In the United States, June 14 is Flag Day, that one remaining heartening and unifying occasion when Americans of all colours, creeds, politics and identities can gather around the national flag in the only true shared collective brotherhood that is now left open to them – that of increasing mutual hatred.

The traditional agreed-upon standard symbolism of Old Glory is clear. The 13 red and white stripes represent the 13 original colonies in the Union, and the 50 white stars on a blue field signify today’s 50 Federal States. Red equals valour and bravery, white purity and innocence, and blue vigilance, perseverance and justice.

Yet, in today’s divided United States, many disagree. How can white mean innocence, critics crow, when America is now held perpetually guilty of its original founding sin of slavery? And how can blue mean justice, when there was no justice for George Floyd? To deconstruct and pick apart a national flag is to deconstruct and pick apart an actual nation itself in microcosm.

Raising red flags

There has been a flurry of academic research into the psychological effect of flags over recent years, the apparent aim of which is to literally ‘flag them up’ as being dangerous and harmful in nature. To today’s ideologically transnationalist ruling class, flags are inherently politically and morally illegitimate, and so must be discredited by any means possible – and academics are only too willing to oblige.

One 2016 study found that “simply having a [shared] symbol” like a flag immediately “leads collections of individuals to seem more like real, unified groups”, which sounds like a good thing. Yet, continued the study, this imagined collectivity only leads such flag-bonded groups “to seem more threatening” to outsiders. Therefore, collectives “strategically emphasize” their flags whenever they “want their group to appear united and intimidating”. Flags start wars. Flags can kill.

Another 2008 study supposedly found a mere 15 millisecond flash of the old Confederate flag made white participants less willing to vote for black Barack Obama. Other research purportedly discovered exposure to national flags immediately increased anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s official: flags make you racist, so douse them all in gasoline right now. Science orders us to do so.

Most laughably of all, one 2011 paper suggested a single exposure to the Stars and Stripes shifted a voter’s allegiance rightwards towards the Republican Party for as long as eight months afterwards. Why do the GOP keep on losing so many elections to the left-wing flag burners, then?   

Ban these banners

One handy 2021 summary of such research featured quotes from social psychologists to the effect that “Flags are tricky. If you allude to a collective and say ‘This is us,’ there’s always somebody that’s not included.” Yes, that’s kind of the point …

The Japanese flag, by its very nature, excludes Australians; but then, in direct compensation, the Australian flag likewise excludes the Japanese. That is what nations are: limited, bounded, concrete, not limitless, boundaryless and abstract. Those are the qualities of bloodless transnationalist organizations like the EU or UN, beneath whose bland banners almost nobody would be prepared to die in a time of war or crisis.

How ironic today’s Western governing class all (creditably) wear the blue and yellow ensign of Ukraine on their lapels: they wouldn’t be seen dead displaying the flag of their own petty little outmoded non-nations the next time they all meet up at Davos to further unravel the Treaty of Westphalia.

Flagging morale

Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the Stars and Stripes predictably came in for much radical revisionist racial reassessment at the hands of Black Lives Matter.

On 4 July 2021, a BLM chapter in Utah called the US flag “a symbol of hatred”, and, as for anyone dumb enough to disagree and go on flying it, “we question your intelligence”. To demonstrate their superior intellects, BLM Utah said that “This country has created genocide”, so anyone flying such a flag of mass-murder “is a racist”. “We will not pledge allegiance to that flag,” leaders declared. “We will not respect a piece of cloth that you respect more than Black lives.”

BLM Utah’s ultimate intentions were clear: “We will proactively destroy the systems that continue to give you [white people] the power to marginalize people of color.” And the primary such system of power? The very nation-state itself, of course!

Ironically, to transform the flag into a symbol not of shared nationhood, but its precise reverse, was to pursue the old white European colonial-era tactic of divide and conquer: “When we see this flag we know that the person flying it lives in a different America than we do.”

BLM’s unspoken intention was to get you to realize this too, all the better thereby to further dominate you, politically. BLM Utah “taste your fear and it tastes delicious”, they gloated at the time, the precise same reason pirates of old once fluttered their own divisive black skull-and-crossbones flags out on the High Seas.   

By unleashing such rhetoric on 4 July, Independence Day, the message was clear: no justice, no peace, let’s tear down the nation and re-fight the Civil War all over again. But, if a new society was then to be erected on the intended rubble-heap of the old one, wouldn’t it need its own new flag?