Actors Call For Zombie Boycott

The television and film industry was sensationally thrown into chaos yesterday when the actors’ union Equity, announced a boycott of all productions with any connections to the subject of zombies.

The first major casualties of this industrial action will be Season 3 of AMC’s blockbuster The Walking Dead, and the new Brad Pitt movie World War Z, which are set to be pulled from screens under pressure from the actors’ union.
 

A spokesperson for Equity told The Govan Enquirer last night:
 

“It is to our eternal shame that we have supported productions in the zombie genre in the past. We mistakenly believed them to be harmless, if tasteless, fun in the tradition of vampire and werewolf horror stories and for that we apologize profusely.
 

After meeting with representatives of the Rangers Supporters Trust over the past week, we now accept that the entire zombie genre has a sinister sectarian subtext and such productions are little more than propaganda glorifying the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA, the Official IRA, the Continuity IRA, Peter Lawwell, Opus Dei and the Vatican.
 

We can therefore no longer support zombie productions of any kind and we call on the entertainment industry to isolate and cast out into the showbiz wilderness anyone who writes, acts in, or otherwise is involved in any and all zombie productions.
 

All of our members who have appeared in zombie productions, at any time in their careers, have had their Equity cards revoked. We had thought them to be serious artists, but we were wrong. They are tarred with a sickening sectarian brush and are no longer welcome.”
 

Dark Mingwall of the RST said:
 

“We welcome the news that Equity has withdrawn its support for zombie movies. Everyone now knows that these are productions made by, and for, hate-filled, Rangers-hating, sectarian bigots.
 

The vanguardbears have produced a list of the names and addresses of everyone involved with every zombie movie, tvseries, novel and comic strip ever made, and are prepared to take direct action against any of them, alive or dead, who do not publicly apologise for their vile anti-Protestant, anti-British, anti-Rangers bigotry.
 

We now move on, to concentrate on our campaign to stop the break-up of the British Empire by the hate-filled Jacobites of the SNP.”
 

Equity refused to comment on rumours that threats have been received by actors who have recently appeared in zombie movies and TV shows.

Don't Dare Call The Rangers "Zombies."

I had hoped to write a blog about Celtic's UEFA Champions League match with Benfica today, but work commitments meant I didn't even get to watch it.

I can say I'm encouraged by what was by all accounts a good performance and a point from a match where I personally feared the worst, but that's about it.

No matter, I soon found some material to write about after reading with a sense of incredulity that the SFA has served a notice of complaint against Celtic for a banner displayed at the pre-season friendly against Norwich City on July 24.

Yes, almost two months ago.

The first question that springs to mind is - why now?

Why not in the days and weeks after the match?

It's not as if there wasn't any manufactured outrage over the banner at the time.

Have a look at this piece of nonsense from @cyberted72, who has clearly been drinking the koolaid.

It appears though that the SFA are indulging the The Rangers fans in their squeals of outrage over the banner.

The charges against Celtic amount to allowing fans to enter the ground with an, "offensive," banner, and not removing said banner from said fans once it was displayed.

Before I go on - remind me. Did the SFA ever charge Rangers over this banner:

 

 

 



I may be wrong, but I don't think they did.

In light of that, it really does beggar belief that the SFA consider the zombie banner to be offensive.

It depicts the death of Rangers and the re-animation of its corpse as The Rangers.

The depiction of The Rangers as zombies is perfectly apt. It is exactly what the tribute act is - a re-animated corpse.

In recent years, zombies have gone mainstream.

The Walking Dead has achieved the highest ever viewing figures for a series on a basic cable channel in the US.

Brad Pitt will shortly be appearing in World War Z which is expected to be a smash hit at the box office.

Zombies are now an established part of popular culture.

Anyone seeing the banner would be fully aware of the point being made and that the banner does not actually advocate shooting anyone.

Only the most anally-retentive, looking-to-be-offended cretin could think otherwise.

There is something deeper going on here though.

What we are seeing is the bowing down to the demands of the most spoiled, indulged, humorless fans in world soccer.

