MICHAEL Donnelly (May 9) rightly defends one of Scotland's great democratic heroes, Thomas Muir, against the brash prejudice of Michael Fry's ''The New History of Scotland'' (May 7). Fry is a clever writer, but his polemics are of the stir-Fry kind. His kick at Thomas Muir is the old and tired reactionary nonsense expected of a blatant Tory historian.
If there is a ''father'' of Scotland's democratic tradition, it is not the leering, finger-wagging Donald Dewar, it is Thomas Muir, the young advocate, who was sent to Botany Bay for 14 years because he read and gave to others Paine's book The Rights of Man.
That there is no statue erected to Muir's memory in Scotland is a national disgrace. One should be erected at the entrance to the new Scottish Parliament, as an eternal reminder that the ideals of freedom and democracy are what elevates man from the brute. Ian O Bayne first mooted the Muir statue idea.
It was the dominant animal brutes (pre-civilised man) who won the day, in the ideological battlefield of the 1790s, when the Enlightenment project crashed to chaos as the humanitarian ideals of a generation were wiped out by warmongering Willie Pitt and his snarling ''Pitt-Bull'', Harry Dundas.
Muir's trial was a show trial devoid of reason and devoid of justice. It compares with the Stalinist show trials of post-war Russia. It was straight out of Planet of the Apes. During the 1790s Scotland experienced its historic ''Tianmen Square'': when the intellectual and radical vanguard of our country was intimidated into silence, imprisoned, or deported. Michael Fry's assessment of this period is an apologia for barbarism and tyranny.
Bottle-swigging Harry Dundas ran a counter-revolutionary phalanx of spies in Scotland. Professor Dugald Stewart was silenced. Professor John Miller of Glasgow went underground, writing under the pen-name Crito. Robert Burns was directed to be ''silent and obedient'' and keep his nose out of politics (we know now he did not obey this obnoxious order). Burns's friend James Tytler fled the country as did others like James Thomson Callander.
The domestic ideological war of the 1790s and its horrendous tragedy is summed up perfectly in the 1795 song Exiles , (printed in the recent 1996 Edinburgh Review):
Arm'd alone with Truth and Reason,
Mammon's venal slaves we dar'd;Short of triumph was the season:
Virtue, view the base reward.
Doom'd among these wilds to languish,
Exil'd from our native shore.Friends bewail in bitter anguish,
Victims they behold no more.What the cause of our destruction?
Tell th' astonish'd world around;'Twas the combat with Corruption;
Britain feels her mortal wound!
Scotland, once our boast, our wonder,
Fann'd by Freedom's purer gale,When thy Wallace, arm'd with thunder,
Bade the baffl'd TYRANT wail:O, our Country! Vultures rend thee,
Proudly riot on thy store;Who deluded, shall befriend thee?
Ah! do we thy lot deplore.
In January 1999, the bicentenary of Muir's death, Scotland should celebrate its great son, Thomas Muir. Muir, like most modern Scots, wished to see unbridled Reason flourish in a mature participative democracy. Vogue, prejudiced, and reactionary ''history'' serves to save the dark of ignorance and hold back the day.
If nothing happens in Scotland to commemorate Muir in 1999, then we will know that Scotland is not a nation proud of its evolution towards democracy and that modern talk about democracy and ''the will of the people'' is merely shallow rhetoric.
Patrick Scott Hogg,
16 Main Street,
The Village, Cumbernauld.
May 11.
c/o A M Heath,
79 St Martin's Lane, London.
May 11.
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