disabled person, that we weren't likely to be the most robust of opposition to any aggression. Swigging on the tonic too, they were, erratic, drunk, unpredictable. I shouldn't, it wasn't the most consideration I could give my safety, nevertheless, it had to be done.
'I'm no intae fitba; and there's laws against you singing that nonsense noo, the driver should be pulling up at the polis station to drop you'se off! It's no big or clever, disnae say who you are, to try and make me and that old fella feel intimidated by your backward tribal bullshit, gie it a rest.', and to the driver as I waited to exit, 'D'you no think you should be dae'in something aboot that? Is that old boy supposed to feel intimidated aw the way to the station noo?', 'No ma job mate', 'It is though, they're breaking the law on your bus, your the very man to sort it; but it's aw oor jobs, it just shoodny happen anymair, shoodny ever have but we've got means to stop it noo and we aw shood stop it in its tracks whenever we can, they're just young laddies, they don't even know what they're saying, if we don't tell them how offensive it is, how intimidating, show them an alternative to the bullshit that tells them it's ok, there's a whole other generation gawny keep that gawn!', 'No ma job mate, hear what yer sayin, but ah just drive the bus, ken.'. As I got off I heard the songs start up again, louder still, vindicated, and I got the finger and a throat cutting motion as the bus pulled away.
Twenty years on and the same potentials were still there, despite whatever the law thinks it does. What would the Slovakian students make of it, of lessons still to be learned?
I wont turn this into a wander through Slovakian cultural history now too, fascinating as it is and those conversations I had with the students after that fateful day were. I’m aware this has gone on for some time already and maybe your wondering, what’s the fecking point, what are you saying?
If you get the chance, and as a current European neighbour as well as one we would have as aspiring EU/Scots citizens, you know, beyond Brexit (I may have mentioned that earlier, I am getting back to it!), and of course that is if your not already fluent in both the language and culture already, getting to know Slovakia is worth the journey. As things stand now, as a destination in that journey, you would of course have to question how, as an ancient yet newly emergent nation, how they transitioned from the promise of the Quiet Divorce to being, alongside Greece and Hungary, one of only three EU countries to have a political party who stood for election on openly fascist platforms represented in parliament.
How any of those parties found their way into mainstream politics and their easy place along the continuum of the right, which, if it wasn’t before, post Brexit vote, is now so much more clearly defined as extending rightwards from the UK Conservative Party, blurring now into UKIP, Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party, Austria’s nascent equivalent, France’s Front National and on through a plethora of increasingly intolerant right wing opinion into Pegida, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary and L’SNS in Slovakia (lets not forget also that it was only in 2009 when Nick Griffin, then of the BNP, was given equal airtime with mainstream political parties on the BBC), is clearly a cautionary tale any emergent European nation should ignore at its peril. Across Europe, as it has in the UK, the hard, far and extreme right have offered an easy out for frustration and anger at what are seen as increasingly failed financial and political elites in the post 2008 financial crash landscape. Some 19 years of Nigel Farage and UKIP influencing UK politics, changing the language, the narrative, as perhaps the noisiest minority, in terms of ultimate consequences, these islands have ever seen, they led right here.
Looking at the history, the development of all those groups, both individually and collectively, looking at the embedding of their ideas and language into social and cultural consciousness, somewhere holds the key to understanding the future for Europe. Learning from the cautionary tales of appeasement of the extreme right, as much in the recent past as not so, is crucial to a future beyond a landscape of fear.
For my purposes here, since there is at least a PhD’s worth of work in studying the rise of the right across Europe, in highlighting some of the continuums of ideology and how consent for enacting their manifestos is enabled and ultimately manufactured, I’d like to focus a little on Slovakia.
Discovering that book, that gift, lurking among my unpacked boxes made me realise I hadn’t kept as watchful an eye on developments there as perhaps I should, if for nothing else other than to see how the students I entertained almost twenty years ago now, so soon after the hope of their country’s transition to independence, may have fared. Of course I had heard the worrying basics. More recently, alongside the response of other Visegrad countries, how their Prime Minister sounded with regard to the refugee crisis had given me chills, and with the Brexit vote in context alongside all of the other right wing demagoguery, yes they were multiplying. I decided to fill in a few blanks for myself, maybe you’d like to come along for what is certainly a bumpy ride.