For starters, fans of The Rangers are reduced to making loud complaints about every little thing that winds them up because they lack the wit to make an adequate response.

So their tactic (and a very successful one it is too) in these situations is to loudly denounce whatever is thrown in their direction as, "sectarian." The great no-no in Scotland today.

For decades, Rangers fans were called, "Huns," by fans of every other club in Scotland.

You can't call them that now. The very word is banned from most message boards because it is, apparently, a derogatory word for Protestants.

That's what they are doing now - try to mock The Rangers in any way, and you are being anti-Protestant, therefore sectarian.

"Zombie," will soon be declared officially sectarian because the courts, the SFA etc will shortly agree that it is a derogatory reference to Protestants.

The The Rangers fans simply can't take being the butt of a joke.

As a collective, they have never attained the level of maturity demonstrated by pre-adolescent schoolchildren in coping with the normal type of banter you encounter between rival soccer fans the world over.

The SFA has spent so long pandering to the club in blue who play out of Ibrox that even beyond the grave, the Zombie Rangers are the great Untouchables of Scottish soccer.

The Rangers, The Titles, and The Don.

Last Monday, Charles Green issued a lengthy statement on rangers.co.uk,  the website  he purchased from Duff & Phelps along with the rest of the now defunct Rangers FC's assets. You can read it here

I wanted to pass comment on some little gems contained within it relating to the, "it's the same club," fiction.

First of all, there's this:

"Neither the SPL, nor its Commission, has any legal power or authority over the Club because it is not in the SPL.

"For that reason it has no legal basis on which to appoint its Commission. The Club ceased to be subject to the SPL’s rules when it was ejected from its league."
 

Rather missing the point. The SPL is investigating the behaviour of Rangers FC during the period from 2000 - 2011, when it was a member.

The SPL is fully entitled to appoint a commission, whether Rangers has been ejected or not.

Green also indulges in his customary blurring of the distinction between Rangers FC and The Rangers FC. His club was not ejected from the SPL because it was never a member in the first place.

Next up:

"Since the decision was taken by HMRC on June 14 to reject administrators’ proposals for a Company Voluntary Arrangement, the fate of Rangers FC lay firmly and clearly in the ability of the consortium I led to form a new company and corporate entity that would ensure that Rangers had a future as a football club."
 

Actually, Rangers FC is still in administration and awaiting liquidation. Charles Green buying Ibrox, Murray Park and a car park lease doesn't get the club off the hook.

Here comes my favorite line from the entire statement though:

"To make it crystal clear, the new owners purchased all the business and assets of Rangers, including titles and trophies."
 

I wish Charles would explain this: IF (and that's a big "if") Sevco Scotland are the new owners of Rangers FC, the club formed in 1872, why on earth would they have to "buy" Rangers' titles?

Surely by virtue of being, "the new operators of Rangers FC," they would have no need to "buy" the titles?

Major faux pas from Charles there, I'd say.

The funniest part of the statement for me, is saved for last, as Green indulges in some classic rabble-rousing:

"As far as I am concerned, Rangers Football Club has won a world record 54 league titles, and, whatever the decision of the SPL Commission, these titles cannot and will not be taken away from us and our Manager Ally McCoist is in total agreement.”
 

I agree with the first part. Rangers Football Club has won a world record 54 league titles (or rather, 53 and a half titles, as the first was shared with Dumbarton).

Then Charles goes awry. Those titles can be taken away, although not from The Rangers FC, who don't have any titles to take away.

If the record books are to be amended to take titles won between 2000 and 2011 away from Rangers Football Club's record, it will have no effect on the trophy haul of Green's The Rangers FC.

But the real side-splitter here is that "Ally McCoist is in total agreement."

So that's that then. If the SPL want to strip titles from Rangers, they'll have to hang around like supplicants waiting to beg a favor from Don Vito Corleone on the day of his daughter's wedding.

Trouble is, Ally has already warned everyone he'll never accept the titles being stripped. End of story.

