Scotland

Without a long history of invasion and internal colonisation in Scotland and England, there would have been no British Empire colonising overseas. Without the vicious clearing of highland communities from their lands here, there would not have been the families desperate for food and a future, with no choice but to work for a pittance in the factories and furnaces of empire, or to fight its wars.

The devastation this domination system wrecks on communities elsewhere is vicious and visible. The terrible harm it has done and does to ordinary people here can be less visible. Even less visible is the atrophying of empathy, the shrivelling of humanity, it causes in the wealthy who are persuaded they benefit from this system, and so perpetuate it.

The mass murder of empire, the forced residential schooling, and breaking of others cultures and stealing of their lands, has viciously harmed indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, while being dressed up as a ‘civilising mission’ or ‘progress’.

The same is true of how this system treats the vast majority of those living precariously here, who are told that they benefit from a system that blames them for the inequality they suffer.

But do even the 1% who supposedly benefit, really benefit? Those whose empathy is broken through the boarding school system, and whose shallowness is groomed by a compliant fawning media perpetuating its life-destroying feudal, corporate and political world?

It is not by chance that our system is stumbling us into extinction.

How do we become aware of, heal and recover from the trauma that paralyses us when we are caught up in systems of domination - sometimes as dominated, sometimes as dominator?

We begin from Scotland, from the experience of internal colonisation, dispossession and alienation here, that led to the same elsewhere. And also from the experience of regaining connection to the land, regaining community, releasing ourselves from captivity.

In terms of the dispossession of communities, Scotland suffers from the most concentrated land ownership in Europe, with less than 500 people owning half of all privately owned land. However a huge pushback is underway. In the 1990s places like the Isle of Eigg took back their lands into community ownership, then the 2003 Land Reform Act - passed by the newly reconvened Scottish Parliament - made it possible for rural communities to take back their lands. Now 75% of people in the Western Isles live on community owned lands, and as the Act’s provisions are extended, communities in urban areas are using it to bring buildings and lands back into community ownership.

Empire sought to break us, but can community and collective care be our future?

[GalGael and the Govan Free State: “We no longer find it reasonable to put our faith elsewhere. There is no one coming. There is only us.” G2G and how we assemble “In Scotland, we are supporting and collaborating with people around the country to build bottom-up Peoples Assemblies”