Back in March of this year, when Slovakian citizens took to the polls in a general election, pundits expected the populist right to grow similar to developments across Europe, and grow it did. What was less expected was the sharp rise in support for the extreme right People’s Party Our Slovakia (L’SNS), who garnered eight percent of the vote, gaining parliamentary representation for the first time. The party openly supports the Nazi puppet state installed in Slovakia during WWII.
Amid corruption scandals, economic uncertainty and the refugee/migrant crisis, Slovakia, which has recently taken over the rotating presidency of the EU, is now one among many European countries (of course now including a Brexiting, right wing Conservative led, with an emboldened, hard right UKIP cheerleading, UK) where demagogues, populists and fascists are utilising working class anger and frustration at domestic/global financial and political elites to threaten the European peace, order and stability of the post war settlement. Many worry that, in the Visegrad bloc and post communist countries of the Union in particular, there is a return to the kind of intolerance last seen in the 1930s. In Slovakia, the director of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Stanislav Miccu, calls it ‘a crisis of moral values’, going on to note:
'Many European countries are supporting extremist parties, even more than in Slovakia. But western European extremist parties are not (openly) fascist parties…When you say, this party is xenophobic or supports a program of racial hatred [supporters] will say this is not true. They say [the party] just wants to establish order here, and that its not possible today what happened during Hitler’s era. They are not aware of how fragile our politics are.’
One of the major questions for Slovakia, and Europe, is has there been a failure to address fully the shortcomings of the transition to democracy. In some apparent failings may be seen the roots of at least some growing intolerance and resentments towards political elites and the EU, giving perhaps a tendency towards a more extreme impetus in the rightward political drift than elsewhere in Europe.
Some twelve years since their 2004 accession to the EU, clearly enthusiasm for it has dimmed in Slovakia. In one recent survey 52.3% were positive about membership, dropping from 68% in 2010.
Slovakian sociologist Michal Vasecka argues that part of the issue is that EU membership was never considered in terms of principles, he points out:
‘The Slovak transformation was very much focused on changes of institution and connected with the building of capitalism. It was not attached to values. It was perceived by most of the population not in terms of quality of life in all possible dimensions, but quality of life in material dimensions.’
The obligations associated with membership were brought back under scrutiny during the EU sovereign debt crisis, which happened just as Slovakia’s growth was showing promise for a nation so often cast as Czechoslovakia’s poorer half. Support for Greece during its first bailout proved so contestable among people and politicians that the government collapsed as a result. Vasecka points out:
'Suddenly Slovaks realised that their membership of the EU is not just taking eurofunds and moving around EU, but there are some responsibilities too. This is the moment when positive feelings about the EU disappeared in a second.’
Further issues have escalated since then and seemed to reach another catalysing point in resonse to the refugee crisis. Prime Minister Robert Fico, nominally a Social Democrat, has been one of the loudest anti refugee voices among Europe’s leaders, even suing over the EU’s relocation quotas. Many blame him for desensitising the public to aggressive rhetoric from all sides.
Editor of daily newspaper Dennik N, Matus Kostolny, sees the thin line between Fico’s rhetoric and that of Marian Kotleba, leader of L’SNS and one of their parliamentary representatives. He points out:
‘Fico opened the door to primitive language. People see Kotleba talks dirty but so does everyone else. And at least Kotleba offers solutions [to the people]. Divisions between normal and extremist politics started to become really thin.’
L’SNS has a clear anti-Roma platform and is expressly anti asylum seekers and refugees, as well as NATO and the EU. The party posted a congratulatory note to the UK for the Brexit vote on their website.
The political elite are still reeling from the rise of L’SNS. No invite was received by their elected members from the president to attend a meeting for all representatives of parliament after March’s vote. The media admit to being unsure of how to direct coverage of the party, unsure whether giving column inches or airtime to Kotleba gives his party unnecessary respect or if ignoring him/them confers further pariah or folk hero status.
Whilst there are those drawn to Kotleba and L’SNS because of their extreme views, the predominant sympathy appears to be with them as anti establishment figures and Kotleba’s carefully cultivated image as ‘a man of the people’. Radovan Branik, who founded a crisis response team to assist during natural disasters like flooding, says that when needed, L’SNS dispatch help with the utmost efficiency, noting ‘When it comes to volunteering, if I ignore their politics, they are objectively the most effective volunteer workers.’
