If YOU walk down Regent Street right now, you will see it laced with strings of Union flags as part of the jubilee celebrations. Most people, I suspect, will barely register the new decorations. Some will feel a twang of national pride. And some, it seems, will be reminded of fascism. A row broke out online yesterday after people made comparisons between the picture of Regent Street and Nazi Germany. One man really kicked off the debate by suggesting Regent Street should look like that all of the time.
This somewhat dramatic interpretation of what is effectively very large bunting is a prime example of what George Orwell called negative nationalism, which can be just as emotionally intense as its opposite.
As someone who hasn’t waved one since the 1981 royal wedding (I was seven), I am lukewarm on the subject of the flag — flagnostic, if you like — and I find the neurosis about it in sectors of the Left bafflingly overheated. Regent Street was also decked with flags for the 2002 and 2012 jubilees and that wasn’t read as a sinister symptom of incipient fascism. Nor was the massed flag-waving at France’s Bastille Day parade, nor Denmark’s recent golden jubilee. Given the Government’s current thirst for culture wars, the display might reasonably strike some as crass or alienating, but Nazis? Really?
Nazism is a chronically overused reference point because it’s the one historical period that everybody studies at school. But what we learn is the unique scale and extremity of the horror involved. There must be a better way to critique this Government’s record on immigration, human rights and the rule of law than invoking the most appalling regime of modern times. Hyperbolic comparisons trivialise its crimes and disrespect its victims.
The Nazi flag represented a hijacking. It was part of a totalitarian project to make the German state synonymous with the party and had no life outside of Nazi ideology. The Union flag, like any long-lived national emblem, has a multiplicity of meanings: in 1945 alone, it signified liberation in Europe and colonial oppression in many other parts of the world. It is what we make it. So it seems very unwise to acknowledge its immense symbolic power in the same breath as ceding it wholesale to the nationalist Right. It belongs to every citizen and can be imbued with other values. Don’t give it away.
