False Flags | QMM #3
On Nationalism, Ceasing Fire, Peace and the Three-Percent
Quixote’s Media Meditations #3
Assignment: Make your own assignment…
What are the effects of the flag and flag-waving? What is the message of the flag as a medium?
“A flag has no real significance for peaceful uses.”
― H.G. Wells, The World Of William Clissold
As a child in school, I was taught that magical and mythical thinking are products of the past. Dead and gone. That they were, in fact, levels on an assembly line of progress that were eventually and necessarily remodelled and replaced by religion, philosophy, reason, nation-states, and democracy, to name but a few successors. In those schools, my fellow students and I were also forced to stand and sing the national anthem each morning, a choral nod and submission to the flag at the front of the room and the nation-state it stood for.1
During that time, I identified first with the culture or ethnicity that my family inherited (for many, this meant '“from elsewhere”). Secondly, I was Canadian, born and bred. In the years leading up to puberty, I remember adopting a flippant and frankly shallow derision for all things American. There was no intellectual or political basis for it. None, whatsoever.2 My superficial anti-Americanism fuelled a superficial pro-Canadian sentiment that fizzled out with the onset of teenage apathy.
"Anthems and flags are powerful symbols that evoke a sense of collective identity and loyalty among individuals who may never meet but share a common imagined community."
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Later, in the mid-2000s, in my early twenties, I began backpacking. At the time, the US had expanded its scorched earth, oil-grabbing policies from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond. Citing my North American English and lighter skin, I sewed a Canadian flag patch to my bag, despite having given up the nationalist ghost long ago. In case there was any doubt from a distance, a closer look could reveal a lesser-of-evils legitimacy: not American.
This is nothing new. Many Americans love flag-waving at home, while others pretend to be Canadian abroad in order to avoid the evil eye instigated by their own governments. For hundreds of years, the colours, symbols, and invisible borders of flags have bound us to nations, nationalizing us. Despite contemporary attempts toward global citizenry and villages, the flag and its use as a weapon of war continues, and ironically, by many whom I believe desire peace.
Flags of Fire
At the moment, it’s late into the 2023rd year of the Gregorian calendar, and the root fire in the Levant is burning once more. The Israel-Palestinian or Arab-Israeli conflict is back with more blood and brutality. Tragedy begetting tragedy. As immediately as the missiles were launched, I was bombarded with the news via the social media accounts I follow.3 As the deaths mounted in the Middle East, each of them simply tuned out all other topics and troubles. It became the War Channel.
The unannounced Hamas missile attacks. The Israeli declaration of war. The bombings. The worldwide protests. The invasion of Gaza. The worldwide protests. The war. The truce. The worldwide protests. The genocide…
Years ago, during the Bush/Neocon era, I marched in many anti-war demonstrations. Recently, I noticed something I rarely did when I was younger, something that has perhaps signalled a critical turn in activist politics. Given the left-wing leaning of most of the social media I subscribe to, it’s not surprising to note that most reported (visually) on marches supporting Palestine or Palestinian liberation. Of course, some protests supported Israel. In both instances, the posts have the people framed, congregating in the street, the shots pulled back as wide as possible to accentuate the “mass” in “masses.” And what one saw and continues to see, emphatically, in places far from the Middle East, among people who are neither Palestinian or Israeli, were flags, waving in the wind. In some cases, they’re waved against each other (or those holding them), sometimes aggressively, as if they were in fact tools of the trade, weapons of war.
And so I wondered, having shown up for a particular side or nation or state or flag, what were these people marching for? Liberation… security… an end to occupation… freeing of hostages… As more bombs fell and the death counts skyrocketed, the horror continued to consume hearts far and wide. The marches got bigger, louder, and more difficult for corporate news media to ignore. And yet, the photos were spitting images: tens and hundreds of thousands of people, little dots squished between buildings, veiled in many places by poles, banners, and emblems. Green, black, red. Blue and white. The preeminent symbols that rose above the stream of people. Emblazoned.
And then, after weeks of death and destruction, after what finally seemed like an inability of bystanders to even consider something other than war and the self-righteous moralizing that comes with it, came the calls (from the people and then the governments) for a ceasefire. Not peace. Ceasefire. As those calls mounted, so did the pressure, perhaps as a result of effective social media campaigns that mobilized people beyond their screened-in world-views to insist that their representatives act to end the war.
Weeks later, a truce was announced. Not peace. Truce. In this instance, it was a synonym for a pause in the action. Not “fidelity,” “truth,” or “faith,” unless the faith in question was for a God of War.