But is there hope yet? Maybe no Sevconian can refuse a favor on their team's first ever winning away day?

A Famine Memorial in Glasgow - But is it a Catholic Famine, or a Protestant Famine?

I read an interesting article in Scottish Review today on the proposal for Glasgow City Council to build a memorial in the city to all those who died during the Irish Famine, or An Gorta Mor.

You can read it for yourself here.

Interesting because the writer, Alasdair McKillop, seems to have totally missed the point of erecting such a memorial.

In a statement you can read in full here, Glasgow City Council stressed of the plan that:

"It follows a motion from Councillor Feargal Dalton, a member for the Partick West ward, who secured the agreement of fellow elected members that the famine has had a significant cultural, economic and social impact on the modern day character of Glasgow. Seconded by Bailie James Scanlon, a member for Southside Central, the motion also recognised the efforts made by Glaswegians to provide relief and sanctuary to those affected at the time."
 

Leaving aside a rather curious reference to the Orange Order (is it really a force for good in Scottish society?), McKillop rightly points out the positive contribution made by both Catholic and Protestant Irish since the era of the Famine.

But why is this reason to call into question the appropriateness of a Famine Memorial?

Well McKillop would have us know that Irish people, both Catholic and Protestant, emigrated to Scotland both before and after the Famine, and that all of them deserve a memorial too.

Does this mean then, that there should NOT be a memorial in Glasgow to the victims of the Irish Famine?

McKillop gets to the crux of his argument with this paragraph:

"The other issue that might be raised at this early stage is the relationship between the memorial and Irish Protestant movement to Scotland. During the 19th century, Protestants accounted for between a quarter and a third of all the Irish immigrants who arrived in this country. During the famine, however, Protestant migration would have been relatively less significant because the heavily Protestant eastern parts of Ulster escaped the worst of the crisis. On the other hand, there is evidence of considerable Irish Protestant poverty in the east-end of Glasgow in the years following the famine."
 

So there you have it. The Famine is too Catholic. Not enough Protestants were affected by it (apparently), so a Famine Memorial would exclude in some way the Irish Protestant immigrant experience.

Alasdair McKillop suggests there is a need, "to consider a memorial with a broader, more inclusive approach to the history of Irish immigration."

In saying this, he completely misses the point.

The proposed memorial will not be a monument to Irish immigration to Glasgow. It will be a memorial to the victims of the Famine.

Must they be denied a memorial because the vast majority (apparently) were Catholic?

McKillop closes with this:

"Some of those who have been most vocal in supporting the creation of the proposed memorial have noted that Glasgow lags behind cities such as Boston, Liverpool, New York, Sydney and Toronto when it comes to commemorating the Irish famine. Will they show the same enthusiasm for using the memorial to acknowledge the Irish Protestant experience in Scotland, and, in so doing, bring us yet another step closer to the countries and continents mentioned above?"
 

I just wonder how cities such as Boston, Liverpool, New York, Sydney and Toronto managed to build their Famine Memorials without upsetting their Protestant populations?

Let's not confuse two related, but separate issues.

If a monument was to be built to commemorate Irish immigration to Glasgow, then of course it would be only right to make it plain that these immigrants were from both the Catholic and Protestant tradition. If there is a demand for it, I'd be all for it being built.

The proposed Famine memorial though will commemorate the people who died in the greatest humanitarian disaster of the 19th Century.

Whether the majority of the victims were Catholic or Protestant is supremely unimportant.

Scottish Press Bowing Down to Threats of Violence

Scottish soccer history stretches back almost 150 years beginning with the formation of Queen’s Park FC in 1867.

At the time Queen Victoria was celebrating her 30^th year on the throne, the Reconstruction era following the Civil War was in its second year, and Bismarck would wait another four years to see his plans for the unification of Germany come to fruition.

Considering such a long span of time (in sporting terms at least) any attempt to trace that history would inevitably focus on a number of momentous turning-points which has brought the game in Scotland to the present moment.

