Here's a villainous Englishman's overview of exactly what's wrong with the film…. Gibson doesn't have to utter a word before the true extent of the film's inaccuracy is revealed. His outfit mismash is the modern-day equivalent of mixing a spacesuit and a suit of armour. But that didn't stop the Braveheart team, whose Hollywood brains decided that if this was a film about Scottish people it had to involve kilts. It didn't seem to bother them that kilts weren't actually developed for another three centuries.
And then there's the woad. If the original Wallace had actually smeared blue face paint all over himself everyone would have regarded him as just a little bit crazy. Woad was 1, years out of date by the time Gibson's character popped up on the scene. And you thought Downton Abbey's water bottle was bad. Gibson's Wallace was on the side of the ordinary people.
That wasn't exactly the case in the 13th century. Far from being a poor villager who couldn't afford more than three or four tubs of woad a year, he was actually a minor knight who owned land. Okay, so he was a noble by birth. But his heart was in the right place, wasn't it, putting him on the side of ordinary people? Not really. What Gibson failed to show was Wallace's use of conscription to make his peasant soldiers fight for him — and his readiness to hang those who refused to do so. Wallace's archnemesis, the English monarch Edward I, wasn't the nicest of characters.
But 'Longshanks' wasn't quite the monster Braveheart paints him to be. All the records show him to be very generous, giving away lots of money as befitted a serious religious man. He was extremely keen on his wife, Eleanor of Castile as opposed to in the film, where he lustily asserts his overlordship by having his way with newlyweds. And, we are told, he liked poetry and harp music too. Sounds like rather a sensitive little soul, doesn't he? Wallace, in aspiring I-have-a-dream mode, reveals his vision of a future Scotland, independent and free, to his younger brother, the confusingly-named Bruce.
It's exactly the sort of message the nationalists have been putting forward in And while they're not exactly pretending Scotland wasn't its own nation before the Act of Union in , it's not exactly mentioned much. Wallace was utterly wrong: Scotland had been its own kingdom for ages and ages before the death of Alexander III. The English had actually only invaded the year before.
After Wallace's gory demise came the Battle of Bannockburn, in which the British were surprised by Robert the Bruce and suffered a big defeat. The film portrays Robert the Bruce as triggering the battle after getting carried away with the emotion of Wallace's memory. The movie does not address the issue.
Its clear, from the end when we switch to Bannockburn, , its national freedom. But since we are talking about a monarchy, that means freedom for the Scottish King.
For the average peasant or partisan, things would not have changed that much. Independence for what? To begin to answer these questions, we must first define what we mean by nationalism. For many people, it is just the natural attachment to home, the place they group up. These feelings, however, obviously do not exist in a social vacuum. But nationality is not the same as nationalism.
Nationalism is far more, and a lot less ethically, than recognition of cultural uniqueness and love of home. Nationalism is the love of, of the desire to create, a nation state. Anarchists have long noted the fundamental difference between society and state.
Every state is an artificial mechanism imposed on society by some ruler in order to defend and make secure the interests of privileged minorities within society.
Nationalism was created to reinforce the state by providing it with the loyalty of a people of shared linguistic, ethnic, and cultural affinities. This can obviously be seen in Scottish history, when English Monarchs banned the pipes, the kilt and Gaelic. This is hardly surprising as the state is a centralised body, invested with power and a monopoly of force.
This does not mean, however, that anarchist are indifferent to national liberation struggles. Far from it. Nationality is not a principle; it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is.
Every nationality, great or small has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. Nationality is a product of social processes. Social evolution cannot be squeezed into the narrow, restricting borders of the nation state. Nationality, like any right, results from social life and is only to be concerned with itself when the right is denied.
We will not bother to prove that Scotland, like Wales and Ireland, is a colony of the English Empire and a separate country. For most thinking Scots it does not need to be argued, our rights to self-determination are denied. We will move on to the real core of the problem, what does independence actually mean today and what should the response of anarchists be to struggles for national liberation. When addressing the implications of independence, we must start from the obvious fact that any country has class and hierarchical divisions within it.
Obviously, if we are talking about national freedom we have to take into account the people who inhabit the nation. How wealth is disrupted will have an impact on society and the distribution of freedom within it. Would a capitalist Scotland be fundamentally different for most people who would still be powerless economically and socially? These vast differences in power and freedom are just as true on the international level as it is within a country.
Under existing circumstances, devolution is intended as a further blow to the eroding democratic processes. Major corporations, investment firms, and the like, can constrain or directly control the acts of national governments and can set one national workforce against another. The power of global capital has increased massively over the last 30 years, something which must be taken into account when discussing the social impacts of self-determination for Scots within a world capitalist framework these important points are discussed in greater detail in issue 2 of Scottish Anarchist.
The distribution of wealth, and so power, within a country has important implications for any national liberation struggle. Braveheart does make it clear that when push came to shove, most of the Scottish Nobles sided with their class brothers on the English side.
In the Act of the Union, the Scottish Parliament happily united Parliaments in order to get better access to the English Empire and new markets and wealth.
The interests of the ruling classes then were a-national, not much has really changed. National liberation struggles usually counterpoise the common interests of the nation and assume that class is irrelevant. This does not mean, however, that anarchists are indifferent to imperialism, whereby one nation imposes its will on another. We will now contrast the anarchist approach to national liberation struggles with that of Leninism, the approach most commonly used this century.
Like the good Social Democrat he was, Lenin supported the right of nations to self-determination. Lenin's ideas still hold relevance for much of the socialist movement in Scotland.
The same point, namely that independence would be a step towards creating socialism, was made by Scottish Militant Labour SML and Liberation members at the recent Scottish Socialist Forum, recently held in Glasgow. The second of these myths was demolished in issue 2 of Scottish Anarchist, where the power of international capital and the non-neutrality of the state was discussed in great detail [15]. Now we will deal with the first point. This is state capitalism, the creation of one big boss, the state — not socialism,.
Instead of the revolution of everyday life and the often difficult work of creating self-managed alternatives in our communities and workplaces, socialist activity is constrained and forced into the individualistic and atomising mould of capitalist politics. That this is the result of electioneering can be seen from the history of Marxian Social Democracy, the British Labour Party and more recently the German Greens and should leave no honest investigator in any doubt.
Socialism, for anarchists, is the self-liberation of working class people, by their own efforts, creating and using their own organisations. There can be no separation of political, social and economic struggles. The struggle against imperialism cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation struggles. That this approach can be successful is indicated by the actions of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, to take just one example.
Makhno, as well as fighting against both Red and White dictatorship, also resisted the Ukrainian nationalists. In the areas protected by the Makhnovist army, working class people organised their own lives, directly, based on their own ideas and needs. True, social, self-determination [18]. Until such a time as a film about Makhno is made, Braveheart will have to do. It should be given credit for raising some important points concerning the struggle for national self-determination, although it does not really address them.
We hope that we have done so here. So, so and see Braveheart, its an excellent movie. But also check out Ken Loach's new film Land and Freedom as well. This gives some sort of idea what social self-determination would be like as it deals with the Spanish revolution and what the struggle for freedom must also involve if its not to prove illusionary [19].
Free in a Free World.
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