Through all of this, I continued to wonder what has become of peace and peace-making in our time. How do you expect to stop a war or a genocide by calling for a ceasefire (a term whose definition means explicitly “a temporary stoppage” of aggressions). Few, if any of the major rallies held in response to the war are promoted or titled as “anti-war” marches. Most are labelled as a “March for Palestine” or a “March for Israel.” Al-Jazeera has done the work of mapping the marches, not just geographically but politically. And this is what they found:
“The vast majority of protests during October 7- November 24 - 87 percent (more than 7,283) - have been pro-Palestine while 10 percent (more than 845) have been pro-Israel. The remaining three percent of protests (about 243) have been neutral, calling for peace.”
Only 3 percent of over 7,000 demonstrations have been exclusively for peace. Now, it’s hard to believe that of the countless millions who have taken to the streets as a result of this conflict, only three percent are for peace. However, when you consider that the vast majority of demonstrations were not held in Israel or Palestine or that the vast majority of people in the streets were not Israelis or Palestinians, 97% standing for war (or a surrogate such as vengeance, victory, or liberation) as opposed to peace can reveal a kind of mania fit for spectacle and the spectators who create and consume it.
More importantly, we can ask, what has become of peace in our time? What has happened to the anti-war movement(s) in the last twenty years? What’s happened to peace studies as a significant branch of political science? When was the last time anyone heard a John Lennon song on the radio? What if the neglect of peace during peacetime meant that war’s eventual return held no quarter upon the people and places it would visit itself upon? What if that’s what’s come to pass?
The Message of the Medium
Perhaps, more keenly, we can return to the images of the marches. The flags and flag-waving. Without having taken a meticulous magnifying glass to each of the countless photos of these demonstrations, I noticed one thing. All of the flags raised were of nations or nation-states. If a flag is to represent or symbolize a particular place, people, identity or ideology, how come none of them emblazoned the peace sign or symbol - the tripod and rising pole enclosed by a circle? Where were the flags of white doves, olive branches, broken rifles, and white poppies? Have you seen any?
Since this dispatch is part of a series on media ecology, I’d like to wonder on your behalf what message the medium of flags presents. What do they carry within our cultural and historical milieu that provokes a degree of devotion towards them? Today, we have flags for non-state nations (i.e. Palestine, Kurds), nation-states (i.e. Israel, Iran), demographic identities (i.e. LGBTQ+, white nationalists), ideological affiliations (i.e. communists, fascists), and pretty much anything else one wants to attach a visual symbol to. Even those who shun top-down governance have their own - the anarchists and the pirates with the Black Flag and the Jolly Roger, respectively.
The lineage of state flags derives, almost always, from the invention of the national flag as a symbol of a people. Put differently, all modern flags are the progeny and products of the nationalist and statist agendas of governments and revolutionaries worldwide. Even nations that have existed in opposition to such agendas, especially those who actually won their struggles, have typically utilized the same mediums as their colonizers. The rebel flags, uniforms, symbols, songs, and histories.
“How far the new anti-imperialist movements can be regarded as nationalist is far from clear, though the influence of western nationalist ideology on their spokesmen and activists is undeniable as in the case of the Irish influence on Indian nationalism.”
- Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780
The national flag of Palestine is no exception. It was created at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a time of rampant nationalism and nation-building. It was designed by Palestinian nationalists, specifically of the local literati or intellectual class of the time. Like their contemporaries in other countries, they sought to establish Palestine as a place and people on par with budding nation-states. Almost all of the nationalisms of the time, revolutionary or otherwise, were created by aristocrats and academics with visions far different from those of peasants or working-class people.
When we fly a national flag, it is the intentions of its creators - of their time, their places and politics, not just our own, that we are raising. In doing so, we re-present both the nationalist project and the inability to see its history and consequences clearly. It doesn’t matter if the flag in question is that of the righteous or the oppressed. What matters (i.e. mothers) is that it reproduces the idea of the nation as much as it does the idea of a nation. This is no more evident and no more obscured than as a result of war - a collective trauma that binds people together under a banner of both mutual survival and mutual destruction. Without a critical understanding of how we’ve been nationalized and how we constantly recapitulate nationalist tendencies, we remain flagpoles for the continued ignorance that feeds war.
Consider an example: the desecration of an enemy’s flag. I recall seeing, throughout my life, as perhaps many of you have, images of the American flag being burned by protestors in the streets of various locales in the Middle East. For those burning the flag, the medium is the message, but the medium is ignored as such. The people in question weren’t vandalizing a flag, or the idea of a flag as such, but of Americanness, of American nationalism and its consequences abroad. By burning the American flag, these protestors were reincarnating its importance - their fidelity to flags, despite and in spite of the symbols that the flag produced. They might have succeeded in conjuring anti-American sentiment, but the act reinstated the flag’s form and function in their minds and those they sought to influence, including those of the supposed enemy.