If soccer in Scotland should continue for another 150 years though, surely none of them would match for sheer scale and drama the demise of the nation’s most successful club, Rangers FC, earlier this year.

None of the previous turning-points – such as the appointment of Bill Struth as Rangers manager in 1920; the return to Celtic of Jock Stein in 1965; Aberdeen’s appointment of Alex Ferguson in 1978; the arrival of Graeme Souness at Rangers in 1986 which revolutionised (and not for the better) the Scottish game – can come close to matching the change in Scottish soccer wrought by the death of one half of the “Old Firm,” the duopoly which lorded it over Scottish soccer for 120 years or more.

You would think then that the story of Rangers’ downfall would be something the Scottish media would cover as thoroughly and as widely as possible.

You would be wrong to think that.

Journalist Phil Mac Giolla Bhain, who brought the full extent of Rangers’ financial plight to the attention of the mainstream media, has written a book on the subject.

Downfall: How Rangers FC Self Destructed is at the time of writing at number 44 on the Amazon UK bestseller list, despite not yet having been released.

Last weekend, The Scottish Sun newspaper announced that it was to run a serialization of the book, and ran a story on Mac Giolla Bhain, outlining the stories he had broken regarding the Rangers crisis and the threats he received from Rangers fans for his trouble.

The news of the intended serialisation of the book sparked a furious response from Rangers supporters, who threatened to boycott the newspaper if the serialisation went ahead.

It also led to pressure from The Rangers FC, who threatened to ban Scottish Sun journalists from Ibrox Stadium if the serialization was not stopped.

The story was quickly taken down from The Scottish Sun’s website and the planned serialization cancelled.

Remarkably, the greatest story ever told in Scottish soccer will not be told in Scotland’s biggest selling tabloid newspaper.

The Scottish Sun has bowed to the mob and self-censored, amidst allegations that physical threats were made to the journalist who interviewed Mac Giolla Bhain for the original story.

Former Rangers FC owner Sir David Murray, expended huge amounts of time and energy on cultivating the support and favour of the Scottish soccer press pack.

So successful was Murray in this endeavour that a new phrase has entered the Scottish soccer lexicon – “succulent lamb journalism.”

The phrase originates from a now infamous article written by Daily Record Sports Editor James Traynor in 1998, following Celtic’s title triumph which prevented Rangers winning a tenth league title in a row.

It contained the following, rather cringeworthy excerpt:

If the past 10 years have taught Murray, who is one of Britain's wealthiest individuals, anything it is how to win and he believes Rangers will continue to grow and prosper.

"I look upon these last 10 years as having been a great era, but it is over and Rangers are about to head on into a new era," he said over a glass of the finest red.

He was about to take in another mouthful of the most succulent lamb – anyone who knows Murray shouldn't be surprised to learn he is a full-blooded, unashamed red meat eater – when he put down his knife and fork.

It was like a statement of intent and looking directly across the table to make sure I hadn't yet succumbed to the wine, he said:

"Bring on the next 10 years, there's more to come for Rangers.”

Murray controlled the Scottish press pack with promises of access and exclusives in return for favourable press – a task to which Scottish soccer journalists applied themselves with gusto.

It appears that old habits die hard and the Scottish soccer press are now doing the bidding of Rangers’ Division 3 successor club.

Succulent lamb journalism has for long prevented negative stories concerning Rangers being published and allowed them and their huge fan-base to sleep-walk into oblivion.

So what did The Scottish Sun have to say about its decision to pull the book serialization?

Surely they did not decide against the serialization of the book because it would have been unpopular with Rangers supporters?

In an editorial Monday it said:

“We pride ourselves on having the finest journalists in the country who are totally and unequivocally impartial.

But Phil Mac Giolla Bhain is not one of our journalists and his blog undermines the entire industry.

THAT is why we have decided not to carry the serialisation of the book.

NOT because of the social media backlash.

NOT because of the internet bullies.

But because the author — previously unbeknown to us — is tarred with a sickening sectarian brush.”

