Flag Fetishism

A classic essay republished to commemorate July 4th

by Andrew Hamilton

THE PREVALENCE of American flags in the few remaining White enclaves of the country is striking to any thoughtful observer. Even these small areas, of course, are not all-White as they were a quarter- or half-century ago. They are majority White demographically — for the moment.

What does the flag signify to the people who fly it? Flag patriots are overwhelmingly White.

Veneration of the flag appears to be a sign of “implicit whiteness” as described in 2007 by evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald.¹

His basic insight is that, unmolested and unpersecuted, Whites exhibit certain characteristic patterns of behavior and affiliation. Residing in predominantly White neighborhoods and communities is one pattern; veneration of Old Glory (not mentioned by him) is another.

Of course, Leftist Whites are much less apt to fly the flag in the first place, and more likely to criticize, desecrate, or cheer its desecration than are conservatives. Conservatives are laggards. They will do that tomorrow.

Venerable Roots

Deep-seated emotional/psychological reverence for the Stars and Stripes is a long-standing American trait.

I remember seeing a black and white photograph taken in a general store in the 1890s. Two men in their prime, long since vanished into the dreadful nothingness that quickly obliterates us all, were looking at the camera. Two large American flags were conspicuous in the background. I thought: “How contemporary it looks!”

A similar shock of recognition occurs at other times, as in early silent films photographed at massive football games (Harold Lloyd, The Freshman, 1925) (sports mania) or the man pressed into buying a lapel tag to support the “eat a prune a day” campaign in W.C. Fields’ It’s the Old Army Game (1926) (dotty civic crusades people lavish time, money, and energy upon). Both URLs take you to the exact spots I’m referring to. Note the male college cheerleaders in the Lloyd clip!

When you discern vivid patterns of thought and behavior such as these, existing before Jews and communists totally controlled the country, it hints at something innate. Much of what we see today is a consequence of alien domination and culture distortion. A conscious effort is required to mentally disentangle what is innate from what is foreign.

Historian Mary Scrugham wrote the following in 1921 about American psychology in 1860:

The lowering of the American flag which accompanied the surrender of [Fort Sumter] to the South Carolinians unified the North, the people of which locality proceeded to stand together regardless of party political differences on the “platform of the flag”. . . . But there is no evidence to indicate that the thousands of northern men who sanctioned the call to arms issued by the President [Lincoln] had any desire to abolish slavery by the sword or that they had any intention to deny the southerners one iota of their rights under a government based on the “common” consent of the governed. They merely felt an overwhelming desire to defend the flag, the sacred symbol of free government, from desecration. The popularity of

“Shoot if you must this old grey head,
But spare your country’s flag, she said,”²

is very significant. It is not an accident that the “Star Spangled Banner” is the national anthem of America. The flag is far more reverenced in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” than the President, for the flag can do no wrong. The Americans are said to have a “bunting patriotism” because it is so easily aroused by a combination of “red white and blue” bunting. This feeling is especially noticeable in Americans in foreign lands when they see the stars and stripes floating in the breeze. — The Peaceable Americans of 1860-1861: A Study in Public Opinion (New York: Columbia University Press 1921), p. 100.

The Pledge of Allegiance

The once widely recited Pledge of Allegiance is another example of bunting patriotism. The Republic for which the flag stood came in second: “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands . . .”

In the twentieth century schoolchildren across America stood every morning with their right hands over their hearts and recited the Pledge in unison before lessons began.

I did it myself throughout elementary school. Like some others I also led the Pledge for a week, reciting it to the entire school over the intercom in the principal’s office. The Pledge was simultaneously piped into every classroom via loudspeakers as all students in the building stood and faced the flag at the front of the room to recite the words.

Many years later while attending a meeting of the John Birch Society as a guest I was surprised to discover I had forgotten some of the words! Birchers still recited the Pledge at their meetings.

