Culloden

"Now's the time, and now's the hour"   Robert Burns

The Langs of my family were a Jacobite sept of Macdonald of Glencoe.  They left Scotland for Louth and Meath fifty years before Culloden after Killiecrankie and the Glencoe Massacre.  They hoped to avoid taking the oath of Allegiance to King William.

pl

Comments

[Medicine Man]

I'm sorely tempted to find and link to an online recording of Iron Maiden's The Clansman in honour of all our Gallic ancestors. Alas I think the Colonel is more of a country/western guy though.

[robt willmann]

Independence for Scotland! Secession now!

https://www.scotreferendum.com/

(Will they be using electronic voting machines? If you don't watch it, they can eliminate your chance for success.)

[Piotr, Poland]

@ Col Lang:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cPitxtk4m0

[georgeg]

Peter Watkin's "Culloden" (Available on DVD) is a lost masterpiece.
Frightening in it's display of man's inhumanity still true today.

[turcopolier]

MM

No. pl

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Colonel and All,

A link to a Wikipedia article on the Scottish folk song, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation, lyrics by Robert Burns. The article sets the stage by describing the Darien Scheme, that in conjunction with poor harvests, and maybe a little bribery, too, led Scotland to sign the Act of Union. Burns' poem, in Scots dialect, of course, is found on this page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_a_Parcel_of_Rogues_in_a_Nation

Next, a link to an arrangement of this song by Steeleye Span, unfortunately not in dialect, but the scornful impact of the poem is preserved intact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF36FZyxt0g

The best of luck to Scotland the Brave, regardless the outcome of the vote.

[Jim Buck]

Culloden is viewable on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0efUZQANaE

[ronmac]

I'm also in the same boat. My ancestors also fought and died at Culloden. After which their name was mud and was forced to leave during the Highland clearings

[Medicine Man]

Col.: Ah, spoilsport.

[turcopolier]

piotr

The Langs "fled in the night" and snow all the way to Ireland and then to America where they ended by marrying with the Puritan English, but that is another story. pl

[Medicine Man]

It looks like most of my father's clan, Ross, supported the government at Culloden.

[turcopolier]

MM

I suppose you mean the government of the German Hanoverian king. Could George II speak English in 1746? pl

[Medicine Man]

Col.: Yes, the Hanoverian government.

More to the point of present day, neither the Germans or English are Scots. Polling is very tight on the independence vote.

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Colonel,

An interesting point, that, how the Powers That Be in the days of monarchies had no problem installing rulers alien to the nation over which they were to govern.

Today things are somewhat different. Now, there are some who maintain that our current pResident is in similar estate; that he was a Kenyan, or an Indonesian, or such, and therefore unsuitable to be the chief executive of the republic. But we were assured by Mr. Biden that the future pResident was very well-spoken, so that worrisome indicator of a non-native at the helm was not on display.

It still begs the question, however, as to whether the institutional vetting involved in putting forth this particular sort of fellow for the position was not akin to those hallowed practices from the days of monarchy of plunking an alien down in the throne. Maybe it was all legit after all; but a deracinated member of the elite in the role bespeaks a status change for the nation, perhaps?

[different clue]

JerseyJeffersonian,

I have my doubts that Obama was vetted for "alienicity". I suspect he was vetted to be the eager servantool of the people who funded him and brought him forth. He was vetted by Big Insura who looked to him for their big Obamacare payday and by the FIRE sector engineer-designers of the Crash of 2008 who looked to him for immunity and impunity for any illegal actions they may have been vulnerable to prosecution for on the road to TARP.
He may also have been injected into the Dem party as a trojan horse Republican within it, to finalize the work of destroying the Democratic party from within and discrediting it for decades to come among the people who voted for "hope and change".
The more money he is given after office, the stronger the support for my theory of Obama . . . in my own mind at least. His ambition is to be America's first billionaire ex-President. (Which makes me circle yet again around to Walrus's diagnosis of Obama as pathological malignant narcissist. He must know that nuclear war with Russia would leave him too dead to collect all his beautiful money, yet he freely risks it anyway with gay abandon.)

[different clue]

As I was reading the last post and thread about Scottish Independence yes/no, I was thinking about how entirely cautious I am and how I might be voting if I were Scottish but still me in every other way. I would be thinking about what status would give Scotland and the Scottish people therein the best chance of physically and socially/culturally surviving the coming times of strangeness.