The L’SNS message resonates especially loud in more remote areas neglected by mainstream politicians; but in these towns their rise, and in particular the personality and predominance of Kotleba, has created division and uncertainty. In places like Banska Bystrica, where Kotleba represents in parliament, the results have aggravated a generational divide. A quarter of first time votes went to L’SNS much to the consternation of a majority of older residents in the region with longer memories.
In the small village of Ostry Grun, in the west of the Banska Bystrica region, on Jan 21 1945, Nazi soldiers retaliating against partisans and their supporters living in the hills, burned down the entire village, shooting 64 villagers indiscriminately, men, women and children. In the decades since the village has been rebuilt and appears never to want to forget, having raised memorials, commissioned books and constructed an archival room dedicated to the dead. Bewilderingly for many, more than a fifth of the population voted for the openly Nazi sympathising L’SNS, whose first act in parliament was to demand a minute of silence for the day Josef Tiso, the head of Slovakia’s pro Nazi government during WWII, was hanged in 1947 for treason.
Emiliana Surianski, one of the last living survivors of the massacre, who’s mother and sister were among those killed, was seven years old at the time. She says now, of the vote, as well as the rise of L’SNS and their ideology/policies:
'If someone had to survive what I had to go through, the vote would never have ended like this. People don’t understand what refugees go through. They don’t understand what fascists are. Slovakia is losing empathy. People cant feel for other people anymore.’
Where the extreme right stand ready, where there is a legacy of intolerance, however it is seemingly well managed, there is a clear route, through the enabling language of appeasement among neo liberal governments, for protest to turn into intolerance, for intolerance to turn into fascism in darkening continuum. Where fascism lurks, so too do fear and terror.
The protest vote against political and financial elites is manifesting itself everywhere. It is a phenomenon emerging to varying degrees across the majority of European countries, from Central Europe to Britain, and in Trumpism too; something structural is occurring in the relationship between populations, national governments and political/trade blocs, like the EU and its institutions. Understanding the dynamics of those changing relationships will surely be key to the future of the European project. It will also surely be fundamental, as the notion of the nation state appears to resist ‘ever closer union’ for each to ensure a thorough understanding of where legacies of, as well as nascent, intolerance lurk within them. The lines between protest, intolerance and fascism are blurring and vigilance is clearly required
As Scotland attempts to respond to the post Brexit vote landscape and hopes to take its place somewhere among the small, independent nations of Europe, it's civic nationalism must stand tall in opposition to the revisionist nationalism of right wing zealotry so clearly exemplified in L'SNS and all of the variants demanding attention across Europe. I hope in reading about some of Slovakia's plight the parallels with this disuniting kingdom we live in were easy to see, just a matter of continuums. An outward looking, civic nationalism has the potential among European nations to provide a forward looking alternative, to be an exemplar, a positive node in the battle of networks against hierarchies which rages all around. Where there is that landscape of fear, where change is being co-opted and the threat of fascism stalks, we must look at ourselves, warts and all, and say, no, not here, not ever.
It's not just here, in the UK, that the protest vote is being subverted, is a symptom rather than a cause. A wave of change is building the world over. Faced with the uncertainty of change, as fragile human beings, we tend to yearn for safety. Sadly, often we turn to those who seem to be certain about creating it, it's why, in the face of coming change, the populists, demagogues, zealots and fascists seem to be on the rise. They attempt to conjur images of strength and power, of certainty in past or future glory but root their thinking, their ideologies in a weakness which resists the realities of a changing world.
Somewhere, there are those whose thoughts are rooted in the reptilian brain, where only 'I' matter. And those whose thinking struggles to move beyond the mammalian; only I and my blood relatives matter. Whilst there are those further restricted in the evolution of their thought by allowing it to only be determined by the tribe, whatever it's bonds; only I, my blood relatives and the tribe, eg Slovakians, Britons, Americans, Germans, Christians, Muslims, Hindus. But there are a growing number of people responding to the absolutely necessary demands of planetary, global change with planetary thinking and evolving it to the point where everyone matters, all life matters and all that sustains it matters. What do you think is the most appropriate response?
I couldn't claim to have all, or even any, definitive answers to any of the question marks I've left hanging all throughout parts 1 and 2 here. I have some further thoughts, largely they concern indices, democracy and 2025. Having gone all around the houses with their forerunners, thankfully I hear you say part 3 will be significantly shorter and will be the last I have to say on these particular topics round here for quite sometime.
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