When national flags are inverted into mere utopian abstractions, they become little more than concrete symbols of coercive oppression.
The advent of June means annual Gay Pride Season is here, that one month of the year (apart from the other eleven) when homosexuality is officially promoted by the State all across the Western world. You can’t move for LGBTQ rainbow flags of one sort or another out in public these days, the symbol’s new-found all-pervasiveness leading some sceptics to compare it to a Nazi swastika.
During last year’s Pride Month, UK actor turned politician Laurence Fox, leader of the small anti-woke Reclaim Party and former candidate for London Mayor, marked the occasion by posting the mocking refrain “Oh blessed and most holy month!” together with the following doctored image of Pride flags to his 300,000-plus followers on Twitter.
Fox was speedily criticised by Jewish and Holocaust Memorial groups, as well as being temporarily Twitter-banned for causing offence. But, as Fox argued, the freedom to cause offence is just one aspect of freedom of speech. Furthermore, by suspending him, the pre-Elon Musk social media giant was demonstrating clear double-standards, as “You can openly call the [Union Jack] a symbol of fascism and totalitarianism” on the site but “You cannot criticise the holy flags” of Gay Pride.
As if to prove this, Fox’s then-Deputy Leader in the Reclaim Party, Martin Daubney, posted the following tweet, recasting Britain’s flag as a mashed-up Nazi swastika too.
“So, is this worthy of a ban?” he asked. As far as I am aware, the answer was “no”, and so Daubney kept his account. Unlike gays, patriots can be compared to fascists with total impunity.
Fox’s Book of Martyrs
Pride 2022 came not long after the Platinum Jubilee celebrations marking 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, an occasion marked both by an outbreak of mass Union Jack flag-waving amongst the patriotic general public, and an equal outbreak of flag-hating amongst the ostentatiously unpatriotic hard-left.
Again hoping to illustrate his opponents’ double-standards here, Fox retweeted the following contribution from conservative-leaning political commentator Dominique Samuels, showing Pride flags arrayed all down what was actually central London, but looked rather more like some hypothetical gay Nuremberg.
Some people may find the Nazi comparison overblown. Yet it is not that Fox or his allies were literally claiming that Gay Pride Month is as bad as actual Nazism here, as some critics chose to misinterpret matters, more that the Pride flag and the swastika were similar in a generic sense, i.e., as very visible symbols of enforced ideological conformity. Fox could have digitally added the Communist hammer and sickle to the flag instead and made his point equally as well.
As Fox said, public “acceptance and celebration” of the flag were now ruthlessly “enforced with a sense of hectoring authoritarianism.” It was not as if Queer Quislings were about to start another Holocaust or invade Poland, but they might well try and get you sacked, cancelled or even imprisoned.
As if to prove this, one of Fox’s rival metropolitan politicians, Green Party London Assembly Member Caroline Russell, used her position of political influence to plead with the police to arrest the brazen thought-criminal, an appeal Fox quickly responded to:
The Fascistic Mr Fox?
Fox may not have been arrested by the thought-police himself, but a private citizen with a much less awkwardly prominent national media profile soon was. Darren Brady, a 51-year-old British Army veteran from Aldershot, retweeted Laurence’s original rainbow swastika meme, then found himself placed in handcuffs by Hampshire Police on the grounds his action had “caused anxiety” to some unnamed complainant.
Hampshire Police had offered to downgrade Brady’s “offence” from a full-blown criminal incident to a mere “non-crime” (which it already was anyway), if he had only agreed to remove his post and pay them £80 to attend an in-house Maoist gay re-education course. Brady bravely refused, instead informing Laurence Fox directly about what was going on.
Fox then turned up at Brady’s home together with ex-policeman Harry Miller of the Bad Law Project campaign group, who was then himself also arrested for obstructing the police in their duties. Fox captured all this on film, accusing the cops of acting “like the Gestapo”, no doubt prompting more complaints from left-wingers angry about precisely the wrong thing here.
Political football
Britain is hardly alone in its increasing public replacement of the national flag with the rainbow one. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup held over in Qatar, the US soccer team made headlines after redesigning their badge so the usual red and white of the Stars and Stripes was replaced with garish gay rainbow colours instead, on the walls of their training-base and media branding.
Objecting to their Qatari hosts’ highly negative legal attitudes towards homosexuality, “Be The Change” now became the US team’s main slogan rather than, say, “Kick The Ball”, which is what they’re supposed to be paid to do, pure and simple, nothing else. “ONE NATION”, reads the US rainbow badge’s accompanying slogan. No: TWO NATIONS, by specific design.
By transforming their badge into blatant ideological propaganda, US Soccer recklessly subverted the formerly largely neutral and uniting image of the national flag and replaced it with the contentious, fragmenting political emblem of an agenda which is clearly not agreed upon by all. The message is as clear as it is queer: unless you, too, support the specific partisan line being pushed here, then you’re not truly an American, and your support is just not wanted. And yet, despite this, “We are a group that believes in inclusivity,” the team’s Newspeak-fluent goalkeeper Sean Johnson claimed.