At first I was thinking that of course Union with something bigger/stronger would enhance Scotland's survival chances through being part of greater mass and inertia. But then I read a comment about how the current UK government was pushing forward the agenda of all past UK governments from Thatcher forward to slowly and steadily
privatise and yeltsinize every public thing and space of any profitizable value whatsoever in the UK. And this commenter noted that Scotland still had some engineering and industry and social conscience and collective public social co-welfare/co-survival institutions. And staying in UK would subject all these to complete destruction. So
voting yes would be survival-motivated voting to save Scotland from the ongoing Great Burndown.
So what would I do? My cautious heart says "Union" and my cautious head says "Independence". Which would make the stronger case?

Blogger Ian Welsh just yesterday posted an article laying out the same logic . . . how Hard Independence would be a necessary precondition for Scotland to have any hope of long-run social and economic survival. Here is the link.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/scotland-england-and-hegemonic-states/

If Scotland goes Independent, all the way Independent with its own currency and everything; the rump UK, all the EU powers as well as the EU bureaucracy as well as well as the FIRE sector actors (and their government frontpeople) in the US will fear and hate the Independent Scotland just as much as the Western Powers feared and hated the infant Bolshevik Regime in Russia. And the current powers will try just as hard to destroy the genuine independence of Independent Scotland as those powers of old tried to destroy the Bolshevik's infant USSR. Scotland should be ready for this.

[Medicine Man]

Monarchies are funny that way. I've read that Richard the Lionheart was basically a Frenchman -- he was born, raised, and educated in Aquitaine. Yet he is thought of fondly by the English.

[Duncan Kinder]

Greetings Col.

My full name happens to be Duncan Campbell Kinder

Because of which, and not despite which, I am looking forward to Scotland's independence vote. (Although I shared some chortles with some fellow Campbells about Culloden. Sorry about Glencoe; we also did in the Lamonts, among other things. And I was raised upon stories about how Duncan Campbell chased Gregor McGregor across the stream.

And a "no" vote would be merely a setback, not a defeat. Catalonia, Belgium, Sardinia, even Venice, as well as other regions are likewise seeking to separate.

To be followed by reestablishing the Kingdom of the Isles, no doubt.

[turcopolier]

MM

Richard I Lionheart and friend to man, especially to man. He is my 24th great grand uncle. pl

[Tja]

I recall my old history teacher enacting for our class a new tactic that did for the Highlanders at Culloden; one which finally blunted the screaming wildman charges that had hitherto terrified and ravaged government soldiers. It was to ignore completely the man who was charging yourself, and concentrate instead upon the man who was attacking the fellow to your right. To wait until the final moment, when his sword was raised to smite your neighbor, and to spear him in his belly now exposed to you, but not to his intended target.

Culloden, and the '45, and Bonnie Prince Charlie all have a curious role in scots mythology. They appeal to our romanticism, to our sense of pride and self; but we many of us rather conveniently overlook the Big Print, as it were.

George II may indeed have been german and spoken not one word of english; but so what? He was protestant and Charlie was papist. That was trumps. Still would be today, for many.

[Macgupta123]

Re: (Scotland), Catalonia, Belgium, Sardinia, even Venice, as well as other regions are likewise seeking to separate.

--- this would be unthinkable if there was no European Union.

[Macgupta123]

IF Scotland declares for independence, will the remnants of the United Kingdom still qualify for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council?

[Hank Foresman]

My wife and I visited Culloden when we honeymooned on the Black Isle in 2007. She is a Scottish Morgan of Clan MacKay. The battlefield is haunting as there are markers to the slain Clans of Scotland.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

A thousand plus kilometers off topic to the east, the Saker has a post up with links to a report by a committee of Russian engineers on the downing of MH17. It is available in both the original Russian and an English translation. I suspect it will be of considerable interest to many who hang out here.
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/09/malaysian-flight-mh17-crash-analysis-by.html

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Bingo. You caught my ironic intent, different clue. Obama was indeed vetted by our equivalent to the Boyars of olden Russia, or the nobility of the ancien regime, the Lords of Finance, Pharma, Agribiz, the MIC, etc. Found suitable for the task, the tightly-controlled messaging was deployed to get him elected. Once there, as the alien kings of olden days, he would rule over the people with whom he shared basically no affinity or commonality of experience. As a side benefit, he served as a hand grenade tossed into the midst of the party that still contained elements resistant to the triumphant progress of NeoLiberalism, dispelling the likelihood of resistance from that quarter by splintering & embittering the party. Ja, I have been on the same page as Walrus since he first articulated his theory of Obama as malignant narcissist.