Original subtitles

[gentle music playing]

-[man 1] Beauty. -[woman] Love.

-[man 2] Unity. -Family.

-Acceptance. -[man 3] Inclusion and freedom.

This flag brings fear.

-Hate. -Anger.

Genocide.

Barbarism.

[man 4] Propaganda.

A sense of pride.

Dream and pursuit of happiness.

It makes me feel safe.

-Division. -Oppression.

At times, I feel confused and disappointed.

[Joep Leerssen] Flags can terrorize and divide us,

but they can also unite us.

They can articulate who we are and what we want.

Flags can mean completely different things to different people,

and they can be one of the most powerful,

and sometimes dangerous, tools in the world.

[narrator] How can a piece of cloth both unify and divide us?

And why does it hold so much power?

[boy] I pledge allegiance to the flag.

[newscaster 1] Displaying to the world his ideal,

a symbol of his patriotism.

[newscaster 2] Flags strike a warm response in every heart.

[crying] We fought for that flag.

[man] If the flag could talk, it could write a book.

That flag has always represented hate to me.

[woman] Changing the flag signals a change of attitude.

Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

[Wiley] One of our most basic human needs is to belong.

It's why we formed tribes, clans, and religions.

And when our group succeeds, we experience that success as our own.

[Leerssen] When our team wins, we cheer.

When our team loses, we personally feel a trauma

that wasn't really our own experience to begin with.

We merge our own personal identity into a larger whole.

[Wiley] And that whole is represented by the flag.

The flag is one of the strongest ideological markers

in our cultural repertoire.

[Wiley] But before that, flags were just tools.

Early societies used them to signal across distances

that a ruler was coming, or an invader.

Ships used them to send messages back and forth.

And they were critical in battle.

You have to know where your friends are and where your enemies are.

And this is signaled by the flag.

[Wiley] Early flags were made of everything from animal hair to metal.

But then, around 6,000 years ago,

China invented silk.

It spread rapidly along a network of trading routes

known as the Silk Road.

[Leerssen] Silk was used

to make the most prestigious flags,

the flags of the monarchs and the flags of the heads of state.

[Wiley] But then these kingdoms started to fall.

[Leerssen] In the 19th century, two revolutions happened.

People, thanks to technology,

became more aware of what was happening all around the country.

And at the same time, they took over power from the kings and the rulers.

What emerged out of that was a new type of political entity

called the nation state.

[Wiley] Without a monarch, these nations needed a new identity to unite them.

In order to foster a feeling of belonging together as a nation state,

a bit of branding was a useful exercise.

We needed a shared belief system,

and the flag helped do that.

[Wiley] As the legendary German writer Goethe said,

"A country starts out from a name and a flag,

and it then becomes them,

just as a man fulfills his destiny."

[Nelson Mandela] I have cherished the ideal

of a democratic and free society.

It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

[Wiley] When Nelson Mandela spoke those words,

the South African flag was four flags in one.

The Union Jack and two Dutch colony flags, all atop the former Dutch flag.

They represented the country's colonizers.

It was a unity at the expense of the Black people.

I was forced by the law to attend schools

specifically designed for Black people.

I could not go into the town where white people live.

I remember being given that flag as a young child.

When I later understood that I was forced to wave

a symbol of my own oppression,

it was really something that was...

repulsive.

You start realizing that something has to change here.

[Wiley] The African National Congress, or ANC,

was fighting for that change.

But at one protest in 1960,

the police opened fire, killing 69 unarmed demonstrators,

in what came to be known as the Sharpeville massacre.

In the aftermath, the government banned the ANC.

A few years later, they sentenced one of its leaders, Nelson Mandela,

to life in prison.

They also banned the ANC's flag.

The design of that flag is a story that's traveled the world and back.

Starting in Ethiopia, the only African country that was never colonized

and the first to adopt a national flag.

Over the years, their flag changed,

as power shifted hands from one monarch to another,

to communist rule,

to a republic.

But outside Ethiopia, the flag represented African liberation.

As African countries broke free from colonialism

and created their own flags,

many of them looked to Ethiopia's.

And Ethiopia inspired another flag, too.

In the 1920s, on the other side of the world,

this was a popular song.

♪ Every race has a flag but the coon ♪

[Wiley] When Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey heard it,

enraged by the racist lyric,

he decided to create a flag,

and he turned to Ethiopia's for inspiration,

swapping the yellow for black to represent the African people

who the slave trade had displaced around the world.

He called it the Pan-African flag.

"Show me the race or the nation without a flag," he said,

"and I will show you a race of people without any pride."

A few years later, Garvey's flag inspired the ANC

when they designed their own.

[crowd clamoring]

In 1990, Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison.

Negotiations began to end apartheid,

and the country held its first fair and free election.

[Judge Mojapelo] On the day of the election,

I was able to cast a vote

for the first time in my life.

It was an emotional and near-magical experience.

On the day that we were allowed to vote,

this flag was also flown.

[Wiley] The new South African flag was a combination of the old flag

and the ANC flag.

[Judge Mojapelo] It was a symbol of unity.

It gave me the opportunity

to identify with my own country.

