The reversion to nationalism is a staging post on the way back to living communities

Ed Miliband tweeted two hours ago to say ‘On the #indyref campaign trail today with the simple message: stay with us.’ He being a Suprastateist Socialist, it is highly significant that the Labour leader made a plea completely devoid of the one thing Scottish waverers would most like to know about voting No: why?

The Big State social democratic Left has always used communication in this way: pleas bordering on commands, with an enormous act of faith required to give any credence to the message. It produced slogans like ‘Keep Calm & Carry On’, ‘You know it makes sense’, and ‘I’m backing Britain’…but they all beg the same question: why?

All the Cameron/Miliband/Clegg trio can see is the need for immediate-term damage limitation. Such is the reaction of those who never grasp the payback of a longer-term view. And yet – even more depressing – there isn’t a glimmer anywhere in the UK Überbau right now of any insight asking “I wonder what’s really going on here?”

In the last 97 years, we have seen the formation of two suprastates, the collapse of a former global colonial power, and then collapse and distress in thosee suprastates. I refer time-respectively to the Soviet Union, the British Empire, the Soviet Union again – and now, the European Union.

When the British Empire dissolved itself after the Second World War, initial member delight at being free morphed rapidly into a deconstruction of the unreal entities created by the colonial power: India, Nigeria, and so on.

When the USSR collapsed, initial delight at being free morphed rapidly into a deconstruction of the unreal vassals nurtured by the Communists: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and so on.

Now that the artificially joined United Kingdom’s collapse has spread from 1916 Eire to 2014 Caledonia, initial Scottish delight at being free will – I do not doubt – morph into the emergence of Cornwallian and Welsh claims….if the Welsh can successfully withdraw from their dependence culture.

And when the ramifications of a fascist Brussels, a crooked Frankfurt, globalist fanaticism and an egomaniacal Berlin finally sit too heavily one day on the three-legged chair called the European Union, its members too will rediscover the divisions within: Belgium, Spain, and so on.

But the trouble with short-term historical events is that (a) they don’t happen in an ordered way to neatly mirror a  long-term change, and (b) the leaders living through them – almost without exception – simply do not grasp WTF is going on. In such a context of unenvisaged change, those In Power jerk at the knee in order to protect the power they had hitherto imagined to be unassailable.

None of this has been made any easier by the emergence of an aggressive but anxious China, the post-USSR mafia-anarchy of Putin’s energy-obsessive Russia, the newly declining American energy-fixated commercial Empire, an AIDS-riddled Africa, and the rise of two religious throwbacks: one travelling chaotically under the title of Islamic Jihadism, and the other trading insidiously under the utterly false flag of capitalist neoliberalism.

But like the ill-fated Martin Luther King (albeit on a comparatively minute and obscenely privileged scale) I do have a dream. A hope that, in the fullness of time, all these tributaries of history will give way to a raging river of reaction: that is, the return of Homo sapiens to manageable pack sizes – and the realisation that family and community are respectively the building blocks and mortar of tranquil fulfilment and material progress.

I think that what we’re seeing at the moment is the second stage of an anti-globalist reaction…ironically made possible by the arrival of that very internet most people see as the secret agent of a horrible New World Order. For the internet makes it possible for a community in Hungary to seek out and give mutual satisfaction to a community in Dorset, Ohio, Queensland, Ossetia or the Yucatan peninsular.

The Bigwigs in Whitehall wish to present the #indyref in Scotland as a potential Sword of Damocles. It certainly does have two incredibly sharp edges: but it is no more than the kitchen knife inadvertantly cutting a finger in the preparation of truly sustaining (and sustainable) meals.

We have been sold political, economic, social, cultural and constitutional garbage for some 50 years. Whatever the Scots do in the end, their desire to go it alone is a symptom of change…and very probably, a catalyst for more of it.

Yesterday at The Slog: Blurring the line between market research and propaganda