**Clark** Hypocrisy That Knows No Bounds: A Rebuttal Written & Posted by Dougie Wright For RangersMedia Over the past few days, a blog post has been plastered over social media entitled ‘Hypocrisy That Knows No Bounds’. The original article can be found here: quaer0.wordpr…nows-no-bounds/ Within the article, the author (nameless) argues that Rangers FC are committing a great act of hypocrisy in putting on a ‘jingoistic display’ on Remembrance Sunday. He claims that the club’s refusal to pay any money owed to HMRC (‘no Rangers fan wants to settle the debt with HMRC’) cannot go together with a solemn display for fallen troops on Remembrance Sunday. Now, this is an article that is wrong on a number of levels. First of all, the author argues that the poppy campaign is merely a propaganda tool to fuel support for current conflict. Not true. Personally, I abhor war, and I think that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were done for the wrong reasons. Yet I still wear a poppy. The poppy covers all conflicts. It covers the soldiers who fought so bravely in the Somme in the First World War. It covers those who fought fascism in Europe, and those who defended British territory from the junta Argentine regime in 1982. The British government has made some mistakes with its foreign policy over the past century, but there have also been conflicts that were absolutely just. However, more importantly, just because you disagree with the motive for war does not mean that you cannot respect the soldiers who have fallen whilst serving their country. You wear a poppy to remember the good guys, not to promote the ‘emblem of fascism’ as the author self-righteously proclaims. Fascism. This is an ideology that the author has clearly failed to grasp. Fascism is the belief that the indigenous population of a country is superior to any other race, and, as such, the country has the right to expand its territory at the expense of other, ‘weaker’ nations. Wearing a poppy to remember fallen soldiers is a long haul flight away from the tyranny of fascism. Remembering the dead does not mean that you think Britain should have the right to declare war on the Faroes and subject it to our ‘superior’ culture of fish and chips and Eastenders. The hapless blogger continues to be even more wrong as the articles progresses. Childish claims that Rangers FC are a ‘new club’ (evidence against that from the SFA, UEFA, the ECA, the ASA, the BBC and STV) are conjugated with the belief that the club owes millions to HMRC. For the best part of a decade, Rangers operated a well known EBT scheme which was subject to a high profile HMRC investigation. However, the First Tier Tribunal ruled almost a year ago that Rangers a) did not illegally and b) did not owe the millions many assumed they would. As it stands, Rangers do not owe HMRC a single penny. HMRC may be appealing the verdict of the First Tier Tax Tribunal, but there has been no evidence that the result will be any different to that of the first time around. We live in a liberal democracy. One where you have the freedom to challenge the interpretation of the laws of the land. Rangers did just that, and were found largely not guilty. Yet bloggers such as this cannot seem to get their head around this. The author has numerous holes in his argument, but they are far too many for a dissertation pressured fourth year Politics student such as myself to write about, so I’ll end on just one. Throughout the blog, the author speaks of the Rangers support as one entity. ’They want this’, ‘no Rangers fan wants’, ‘not one of them’….this guy does not grasp what Rangers is. It is a football club with an incredibly diverse following. We have unionists, we have nationalists, we have Protestants, Catholics and atheists, we have celebrities, we have the homeless, we have liberals and conservatives. We have fans from every cleavage of society. We will unite against anyone who tries to harm our club, but the implication that Rangers equals fascism (or indeed any other political ideology) is both narrow minded and prejudiced. This attempt to vilify the poppy and the entirety of Rangers FC under the guise of righteousness is best summed up by quote from Oscar Wilde: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 09:18:00 +0000
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