Though originally developed as a tool to facilitate the social assimilation and genetic mixing of foreign ethnics and non-Whites with Old Stock Americans, since the 1940s the Pledge has been under attack by elites and will undoubtedly be banned. After brief and pointless objections, conservatives, natural born losers, will docilely adopt the new dispensation.

Ruling Class Fetish: Flag Hatred as Race Hatred

Flag desecration, very common among System activists and domestic terrorists, is another form of flag fetishism. Here desecration or destruction of the flag symbolizes the destruction of the White race and Western civilization via state-mandated genocide.

Burning and desecrating the flag as an expression of anti-White racism began in a big way in the 1960s and 1970s, behavior the Supreme Court, an institution of, by, and for the elite, naturally ratified and enshrined into law.

Jewish and other Left-wing elites associate the flag with Whites and the historic American nation, both of which they hate.

Thus, a nominally Black Web site associates the American flag and the national anthem with White racism: “Patriotism Is for White People,” The Root (September 25, 2017). (The Root is a publication owned by wealthy people showcasing house Negroes who espouse ruling class values.)

A Politically Correct soccer Web site headquartered in Denver and run by Whites similarly associates the flag with the race its owners hate.

You don’t need to be a prophet to know the American flag is on the way out, even if elites at some point feel compelled to pull a Stalin, as their predecessor and ally “Uncle Joe” touted faux Russianism during the “Great Patriotic War” to extend Communist imperialism. The sudden appearance of American flag lapel pins among Wall Street and Washington elites after 9/11 was an example of this.

So, flag hatred by Jews and the rest of the ruling class is also a fetish.

But in their case it serves another purpose as well. By desecrating and ultimately outlawing the flag as “hate,” despots psychologically, emotionally, and physically humiliate and abuse the disenfranchised, spit in their faces, contemptuously malign their values, and rub their noses in the dirt.

To an Aryan this seems counterintuitive. It is natural to think that such behavior would provoke furious anger and hatred against the rulers, giving rise to a firestorm that would incinerate them and their evil ways.

Yet this is manifestly not the case. Vicious Jewish maltreatment of Gentiles invariably produces the opposite result: blind obedience, obsequiousness, and, most surprising of all, genuine conformity, deep devotion, and even worship of the abusers.

Jews effortlessly and routinely tap into hidden but profound perversity and evil that are hard for a human being (a non-Jew) to comprehend.

My Own View

Subjected to intense propaganda, opprobrium, and persecution, Whites can be made to permanently abandon natural beliefs and behaviors on matters as fundamental as empirical reality, religion, sex, reproduction, the family, you name it. Whites can even be programmed to fully embrace lethal (to themselves) beliefs and practices.

Flag patriotism is certainly less fundamental than any of these things.

In terms of racial beliefs the vast majority of Whites who fly the flag today are anti-White, philo-Semitic, and xenophilic. Their anti-White racism is by no means superficial.

To me the American flag is a symbol of the regime — not country — for which it stands. It retains no genuine connection to the historic American nation.

It represents hatred and the destruction of Western civilization, loathsome sexual degeneracy, and destruction of the family. It signifies anti-White racism, genocide, the blind, demented worship of ultra-privileged Jews and — derivatively and contingently — other non-White and anti-White races, intolerance, totalitarianism, vile acts of criminality and aggression at home and abroad, and the Communist imperialism with which it was historically allied.

It is hard to see what else it could possibly symbolize.

Notes

1. “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” The Occidental Quarterly (Winter 2006-2007), pp. 7-46. The article also appeared as two chapters in MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (Atlanta: The Occidental Press, 2007), pp. 300-341.

2. The lines are from John Greenleaf Whittier’s Unionist poem “Barbara Frietchie” (1863) about an elderly German American woman who defiantly flies the Stars and Stripes when Stonewall Jackson marches into Frederick, Maryland. Winston Churchill, who knew the poem by heart, insisted on going past Fritchie’s house during his 1942 visit to President Franklin Roosevelt.

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