Apart from all those who disagree with your agenda, of course, Sean: they are not true Americans at all, just worthless Far-Right bigots. They must be excluded, not included. Homosexuals were perfectly free to support national sports teams before their players all suddenly became swathed in rainbows for no good reason, you know: persons of any sexuality could, it was a complete and utter irrelevancy to all concerned. But no longer, it would appear.
The US soccer team “isn’t representing America” any more, one irritated fan accurately complained online. “America’s colors aren’t rainbow.” Indeed not, but that is the whole point.
Flags of convenience
Liberals of today wish to dismantle their countries’ national flags as a proxy for dismantling their nations themselves, in a much wider sense. The flag, as microcosmic symbol of a macrocosmic nation state, embodies a real, particular, settled physical community with borders, based upon timeless things such as a shared language, culture, traditions, religions and ethnicity.
Contemporary Western liberals – both progressive, transnationalism-loving left-wing social ones and GDP-worshipping right-wing economic ones alike – would much prefer to replace this very concrete and limited concept with something much more abstract and limitless instead, a more homogenised, borderless, truly global society based on allegiance to supposedly “universal” human values, not traditional particularist ones – like Gay Pride, for example.
The rainbow flag stands as a proxy for this impossible dream. It is a flag not of any actual existing nation, but of the desired imaginary, non-existent, progressive, universalist non-nation of tomorrow: that is, the flag of Utopia. And the word “utopia”, etymologically speaking, means, quite literally, “no-place”. That is what you are really being forced to salute when paying enforced obeisance to the gaybow flag – the intended (but never actually to be achieved) perpetual liberal-enforced global moral dictatorship or New Jerusalem of tomorrow.
In the disingenuous name of freedom, all soon-to-be non-nations must be forced to kneel to this flag: even non-Western ones which do not belong to us, like the Muslim nations of the Middle East, the majority of whose populations and rulers simply do not share our own present rulers’ supposedly “universal” values at all. Under other, non-gay-related circumstances, this process would surely be labelled pejoratively as “colonialism”, would it not?
One nation under God
Another flag-related controversy to hit during the 2022 World Cup came when US Soccer, advertising an upcoming match between USA and Iran, posted an image of the Iranian national flag which had been doctored to remove the large red emblem which normally sits in its centre.
Significantly, the emblem in question is actually a written word: “Allah”, the holy Muslim name for God. US Soccer said they had erased God’s name to show solidarity with the women of Iran who were then being persecuted by the ruling extremist clerics simply for, as US Soccer put it, “fighting for [their] basic human rights”. I have some personal sympathy for the oppressed females of Iran myself, but the unspoken symbolism of this act was very telling.
Here is a particularist local or national value – belief in the Muslim God – being erased in favour of a transnational globalist abstraction – human rights. However, human rights are not universal, because, whatever progressives might say to the contrary, many human values are not universal either. Most people over here in the West might think it awful the women of Iran don’t have full political rights and freedoms; but, likewise, most people over there in Iran might think it equally appalling women in the West have the freedom and right to marry one another and raise children.
Like alchemy in reverse
No culture’s values are entirely universal. Each particular set of human values is particular to each particular nation, empire, culture or civilisation. Ironically, those traditions and values which do seem closest to being genuinely near-universal in nature – ones relating to core things like family structure, sexuality, gender binaries, crime and punishment, in-group ethnic allegiance, and so forth – are precisely the ones our own utopian universalists are currently doing their very best to try and dissolve along with our traditional flags.
There is a saying of the alchemists of old: “solve et coagula”, or “dissolve and then coagulate”, used to describe the melting down of separate chemical substances and then re-amalgamation of them all together into one large, undifferentiated mass within the furnaces and alembics of their demon-haunted laboratories, in impossible pursuit of making gold.
When the flags of all nations, with their multifarious separate colours and patterns, begin to be melted down by globalists and then reconstituted anew into more generic multicoloured rainbow ones intended to be flown in every nation under the sun instead, even those that don’t want to, like Iran and Qatar, forging all that was once separate and different into one generic and eye-offending lumpen mass, then an analogously similar process is at work.
Coincidentally, the classic alchemical process was said to have several distinct separate stages to it, each bearing a different colour, like green, yellow or red: the colours, in fact, of the rainbow. (And, in terms of the common alchemical stages of whiteness, blackness, etc, those of the new extended Progress Pride flag so easily transformed into a swastika by parodists online.)
Yet literal-minded alchemists, both then and now, have always proved themselves sadly deluded. What results from today’s process of enforced political alchemy will surely not be a utopian world of purest gold. Instead, it is more likely to be a dystopian dictatorial realm of basest lead. A world, for instance, in which innocent military veterans can be arrested for posting harmless, but politically incorrect, joke images online.
Instead of doctoring his rainbow flags into swastikas last year, perhaps Laurence Fox should actually have defaced them all with hermetic occult sigils of the Philosophers’ Stone instead.
AUTHOR
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience… More by Steven Tucker
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