When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.
When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.
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Tags: perspectivesStewart Bremner
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comment, history
For a long time if felt like a dirty secret. It’s how we’ve been conditioned. It was simply something that you just didn’t speak about, because most people around you would look down on you if they knew.
Those feelings are something that many who believe in an independent Scotland have encountered at some point in our lives. Up until recently I very much felt that way, and to this day I’m still wary of mentioning my Scottish independence yearning in some circles. But times are changing.
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Tags: Stewart Bremner
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comment, culture