This is an astonishing statement, and one that appears to have since been taken down from The Scottish Sun’s website – just as the original article on Mac Giolla Bhain has disappeared.

The Scottish Sun has decided not to serialize the book not because of the content of the book, but because of an opinion they have formed of the author of the book, based on a satirical article on his blog.

The “offending” blog can be found here.

To provide some context, it was published on April 20, as Bill Miller launched an ill-fated takeover of Rangers FC.

Miller’s bid involved creating an, “incubator,” company to buy the business and assets of Rangers FC (exactly as Sevco Scotland did a few months later), while Rangers FC continued to be administered by Duff & Phelps, to be reunited with its assets at an unspecified, later date once it’s, “toxicity,” had been dealt with.

This was Miller’s convoluted (and some might say fantastical) way of assuring Rangers fans that their club could live on after he bought the business and assets.

Charles Green has come up with a much simpler solution – he tells them that “the club” and “the company” are separate and only the company is to be liquidated.

Total fiction of course, but the Rangers support has bought it.

Mac Giolla Bhain’s Incubator blog then was a satirical take on the spin surrounding Miller’s proposed takeover.

It named no living person and its target was not a religious, ethnic or racial group. Rather it was a parody on the kind of behaviour displayed by Rangers fans on their various adventures through, Barcelona, Pamplona, Manchester and Romania.

Certain Rangers supporters though have taken offence and decided this blog is evidence of Mac Giolla Bhain being an anti-Protestant bigot.

The Scottish Sun appears be in agreement, although it has been suggested that that was merely a convenient excuse to drop the serialization and keep the Rangers masses onside.

Regular reader’s of his blog will be fully aware that Mac Giolla Bhain is in fact a confirmed atheist and has blogged extensively on the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church in Ireland, condemning the response of the Church hierarchy.

This is hardly the stuff of which anti-Protestant bigots are made.

In reality, it is merely further evidence that Rangers supporters have a chronic inability to either laugh at themselves, or accept criticism.

Of course there are many, many Rangers supporters who are capable of both, but the culture surrounding Rangers militates against it on a collective level.

It is in the nature of the soccer fan to take the greatest of pleasure from the travails of their rivals.

It is in the nature of the soccer fan to poke fun at their rivals.

It is in the nature of the soccer fan to make up derogatory names for their rivals.

A pattern has developed in recent years whereby Rangers fans have attempted to silence any criticism of themselves or their club by painting it as “sectarian” or “bigoted.”

For decades, Rangers and their fans have been known to fans of other Scottish clubs as “Huns;” A derogatory reference to the culture of violence and aggression which is perceived to surround their support.

Rangers supporters very successfully campaigned to have this word redefined as a derogatory reference to Protestants, despite the fact that large numbers of those fans are presumably Protestant themselves (if they hold to any faith at all).

Similarly in recent months, in an allusion to Sevco Scotland’s re-animation of Rangers FC’s corpse, Scottish soccer fans have taken to referring to The Rangers FC as “Zombies.”

Fans of The Rangers FC affected outrage at the beginning of the season over a banner displayed by Celtic fans of a Zombie emerging from a grave being shot. This was claimed to be a sectarian reference to shooting Protestants.

It is this context that The Scottish Sun decided to pull the serialisation of Phil Mac Giolla Bhain’s book not because they did not believe in the authenticity of the book, but because in their words, the author is, “tarred with a sickening sectarian brush.”

In reality, there is one reason and one reason alone why The Scottish Sun decided to pull the serialization – cold, hard cash.

As Roy Greenslade, media commentator and Professor of Journalism at City University London, suggests, with newspaper sales in Scotland dropping alarmingly, The Scottish Sun cannot afford for fans of the now defunct Rangers FC to boycott the paper on a large scale.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it and the continuing ability of “Rangers” and their supporters to silence criticism is a major worry to all those who wish to see a level playing field in Scottish soccer and transparency in its governance.

History tells us that a “Rangers” free from proper scrutiny from an impartial press will bring no good to the game.