AGGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM

I was waiting for a bus this morning, looking up at half a dozen England flags, fluttering around lampposts.

Controversial. Half the folks I know (including some of my family) are cock-a-hoop about it, asking why on Earth you wouldn’t celebrate your own country in your own country. Indeed, all across England, that’s exactly what people say, defending Operation Raise The Colours. At last, they breathe, it’s being reclaimed for what it should be.

I said (on the family chat) that I thought the Plantagenets ought to be pleased.

“?”

“Well if it’s being reclaimed for what it should be, then it’s a symbol of a Turkish Saint adopted by French kings who liked a bit of Plantagenet crusading in the Holy Land - so, yay, I guess?”

I should have known better.

The thing is I really do know that flags are an embodiment of an idea - in this case the idea of a country that has struggled to understand its identity, that feels like it’s only just finding its feet as proudly and as bravely as it can after Brexit, but one that’s brave, kind, noble and true. That’s what this flag means. Why not be proud of it?

I said as much, just to undo my flag-history message, and restore a bit of balance.

And yet, if you’d been a Muslim in the 13th century, that same red cross might as well have been blood, the blood of your people, smeared across white hot sand. That fluttering banner above the hairdressers and the chemist’s would have embodied a very different idea than patriotism - and even today, for people, spat on by men wearing it on their cheeks, intimidated and hounded, made to feel like they don’t belong, like they’re here and jolly well shouldn’t be… I can see how that same flag - the red and the white - might make people feel. And I don’t ever want to make anybody feel like that.

That’s the problem, I realise, with flags. They don’t actually mean anything.

They are just symbols that can be interpreted; colours that look different depending on the lens you use, ideas that mean completely different things to different people, through history, across cultures, stories and personal experience. And because they’re so strongly linked to lots of different but powerful ideas, they will, I suspect, always be controversial.

That’s why the US throws you in jail now for burning a piece of fabric. It’s the concept. That’s why people get cross at the LGBTQ colours above the town hall in Pride Month. That’s why an old red flag with a white circle and a spidery black swastika is so terrifying. It’s the idea they represent, the values, the reason for flying them. And in our case, now in England in 2025, the reason for it being everywhere.

I find it uncomfortable. It is what I call aggressive patriotism - especially to see so many. Why now? Who’s behind it? What is this about? These feel like questions that might add a bit of context.

I left my family chat alone. There’s no point in stirring, at least when not in person. These are complicated issues, tinged with historical and current context, and I don’t want to be controversial - the world today doesn’t have time for anything but a sound bite, just a snippet of enough information to give you a label for which side you’re on, and which half of the Internet is there to applaud you and which half should throw rocks. I’ve said it before, and I’ll quote Albert Maysles again: ‘tyranny is the removal of nuance’. If there’s anything worth defending, unfurling as an idea that waves above the battlefield of the culture wars, it’s the art of nuance, long before it’s a flag.