The Loch Ness Racist: Colonial dinosaurs are the latest evolution of Britain’s culture wars

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This spring sees the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Loch Ness Monster as a modern-day media phenomenon. There had been local myths of mythological spirit beings known as kelpies or water horses in the Loch for centuries. According to legend, St Columba miraculously exorcised one of these beasts from the nearby River Ness in the 6th century; skeptics claim it was a rogue walrus.

Stories of a true prehistoric plesiosaur-like being living in the Loch only date back to early 1933, however, following the opening of previously remote lakes to the outside world with the creation of a new road modern main passing through the north bank, a convenient vantage point from which a new wave of outsiders would soon begin to claim their own monster sightings. Therefore, a skeptic might well argue that what is really being celebrated this year is not really the birth of Nessie, but the opening of the A82 from Glasgow to Inverness.

On May 2, 1933, the first major newspaper story about Nessie appeared in the Inverness Courier, about a husband and wife who had driven along the newly completed road before being surprised by a huge upheaval on the loch in as a creature with a body resembling that of a whale suddenly appeared, turning the previously calm waters into a quivering cauldron of terror.

The Courier had already gone over 130 years in print without making a single serious mention of a Loch Ness monster. Yet that summer, the news of Nessie had become so widespread that media around the world eagerly reported that another motoring couple named the Spicers had now seen Nessie venturing outside of her natural aquatic environment, crossing the road with a bloody lamb hanging from his jaws.

How long before it takes the new road itself and eats central Glasgow?

Nessie or Nazi?

Undoubtedly, Nessie is good for tourism, as a world famous symbol of Scotland itself. As such, you can expect the nations that currently govern the Scottish National Party (SNP) to embrace it. Not so. For the SNP, Nessie is just a collaborationist tool of English imperialism in the country, a sort of reptilian Caledonian Vidkun Quisling or so reports have implied.

In March 2022, Scottish media reported that the SNP had supposedly created a 17-page social studies lesson plan for use in secondary schools across the nations, which would use Nessie as a tool to ruthlessly indoctrinate 11-14 years with anti -English Propaganda. Quotations have been taken from the document claiming that Nessie was a living symbol of the ambivalent position Scotland occupies in the Union between itself and England.

As the SNP’s whole raison d’etre is to facilitate Scottish independence, the apparent implication was that the monster was to be used to entice impressionable children to one day vote to break up Britain. Quotes suggested that Nessie was simply used by arrogant Londoners to imply that the Scots were ignorant, primitive children who believed in dragons and therefore needed to be ruled from afar by sensible adults:

The very idea of ​​a prehistoric monster in a loch affirms the stereotypical idea that Scotland, unlike England, is rural wilderness, perhaps circumvented by progress. The representation of monsters [in the media] suggests that although there was an early desert before the state of Britain [was established by the Act of Union of 1707]the modern state has the ability to control it using advanced knowledge and technology.

Conservative MSP (Scottish Member of Parliament) Russell Findlay quickly raised questions in the Scottish Assembly building, accusing then Education Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville of trying to brainwash students and for trying[ed] exploitation of our beloved Nessie, before demanding the removal of such embarrassing and ridiculous propaganda from our school curriculum.

In response, Somerville denied that the SNP was abusing Nessie to facilitate Scottish independence, arguing that the lesson plans had been developed by independent educators and that their use in schools was in no way compulsory.

The country time forgot: Scotland

The lesson plan in question, How Others See Us In Film: Scotland in the World Learning Journey is available online. The fact that its web address includes the education.gov.scot tag suggests that it enjoys at least a quasi-official government imprimatur.

This is a media studies resource, encouraging students to consider a range of fantastical Scotlands built by filmmakers from around the world. It is claimed that, when creating the stereotypical Scottish musical Brigadoon (1954), its Hollywood producer scouted locations in Scotland, but rejected them all because no place looked quite like Scotland, so he instead filmed in the United States. Therefore, foreign directors are just recreating their own imaginary internal versions of Scotland in their films, not the real one, the teenagers have to learn.