The National Imagination
National flags, used in civilian contexts (i.e. when not used for defensive or military purposes), have a history only a couple of centuries old. This history is uniquely tied to the creation and maintenance of the nation-state, which is also only a couple of centuries old. This means that the way we understand ourselves and each other as national beings, as citizens of a state is a very recent invention, one that we tend to project onto the past when we think of ancient Greeks/Greece, as a common example. According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, the modern understanding of the word “nation” “is no older than the eighteenth century, give or take the odd predecessor.”4
Flag-waving is acquiescence to nationalism, no matter how banal it might appear to be. It is not so important whose flag you are waving, whether the righteous or the oppressed. What’s important is that you are waving a flag. That action contains and carries with it the entire ontological history of flag-waving, the vast majority of which is an attempt to concentrate attention and power on a particular worldview.
"Flags and anthems act as tangible representations of the nation, allowing people to express their allegiance and pride in a visual and auditory form."
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Moreover, as a singular, unchanging image (as most images are), the flag-as-symbol is monomythic in scope. It assumes an orthodoxy over all other images or symbols that might offer a different take on whatever it is the flag claims to represent. How many parliaments or government meeting halls in the world have multiple national flags? How many nation-states at the UN get to hoist more than one at once to represent themselves?
In the late 19th century, Frederick Marshall summed up the national flag as a symbol “through which an independent country proclaims its identity and sovereignty, and as such they command instantaneous respect and loyalty. In themselves, they reflect the entire background, thought and culture of a nation.”5 In other words, the vast diversity of geographies, cultures, histories, rituals and memories of a people, reduced to a single image…
…as if reducing each of those things to a single image is at all possible. It isn’t and even if it was, we have rainbow capitalism/corporatism as a great example of the political value of flags. We can continue to include as many demographics as possible, but the symbol still gets co-opted into the dominant/dominating system. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if a new generation changes the image of the flag because the message of the medium remains one that, by default, excludes all others.
War and Peace
Historically, flags (like anthems and national symbols) have been a way to keep up with the Joneses of other countries. The risk of not doing so, at least in the last few centuries, has been the inability to claim a place as one’s own. Ask any resistance movement. Ask any group fighting for their political independence. Ask the Americans why planting the Stars and Stripes on the moon was so important. The flag is a symbol of the colonization of land, one that works so well because it convinces you that your flag = your land. It is a child of the cross and of the sword and the ploughshare before it. It is a product of war, most emphatically, when we consider that pre-nation-state flags were used almost exclusively for military purposes.
Why, then, has peace-making and the struggle for peace been displaced, in the last decade, by nationalism? Are they mutually opposing forces, one might ask? Are the pro-Palestinian protestors, many of whom are not Palestinian, simply swept up in the same river as the non-Jewish, pro-Israeli protestors, all of whom are caught up in a moment of noxious identitarianism from all sides of the political spectrum? Is it that the algorithmic war drum recognizes peace as something inherently subversive to its survival?
Flags are not just symbols. They are sigils. In the same way that the McDonald’s and Coca-Cola logos produce an alchemical and imaginal seduction, so too does a national flag. The latter reduces the idea of a nation, the idea concocted by powerbrokers into a single symbol, where nothing else can enter in through its borders. In this context, we can say that the only difference between the Canadian flag and the Coca-Cola logo, is style. They are magical tools and symbols that hypnotize people into believing that the nation is necessary, natural, and noble. This seems to happen, more often than not, by pitting that nation against this nation. Pick a side. Pick a brand. What’s yours? How about, what might be lost by refusing one? What might be gained?
What if, through a deep apprenticeship with the history of nationalism, statism, ethnicism, and identity in general, we could come to understand each as realities we’ve co-constructed with each other over generations, realities that dehumanize ourselves as much as the other? What would then become of all of our flag-waving? I ask you to consider how it’s come to be this way so that we might conjure how it might be otherwise. This is nothing if not urgent, given that peace has become but a fleeting flicker in the political imaginations of the moment, a fate veiled by the flags and fires of war.
May war meet its end. May peace be prayed for and practiced by all. May it be so.
Shalom. Salam. Peace.
The previous edition of Quixote’s Media Meditations was entitled, The Algorithm is the New War Drum. You can read that here and check out the full list here.
These reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by Andrew McLuhan’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about McLuhan Studies straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.
I say “forced,” because there were punishments involved for not doing so, albeit light ones in the 1990s than previously.
To the degree that I can recall, I’m pretty sure it was based on a professional wrestling angle that pitted Canadian and American wrestlers against each other.
…in order to post the occasional anti-tourism related news, meme, or video for The End of Tourism Podcast.
Hobsbawm E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 : Programme Myth Reality. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press 1992. p. 3
Frederick Marshall. Curiosities of Ceremonials, Titles, Decorations and Forms of International Vanities. London, 1880. p. 20