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Alex Salmond speaks at North Macedonia conference hours before his deathSource: Its Academy of Cultural Diplomacy
Transcript
00:00I'm always reluctant to teach lessons to other people in other countries.
00:05And can I just say to the president here that if I say anything wrong,
00:10then I will not be buying lunch for lots of people.
00:14I'm Scottish after all, we don't do these sort of things.
00:17President Ivanov, Your Excellencies.
00:20There were many successful things about the process of trying to reclaim Scottish independence.
00:29There was no violence.
00:31I mean, Scotland is not unique in the world, but it's unusual
00:35in that the process of self-determination in the modern era in Scotland,
00:41in the democratic era, has been achieved without a single person losing their life.
00:48In fact, nobody's had so much as a nosebleed.
00:51I think the worst success in the entire referendum campaign of ten years ago
00:56was that somebody got an egg thrown at them, which is hardly in the great excesses of politics.
01:02So that was an extraordinary success.
01:06I need to thank the School of Young Leaders and the initiative for...
01:10Respect for legitimate democratic aspirations leads to good outcomes.
01:18Disrespecting it in one way or another, and often surprisingly,
01:23can lead to bad outcomes for everyone.

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