Burn All Flags

reprint from FE #332 Summer 1989

by

Fifth Estate # 368-369, Spring-Summer, 2005

On March 21, four people demonstrated at the Federal Bldg. in downtown Detroit for the right to be anti-patriotic. In so doing, they burned a small American flag, much to the outrage of passersby and security guards.

The date of the protest coincided with a US Supreme Court hearing of a criminal conviction of a demonstrator who also burned a flag as a political statement at the 1984 Dallas Republican convention. We give full support to all acts of flag desecration and encourage others to commit similar provocations.

All flags are rags; they are symbols of the nation state that traps the human spirit within artificially established boundaries guarded by men with guns. Flags cause people to lose their common sense. They make men willing to kill other men who wave a different flag; they cause people to hate those who live in a different nation state rather than hate those who rule us.

Flags make people forget that the interest of rulers everywhere is to protect their own wealth and privilege and to expand the territory and people they control. Flags make people love an abstraction called “my country” and forget that in real life we are ruled by a rich, selfish, swinish elite who think of us as dog meat for their industries and businesses and cannon fodder for their wars.

Only the US has such a compulsive flag-waving mania and no country since Nazi Germany actually insists on a pledge to a flag. Free people have no need of flags; only the slaves of nation states do. Even the red flag of revolution is waved by police state bureaucrats and those who aspire to be. The black flag of anarchy could easily suffer the same fate.

Forget the symbols of revolution. Burn all flags! Be anarchy!

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