Wee-arra’ people
GLASGOW. IMMIGRATION. SELF-DETERMINATION. UKRAINE. As are “they”
There’s a story goes around Glasgow that the city’s founders were descended from a tribe of Red Indians called Wee-Arra’ People (or the Small-Arrow People). It’s a classic example of Glesca humour and, if anything, it needs cleaning up by referring to a tribe of First Nation people. However, it’s humorous for being a jibe at the local accent and an oblique reference to the city’s reputation as a stalwart of Red Clydeside, that erstwhile bastion of working class shipbuilding and trade. “We are the people,” they proclaim in defiance of all, including their management bosses, who would assert that they are not.
The phrase We, the people is more closely associated with another, more famous expression of defiance known as the Constitution of the United States of America, written to establish what it describes as a more perfect union, and it is a phrase inscribed on the mind of every American, such that, in the online forums where the upcoming election in that country is being discussed, you won’t venture far before you see it being bandied about hither and thither. “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for our common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution …”
These are high-sounding and, some might argue, highfalutin sentiments. For the union thereby procured has been challenged once in warfare and many times in prejudice and bias; its justice is currently causing shockwaves among its population; its tranquillity is so untranquil as to send ordinary citizens en masse to procure arms for their defence, and a far from common one at that, but an individual one, indeed; its welfare is not general but scattered and arbitrary; and its liberty sets a questionable standard to those who are today’s posterity of those founding fathers.
And, what is more, theirs was a union of themselves that sought to rob the indigenous peoples, the wee-arra’ people, of what was and had been theirs for millennia before the founders uttered these solemn words. What is curious in all of this is how, when we, the people or something akin to it was voiced in the past in countries like South Africa and Rhodesia, the phrase was looked on in disdain by those who questioned, “And, what about the other them, the people?”; yet the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America was taken as an established fact unworthy of question. We, the people clearly meant and, yes, them, the other people as well, who were as subjugated under the liberators as the liberators were from their subjugators. Nowadays, We, the people is a term vaunted by both Democrats and Republicans with equal vehemence and, yet, the brickbats that go accompanied by the phrase clearly indicate that neither means to use the term as an all-inclusive expression that means We, all of the people.
In Israel, there are two peoples as well. One united under a religion, the other excluded by a religion. And, if ever a single people was united, it has to be the Ukrainians, who unite in defiance of those who would assert that they are no people. Not, as was once asserted, that they are Russians, but now one that it is asserted has no right not just to exist as a people but to exist full stop.
The right to self-determination, vaunted so high by those who would be liberated from their subjugators, is a standard easily glossed over when the liberated come to be confronted with like claims by those who feel to be under analogous subjugation from their liberator. From the republics of South America, who subjugate their indigenous folks, to Canada and the US in the north of that continent who have done likewise, from Israel and the West Bank to Ukraine and the Donbas, on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, the fight is for self-determination, perchance at the cost of self-determination for another.
It is for this reason that I insist to Ukrainians that they must hold referenda in a due and proper fashion when the occasion presents itself in those territories that have expressed a will to secede from the Republic of Ukraine. Even Belgium’s plebiscites in the East Cantons that were hived off to it from Germany after the First World War lacked the cogency that a status quo in today’s world belies. A Ukrainian referendum in the Donbas regions may well be the first such open, honest avowal of a principle claimed by the liberated in favour of those who claim a similar right in their own behalf.
For the people that we are must surely decide such matters for themselves, just as the founders of 1781 did for the new-born USA. And the result of the decision must lie with all of the people, not just with some arbitrarily decided us.