Читать книгу Why Scots Should Rule Scotland - Alasdair Gray - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION

THE FIRST PAMPHLET with this name was written quickly for the British general election of 1992. It was my first polemical work and I was pleased with it; pleased also that reviewers treated it kindly.

With a view to reprinting I read it carefully three months ago and found it a muddle of unconnected historical details and personal anecdotes with a few lucid passages and at least one piece of nonsense – Chapter Four spoke of The Protestant Scottish Conscience (or Soul) as if it was a predictable thing many people had, though even influenza takes different forms in different bodies. The only excuse was that I had dictated the pamphlet aloud instead of writing by hand. The reviewers’ kindness had been the condescension instinctively given to the art of children or half-wits.

The pamphlet you now read is therefore not a revised version of the first. It is completely rewritten, though it retains some of the old lucid passages. I have also kept the voice of my publisher, who asked down-to-earth questions when I lost myself in too many details or rhetorical flights. The year of publication is now part of the title because the last chapter fails to bring the book quite up to date, and any version printed after 1997 will be enlarged to make it that.

I also include a story based on bad dreams which came while brooding on the state of Scotland today. Good luck to critics who think the whole pamphlet is fiction. It may still provoke intelligent thought.

I like most of England. I say so because the 1992 pamphlet made one English reader (who otherwise liked my writing) ask why I hated it. He either believed that only hatred can explain a Scottish wish for home rule, or that my historical account of England showed scorn of it. But I nowhere condemn or praise whole nations, and am certainly not pleased with my own.

Some Scots hate England, of course. Their frame of mind is diagnosed by Irvine Welsh in a short story called “Eurotrash”. The narrator meets a Dutchman who denounces Britain saying:

We Dutch went to Africa. You British oppressed us. You put us into concentration camps. It was you people who invented the concentration camp, not the Nazis. You taught them that, like you taught them genocide. You were far more effective at that with the Maoris in New Zealand than Hitler was with the Jews. I’m not condoning what the Boers are doing in South Africa. No way. Never. But you British put the hatred in their hearts, made them harsh. Oppression breeds oppression, not resolution.

Says the narrator:

I felt a surge of anger rise in me. I was almost tempted to go into a spiel about how I was Scottish, not British, and that the Scots were the last oppressed colony of the British Empire. I don’t really believe it, though; the Scots oppress themselves by their obsession with the English which breeds the negatives of hatred, fear, servility, contempt and dependency.

That unhealthy state of mind will always occur while most Scottish opinion has no influence on how Scots are ruled. But it is not my state of mind.