With friends like these ...

What a dreadful ending to my weekly Wednesday night out down the pub. We'd been watching football, and nattering as usual, and then one of my friends picked up a newspaper (I say "newspaper", it was The Sun) that was lying around. This week, there'd been a report about the unique shapes of our noses: there are six basic shapes, but like our ears, our noses are all unique in shape and size, and as biometric data, the measurements can be stored on databases and used in searching for suspects or for general identification purposes. My friend was looking at this in the paper, and turned to me and said, "let's check your nose. Are you a jew?". Well, I just lost it. I'd heard racist comments from these guys before, and been uncomfortable about it. Usually I just tell 'em not to be so stupid, and we have a little bit of an argument, but then the evening goes on with it put behind us; but I just had images in my mind of those posters and leaflets that the Nazis used in the 1930s on 'how to tell a jew'. They showed a profile photo of a stereotypical jew, with a hooked nose and so on. There were arrows and dimensions and descriptions of what to look for, and these images, and those of film clips of Nazi officials with calipers measuring people's noses, just came to mind. I dislike racism intensely, and feel uncomfortable around people who use racist comments and jokes, enough so that I went so far as asking a work colleague to refrain from voicing his opinions in my presence, which he did, and apologised. Maybe it's because I'd had a few pints by then, but I was really upset on this occasion. It seemed to have taken one extra step too far.
"It's only a joke", they protested
"But that's how it fucking starts!" I retorted. Here I am, an Englishman living in Scotland as they're about to take a referendum on independence. I'd be a foreigner myself here if they got a 'yes' vote. Would they feel the same about me as they did about all these other immigrants? If not, why not? Because I'm not black?! I was told I was being silly, that it couldn't happen here. You might have said the same in Yugoslavia before the end of the communist era. It was a civilised, modern country, with Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all living under the system. Friends and neighbours turned on each other. It couldn't happen here? There are a few Scots who would like to give any English living in their country a hard time, and it doesn't take many to start a snowball.

Another of these friends has made comments about us being "inundated" with "them", and how in some places it's a game of "spot the white man". Apparently that's the good thing about West Calder - there are none of "them" here.

This isn't a case of me expressing my politics, and this being The Stand That We Take In The Party I Support; nothing as remote as that. This was a visceral feeling of disgust towards these people who were my friends, it literally made me weep. As I say, I'd had a few beers then, which probably didn't help, but now I'm sober, and still feel very saddened and angry at their comments and behaviour. Maybe they weren't aware of the connotations of what they said when they said it. Well they fucking are now! They are my friends, and I don't want to change that. I know I'm never going to change their minds. These guys have never lived in non-white non-anglo-saxon communities, so they have no idea how similar our values really are. I'd just like these friends of mine to keep those opinions to themselves when I'm around. There are plenty of times when I'm not around that they can talk amongst themselves like that.

The whole episode has left me feeling very depressed, but this was in a week that a prominent imam published a paper characterising the suicide bombing campaigns and Taliban and Al-Quaida insurgences as non-islamic. In another article I read, a Polish neo-nazi skinhead found out that he was actually jewish (his parents were brought up as Catholic during the Nazi occupation), did some research into his heritage, and ended up converting to orthodox judaism so he could study the Torah. All he had to do was to make some attempt at understanding the people he'd been victimising all his life, and he felt different. Doesn't always work of course, but it's a nice story.

That's it. I'm exhausted now. Rant over.