The SNP have come under attack for doctoring an image of Edinburgh castle to replace the Union Jack with the Saltire. Predictably there has been uproar (ok, a little bit of bickering), with bloggers such as Tom Harris MP labelling the SNP as Stalinist and accusing the SNP of deliberately insulting the Royal British Legion … which is just bizarre.
An insult, for future reference, would be something more along the lines of:
I wish those grumpy old ‘i was in the war’ bastards would just f**k off and die already.
Which obviously wouldn’t be a very nice thing to say at all …
… as far as I’m aware that’s not a line the SNP are taking, although Labour have gone to some lengths to send our troops off to die in illegal wars undermining the good reputation of our armed forces. I actually think that it would be more accurate to lay the slur of Stalinist regime at the feet of the Westminster government who have waged an unprecedented propaganda war over the last decade … even at that though the application of the term ‘Stalanist’ would be pushing the bounds of reality a bit.
Anyway, the feigned offence is a bit of red herring, after all the military promotes the history of the Scottish regiments and the notion of being a ‘Scottish Soldier’ … surely it was more insulting then to abolish Scotland traditional military regiments.
note the photoshop addition of the Saltire
If the image on the right here is propaganda, and the image used here is in it’s actual size as it appears here, then I wonder how those who are getting upset about those tiny little flags would say about the image on the below?
It’s understandable from a marketing perspective why the creators of the image might have replaced some of the Union Jacks with Saltires since the image is being used on the Homecoming Scotland 2009website which is publicising a Scottish cultural event. To be honest though I think the notion of replacing the Union Jack was misguided … I’m sure that other images of the Edinburgh Tattoo and/or Edinburgh Castle could have been found which didn’t feature the flag.
Union Jack projected onto the side of Edinburgh Castle, Scotland's best known historicla landmark
The whole thing was really a bit of an own goal and the doctoring of the image unnecessary given the target audience of the site and the tiny nature of the flags in question. The story ties in with the recent campaign to attempt to label the SNP’s approach to independence as ‘creeping’ and to attribute darker nationalistic tendencies more associated with right wing organisations that covet the Union Jack.
How much of a story is this though, that a country flies it’s national flag should hardly be something to cause consternation. Yet it’s something that has become contentious, not just in Scotland, but throughout the British isles with the identities of all the ‘home nations’ being subsumed by the greater identity of Britishness under the Union Jack.
The fact that it can be plastered across the side of a historic monument without nayone so much as batting an eyelid shows where the real brainwashing has been taking place. If you really want to see creeping nationalism, just look out for the EU flag being plastered all over the place … including the Homecoming Scotland site.
image source: Ian Foote
