Six days ago, Scots for Independence staged a march through the streets of Glasgow. It took thirty minutes to pass from one end to the next. It was somewhere close to ninety thousand people strong. But in the Union-owned Scottish papers, it was only around twenty thousand. In the unionist-owned Scottish papers, the march didn't look like this:
It looked like this:
I am reading a book right now entitled Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Frank Forbes, which is about the machinations of empire, or as he puts it, the psychosis of empire. It is what the native American peoples have called in their various languages, Windigo, a kind of consumerism of madness. Windigo psychosis doesn't stop at commodities, but pulls into its maw any peoples in its path. Having no soul itself, it wipes out the soul of others and claims it was never there in the first place. It has many faces, but the result is always the same: it denies the right of others to be.
This is the kind of consumerism Spain is currently exercising over Catalonia.
Just as Britain exercised it over India:
And it is the same exercise of Windigo psychosis the English government has always imposed on what it regards as its satellites. India was one, Ireland was another, and Scotland is perhaps the last in its constellation. If the history of civilisation is the development of a psychotic consumerism, then perhaps the only hope is to call it out for what it is. That is what the Catalonians are doing now, and for which they are being jailed. This is what it means for ninety thousand Scots to band together and walk through the streets of Glasgow.
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