LongTimeLurker

If you are raised to believe that the Roman Catholic church is the absolute embodiment of truth then a football club that is perceived to be part of that ethos is inevitably going to be seen as having the "moral high ground", while opposing clubs will be viewed as evil and en route to hell etc etc. If it was the Mormons and stuff like magic underpants were involved most people would be able to see that it's dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb to put it in Southpark terms and would have no problem saying so, but mainstream brands of Christianity are something that don't get confronted in Scottish society for strength in numbers reasons so people like Archie McPherson did the appeasement thing and told us they were the greatest fans in the world even when most of us are all too familiar with having to deal with the moron element like the cut your throat guy in the Lisbon clip. Roll on a truly secular society.

...and where are you going with this? Lorenzo Amoruso isn't the most Lowland Scots Presbyterian sounding of names so odds on it had more to do with expediency and needing him playing at his best in the next game rather than anything deeply sinister about the traditional culture of the club. It was Rangers who signed Mark Walters after all and way before that Walter Tull: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Tull

...but if you are an Italian from Empoli who is fiercely anti-clerical maybe all you see is that they are anti-RC church and we are anti-RC church, they play in blue we play in blue, or maybe there's no connection at all I'm not sure to be honest? In Scotland the RC church cosied up in a big way to the main left wing party with the trade-off being RC schools guaranteed in exchange for a block RC vote, so the Kelly and White families that traditionally controlled Celtic before the mars bars started flying could comfortably accommodate left wing politics with Roman Catholicism but in southern Europe an involvement with a socialist party often led to excommunication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentiloni_pact Different set of historical circumstances so you can't easily apply what seems normal to people in the west of Scotland to what happens somewhere like Portugal or Italy.

^^^A very Scottish mentality. Portugal has a "red belt" in the south from about Lisbon down to just north of the Algarve where most of the population had strong Communist or Socialist sympathies by the mid-20th century and often very much rejected the RC church. Benfica traditionally draws a lot of its support from people from that sort of background. Italy has something similar north of Rome around about Tuscany in the former Papal States. Hence why clubs like Livorno and Empoli (Ultras are called Rangers funnily enough) are very left leaning. In most of southern Europe the emergence of the modern nation state was due to the emergence of liberal and left wing anti-clerical movements, so people don't equate Roman Catholicism with national identity in the way that happens in the island of Ireland or in countries like Croatia and Poland where there were other national groups like Serbs and Ukrainians that spoke much the same language but traditionally went to a different type of church.

What I focused on was the immediate aftermath of the fall of France rather than what happened in 1939 and you appear to have missed some of the nuanced points in my post over the Union Flag only symbolizing freedom in the narrow context related to that. When the crunch came and a deal could have been done after the military disaster in France (Hitler didn't press home his advantage at Dunkirk with a view to achieving that) when Hitler still had a non-aggression pact with Stalin in the east, the UK kept fighting even though people like Churchill knew it would probably ultimately mean the end of Empire.

Think you'll find that the KKK thing was John Cormack in Leith. Scotland had its share of nutters during the lurch into right wing extremism that happened globally in the 1930s so it's easy to cherrypick a couple of minor historical footnotes to build your desired Rangers = fascist narrative. No matter how you want to dress this up, however, the reality is that while people in de Valera's Eire were brushing up on their German language skills the UK fought on against the Nazis rather than cutting a deal with Hitler after Dunkirk because of the bigger picture of what was at stake in terms of preserving modern western civilisation from a slide into totalitarian barbarism. That means that the Union Flag in a WWII context at least (different story elsewhere obviously where the Empire is concerned) was a symbol of freedom and hence something that Celtic supporters like James Stokes VC and a large number of deserters from Eire's armed forces had no problem saluting. For many people the Union Flag remains to this day a positive symbol to be proud of because of the legacy of the era that very much shaped modern British identity, i.e. WWII.

He's determind to turn Rangers supporters into fascists, basically, when in reality they were patriotic Brits who fought the Axis powers during WWII to defend parliamentary democracy while people like Sean Russell were boarding German U-boats and De Valera was signing a book of condolence for Adolf Hitler.

Schalke 04 were originally known as Scheissenbruen-Weiss Gelsenkirchen.

