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Gaius Publius: The American Flag and What It Stands For


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2017 Sep 30, 3:08pm   1,105 views  1 comment

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What does the American flag stand for?



The modern meaning of the flag was forged in December 1860, when Major Robert Anderson moved the U.S. garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Author Adam Goodheart argues this was the opening move of the American Civil War, and the flag was used throughout northern states to symbolize American nationalism and rejection of secessionism.

Before that day [in December 1860], the flag had served mostly as a military ensign or a convenient marking of American territory, flown from forts, embassies, and ships, and displayed on special occasions like American Independence day. But in the weeks after Major Anderson’s surprising stand, it became something different.

Suddenly the Stars and Stripes flew—as it does today, and especially as it did after the September 11 attacks in 2001—from houses, from storefronts, from churches; above the village greens and college quads. For the first time American flags were mass-produced rather than individually stitched and even so, manufacturers could not keep up with demand. As the long winter of 1861 turned into spring, that old flag meant something new. The abstraction of the Union cause was transfigured into a physical thing: strips of cloth that millions of people would fight for, and many thousands die for.

Note two things about this transformation from flag to symbol. First, it represents military conquest — originally the reconquest of the South, “strips of cloth that millions of people would fight for, and many thousands die for.”

Second, those conquests are always presented as defensive — in this case, “preserving the Union” as opposed to re-annexing territory whose inhabitants were exercising, however good or ill their reasons, the right of self-determination, a prime example of which was the nation’s own Revolutionary War of 1776.

To expand the second point: We like to think of our warrior nation’s wars as fought in defense — with the flag representing that brave defensive posture — but I can’t think of a single defensive war after the War of 1776, save World War II (a war whose causative attack, some historians argue, we invited).

What does the American flag stand for, militarily? Certainly not defending the nation from attack, since we’ve so rarely had to do it. Our enemies would say it stands for national aggression. Which leads to the next point.

A Symbol of National Obedience



Take a look at the image above. During the Nixon era, enemies of Vietnam War protestors and draft dodgers appropriated the flag as a symbol of their own aggression and anger — anger at “the hippies”; at free love (which to a man they envied); at “unpatriotic” protests against the nation’s wrongdoing; at anything and anyone who didn’t rejoice, in essence, in the macho, patriarchic, authoritarian demands for obedience to right-wing leaders like Richard Nixon.

That’s not an overstatement, and everyone reading this knows it, given just a little thought. Why do cops wear flags on their uniforms, for example, but not nurses? Ignore the cover-story explanations and ask, is it “national pride” and patriotism the police are expressing, or something closer to the authoritarian anger shown in the image above?

Much More: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/gaius-publius-american-flag-stands.html

Related and Mentioned in the Main Article: March 8th 1970: Hard Hat Riot https://todayinhistoryblog.wordpress.com/tag/vietnam-war/

#Flag #Meanings #Politics

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