The films about Loch Ness are particularly revealing, according to the lesson plan, depicting Scotland as positively prehistoric, made habitable only by English technological ingenuity. Nessie’s first film, 1934’s The Secret of the Loch, used the brand new A38 as the Empire’s subliminal secret agent:

the ease with which English scientists and journalists were able to travel to Scotland by train, drive around the loch and report their stories by telephone shows that Scotland is an integral part of the modern state of Great Britain. Brittany [Initially] Nessie was less a Scottish monster exactly than a British monster, a symbol of the ability of the modern state to use its technological and scientific prowess to survey all of its borders, even deep within Loch Ness.

In later films, however, Scotland has now been colonized by another, much larger, imperial superpower: the United States. In the 1983 house short The Loch Ness Monster Movie, a claymation Nessie destroys Edinburgh after Yankee infidels attempt to kidnap her in Marine Fantasyland, Florida. According to the lesson plan, this was intended by the film’s creator as a metaphor asking who really owns Scotland’s valuable underwater natural resources, namely North Sea oil, the Americans who extract it , the English who sell it or the Scots who have it stolen. two?

British nuclear submarines are also submarines today in Scotland. In the event of a nuclear conflict of the 1980s Cold War, Scotland would therefore likely find itself bombarded by Moscow, for which the rampage of plasticine Nessies through Edinburgh must be explained to students as an anti-NATO political allegory, another key SNP policy being to launch British nuclear power. submarines, of course.

So the Godzilla-style city-leveling Nessie is presented here as a citizen of the world again, not a British or American subject, just as the SNP would like. Subjugated under American NATO rule, Nessie would have to reconsider her position in Britain in order to find a different place in the world, the children should be told. For Nessie here, I think it says Scotland.

Strangely, the document does not provide a highly partisan separatist political exegesis of the popular 1980s BBC children’s cartoon series The Family Ness, but perhaps that will be left for the Scots Old Sixes to discover for themselves. later.

Political Dinosaurs

It was not the first time that Nessie had been linked to anti-Scottish racism. In November 2014, following his failure to persuade citizens to vote for freedom from the hated English yoke in that year’s Scottish independence referendum, a large cartoon likeness of then SNP leader Alex Salmond , was ritually burned as part of the annual meeting. Bonfire Night celebrations held in the English town of Lewes.

Going down in flames alongside her was a Nessie figure wearing a stereotypical Tam o shanter cap, leading to rather hypersensitive complaints online that the arson was a bigoted example of anti-Scottish and therefore racist. Sussex Police felt compelled to investigate in order to establish whether or not a crime had been committed. It is not yet illegal to set fire to giant paper mch plesiosaurs, even under poorly drafted UK hate crime legislation Sussex Police have made no arrests for racial crimes against aquatic reptiles , but it’s probably only a matter of time.

Outside of Africa

Nessie isn’t the only dinosaur-like animal dubiously said to roam the world today. Central sub-Saharan Africa is said to be home to several of these living wonders, from the sauropod-like creature mokele-mbembe and the stegosaurus clone mbielu-mbielu-mbielu to the Kasai Rex, a T-Rex look-alike of which there are several forged photographs. But are these more examples of Anglo-Saxon white colonialist racism?

African dinosaur legends first emerged in the early 1900s, when much of the continent, much like Scotland today, was ruled from afar by non-indigenous governments. According to some contemporary critics, such as paleontologist Darren Naish, this simply reflected a kind of lazy nave view that all of Africa was imagined as a homogenous dark continent stuck in the Stone Age, inhabited only by people from the jungle armed with spears, and where little had happened since the Mesozoic era. Unlike the ever-changing London, claimed the white men of colonial times, Africa has changed little since the days of the dinosaurs.

Explorer Dr Roy P. Mackals 1987 book A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe, describing his 1980s expeditions in search of unextinguished African megafauna, features a painted cover image of stereotypical half-naked black tribesmen throwing pathetic little spears ineffectually into the back of a huge diplodocus-like animal.

If Mackal had saved the money and just driven to Loch Ness via the A82 instead, might he have encountered topless, kilted Scots throwing sharpened cabers at their own living fossil giant in the same way?

Steven Tucker is a UK based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitlers & Stalins Misuse of Science, comparing today’s woke pseudoscience to totalitarian pseudoscience…

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