Rose

Prior to the arrival of the Gaels of Dalriada the Druids of Brythonic Scotland crowned King Arthur in Camelon. Medieval scribes made a transcription error and the legend of Camelot was born.

Benfica were traditionally very left wing leaning (hence the red), while Sporting were the pro-Salazar clerical fascist regime club. Throw in the shared green and white hoops factor and it's maybe no surprise that the Estoril Young Defenders Accordian Band would be putting in an appearance like this.

Motherwell Not part of Scotland's Tourist Trail

Can you imagine the seethe from Gaelic language advocates if Gaelic placenames were all translated into English in the Highlands and Hebrides and the English translation was placed on road signs alongside the traditional Gaelic one? There's an attempt at the moment to pretend that Gaelic is a national language in an Eire under De Valera sort of way and that definitely does deserve to be subjected to closer scrutiny.

The modern values of political correctness haven't really been internalised by most people in Scotland and that very much includes the chattering classes and political elite. What happens instead is that the PC agenda is used selectively as a weapon to target certain groups within society in a way that pushes a favoured identity politics agenda that wins votes for political parties based on visceral level tribalism. The first step to moving away from this scenario would be genuine secularism and an end to all of the state sanctioned involvement of religious groups within institutions of the state, such as the monarchy, armed forces and primary and secondary education.

Given he's from a part of Belfast that makes Bainsford look like Beverly Hills, I seriously doubt it.

Where are you getting condemnations of celebrations in what I have been posting? All I have been arguing is that some of the outbursts on this thread look a lot like what people claim to be opposed to (i.e. bigotry). In Scotland people use that word in a way that's a wee bit different from how it's defined in the dictionary, which is holding an opinion to an unreasonable extent that results in an intolerance of others, and use it in a tribal sort of way as a blanket description of entire groups of people that they don't like.

...because freedom of assembly is a fundamental human right protected by European Charter.

^^^Prime example of what I was talking about. How about Remembrance Sunday?

No, but some people simply can't stand the sight of a Union Flag and project their own hangups onto it in an exaggerated sort of way & not likely to be mistaken for a MENSA convention but more than just drunken jakey types lining the streets to watch the bands go by

I think the only actively "practicing" Orangeman posting in this thread is an Aberdeen supporter, for what it's worth, which shows why stereotypes are best avoided. Not sure how informative the post really was beyond that. The Dan Winter's cottage stuff that revolved around rural paramilitarism didn't have much to do with what led to the growth of Orangeism later on in Ulster, the Scottish coalfields and beyond. Many/most Presbyterians were on the side of the United Irishmen in 1798 because 18th century Ireland wasn't a fun place to be if you weren't Anglican and it was the Presbyterians that had the numbers in Ulster rather than the CoI. What the LOL later provided was a vehicle for Protestants, who were split between several different denominations, to meet socially and organise in the face of an Irish nationalism that moved away from being inspired by the ideals of the French revolution to being driven by ancestral tribalism. Think people also tend to lose sight of the importance of the meeting socially angle on this in a just another excuse to get bevvied sort of way. But I bet he'll still deny being prejudiced against the aforementioned individuals.

When the SNP hold a parade in Stirling over Bannockburn over some old battle from centuries ago of questionable relevance to the present day is it also absolutely driven by hatred and intolerance? Grew up hearing both Ulster unionist and Scottish nationalist narratives on history and the difference on why one is the end of civilisation as we have known it while the other is perfectly socially acceptable where the chattering classes in Scotland are concerned has never been that obvious to me, given the similarity in having an underlying them vs us mentality underpinning it all was always obvious.

26 + 6 = 2

Hearts changed their colours to maroon and white because one of their players was quite partial to aubergines.

Belfast city hall and clueless fringe nutters from Scotland, who didn't understand who was really supposed to be wound up by it, rather than anybody from the "failed statelet".

Suspect you would be in for a surprise if you checked up on what side the Pope was on in that particular conflict. It was more a wider European dynastic dispute and in a British context a lot of it revolved around how much power the monarch should have relative to parliament. The emergence of a largely symbolic constitutional monarchy is seen by some as a key breakthrough on the road to a fully functional parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage. Personally think Tom Nairn was on the money with his critique of the UK's constitution in The Enchanted Glass and it is something that should be viewed as having been an impediment to the sort of progress that Scotland's 18th century Enlightenment subsequently helped to inspire elsewhere.