[Wiley] Flags have a unique power to unify and stir loyalty,

and for governments, that's a powerful tool.

There's a reason some countries mandate flags in schools.

And in more than 60 countries, if you desecrate your national flag,

you can face fines or even prison time.

Many also have elaborate flag codes,

carefully detailing how the flag should be handled,

treating them with a reverence usually reserved for religious sacraments.

["National Anthem of the People's Republic of China" playing]

It's a type of propaganda,

in that you're promoting a vision of something.

[Wiley] And no one understood that better than Adolf Hitler.

[newscaster] And the German Führer.

-[trumpets blaring] -[crowd chanting]

Adolf Hitler recognized after the First World War

and the disillusionment of the German people

that a symbol could be used

to get a group to coalesce around,

that gave them a vision of a better future.

[Wiley] Before coming to power, Hitler worked for the education

and propaganda department of the military,

where he learned the art of influencing the masses.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf,

Hitler wrote that "A striking emblem

may be the first cause of awakening interest in a movement."

[Guenter] The Nazi flag had the power to inspire fear,

but it also had the power to inspire exhilaration.

[Wiley] Hitler even created a brand guide

that ran over 500 pages.

And one of his first decrees as Chancellor

was banning the old flag and instituting the Nazi one.

Then he banned Jews from flying it.

While flags create an "us,"

they can also create a "them."

And they've played that role throughout history.

[Leerssen] As the saying goes, the states made war,

and war made the state.

[Wiley] Flags were used to rally citizens to enlist around the world.

And they became a solemn emblem

of the soldier's sacrifice.

And that's certainly true of the American flag.

[Guenter] The cult of the American flag arose in the 19th century

to encourage a culture of patriotism.

It was the first country to have

a pledge to the flag,

a flag day, a flag week.

[explosion]

[Wiley] But the Vietnam war marked a turning point.

As the anti-war movement grew, the flag became politicized,

representing two different visions of America.

And each side wore it differently.

The anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman wore an American flag shirt

and was charged with desecration under a new flag protection law.

While President Nixon, who prolonged the Vietnam war,

also started wearing the flag.

As a pin.

And though that law was struck down, the divide stayed

as America turned to new threats.

[newscaster] Fidel Castro is exporting revolutions in our own backyard.

[Reagan] An informed patriotism is what we want.

Let's start with some basics.

More attention to American history

and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

Suddenly, with Reagan saying everybody had to be patriotic

and pro-American, be enthusiastic about the wars it was going to fight,

you either got with that or you didn't. And I didn't.

I grew up a middle-class Black kid on the South Side of Chicago.

Chicago's a very segregated city.

From your earliest age, when the country is telling you you do not belong here,

the founding fathers never thought of you as being a citizen of this country,

you don't feel like you're part of it, and so I never did.

In 1988, I made the installation

What Is the Proper Way To Display a US Flag?

There's a three-by-five-foot flag on the ground.

[Wiley] And above the flag was a notebook, where visitors could leave comments.

[Scott] You could stand either next to it or on it.

"You're disgracing everyone in America by placing the flag on the floor."

"This is the ultimate form of patriotism."

"You should be executed for high treason."

There are a couple others.

"I'm a German girl. If we Germans would admire our flag as you all do,

we would be called Nazis again.

I think you do have too much trouble about this flag."

[Wiley] Thousands protested in front of Scott's exhibit.

The Senate responded too,

voting to ban the display of the flag on the ground.

Later that year, Congress passed a new Flag Protection Act,

making the desecration of the flag a crime in America once again.

Support for the First Amendment need not extend

to desecration of the American flag.

That is a national symbol of unity.

We need unity in this country.

Symbols are important.

Americans who want to burn the American flag

should consider moving to Iran, China, or Cuba,

where burning the American flag is not only legal, but encouraged.

We felt that here was this sort of dying empire

that was desperately clutching at its symbols,

trying to suppress free speech and dissent.

[Wiley] The Monday after the law went into effect,

Dread and three friends went to the steps of the US Capitol,

took out flags and set them on fire.

[Scott] We were instantly arrested, and then it went to the Supreme Court.

[man 1] The potential is for causing a riot.

Whenever somebody does something like this to the flag, people get mad.

[man 2] Justice Scalia, once people are compelled to respect a political symbol,

their respect for the flag is quite meaningless.

[Wiley] It was a landmark decision.

Today, the US Supreme Court ruled that burning the flag...

...is a right protected by the First Amendment.

...constitutional right to free speech. The ruling was five to four.

Flag burning is effective,

in part because, regardless of what language people speak,

whether they're in South Korea, whether they're in China,

they can understand that this is political dissent.

[Wiley] Since that law was overturned,

the US flag has only become more omnipresent.

In one survey, six in ten Americans said

they displayed the flag either at home, at their office,

or on their car.

A culture of patriotism

can be a shield of protection

against a perceived or very real enemy.

[screaming]

[sirens wailing]

After 9/11, three things happened.

People went to church,

they gave blood,

and they bought a flag.

[Wiley] Walmart reportedly sold 116,000 flags on September 11th

and 250,000 the next day,

more than 20 times the amount sold on those days the year before.

And George W. Bush and his aides donned flag pins.

While our flag waving goes up after 9/11,

the country might have taken actions

that were contrary to the perceived values

of what the flag represented.

[Wiley] Hate crimes against Muslims spiked in 2001,

16 times what it had been the year before.

And a New Yorker cover from November of that year

depicted a multitude of flags, as a kind of shield for minorities

in a country that questioned their patriotism.

Six years later, a junior senator from Illinois

announced he was running for president.

I stand before you today to announce

-my candidacy for president... -[crowd cheering]

[Wiley] And he chose not to wear a flag pin.

I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest.

Instead, I'm gonna try to tell the American people

what I believe will make this country great.

Hopefully, that will be a testimony to my patriotism.

[Wiley] It didn't go over well.

...case in point, something of a controversy that has erupted

involving Democratic Senator Barack Obama.

Everybody wears them, from a mayor, to members of Congress, to the president.

It's curious that there's a guy that doesn't want to do it.

I don’t understand liberal logic. They just hate the flag.

[Wiley] After the backlash, Obama started wearing a flag pin.

And then America elected a president who had no issue embracing the flag.

-Do we love our American flag? -[crowd cheers]

We believe that children should be taught

to always respect our great American flag.

If you burn the American flag,

you go to jail for one year.

One year.

[Wiley] Trump rallied millions around a vision of America that was under attack.

From the outside...

Build that wall!

...and within.

Our nation has been gripped

by professional anarchists,

arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa.

Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!

[Wiley] Which inspired some of them to wave other flags.

In January 2021,

rioters stormed the US Capitol,

and flags were everywhere.

There were a lot of Trump flags and right-wing militia flags.

The flag of Kekistan,

a made-up alt-right country based on a Nazi war flag.

And these yellow flags that were a protest symbol from the American Revolution.

And Confederate flags, which represent the southern slave states

that tried to secede in the Civil War.

But this actually wasn't the flag of the Confederacy.

This was.

This was just the battle flag of the North Virginia Army,

but it emerged as a prominent symbol

during the civil rights movement by segregationists, the KKK,

and even some states, which claimed it represented southern heritage.

But its continued use by white supremacists

has prompted organizations to ban them and states to take them down.

Then there were rioters that waved another, newer flag.

The symbol of a thin blue line

traces back to the Crimean War in the 19th century.

[Guenter] It started with the red line of British soldiers

going out to fight the enemy.

[Wiley] By the 1920s, police forces in America

had adapted the phrase to the color of their uniforms

and they eventually made it an emblem.

[man] The blue line that's separating the black halves.

The significance is it's supposed to protect people.

If you took those officers off the front line, there'd be complete chaos.

[Wiley] But outside police forces, this emblem wasn't well-known.

[chanting] Our streets! Our streets!

-What do we want? -Justice!

[Imperatrice] In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement began.

We had the incident with Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown,

Eric Garner. Just one after the other.

[man] Let's have a moment of silence...

[Imperatrice] I think officers were sick and tired

of every day being on the front page of the paper or the news,

being told that they were the worst things ever.

And in 2014, officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were killed.

That is the motivation of why we created Blue Lives Matter NYC.

[Wiley] And a new symbol emerged.

The thin blue line combined with an American flag.

[Imperatrice] To me, the blue line American flag

gives you a reason to remember why you put that uniform on every day.

[Wiley] But some people embrace that flag for different reasons.

In 2017, far-right extremists were planning a rally

and they had a chat room dedicated to what flags they would wave.

One person proposed the thin blue line flag,

and another agreed.

"No one can claim they're unpatriotic," he wrote.

"Not to mention I can put one outside my house or on my bumper

without being investigated for a hate crime."

That August, when they took to the streets in Charlottesville,

the images shocked the country.

[crowd chanting] Jews will not replace us!

[Imperatrice] To see white supremacists using a blue line flag

is a complete misuse, a disgrace.

It's meant to be something that reminds you of someone that was killed,

not something's that gonna go out there and cause people harm or damage.

It is the furthest thing from being racist.

[Wiley] But that's not how everyone saw it.

[boy] I'm one of the only kids of color at my school.

The flag being at my school represented, to me, at least,

that people didn't care about the lives lost at the hands of police.

That made me feel just scared.

It made me feel uncomfortable.

I didn't want to go to school.

[Wiley] Schools across the country have banned the thin blue line flag,

including Maxwell's school in Upstate New York.

[reporter 1] Students are seeing the symbol as, quote,

"threatening by nature."

[reporter 2] The superintendent believes the thin blue line is political.

What happened afterwards was that the community

just overnight started putting up Blue Lives Matter flags.

They were putting it on their lawns, in their store windows.

It was shocking.

[Maxwell] It was right next to the store.

I just thought I wouldn't go to that place anymore. I'd...

I'm sorry.

This is heartbreaking for me.

It really is.

We support fallen officers, we support our police.

But I have heard this my entire life.

"Oh, the Confederate flag doesn't mean that."

"Oh, separate schools are okay."

Racism isn't dying out.

It's just adapting in the current day.

With something like a flag,

people don't think about multilevel meaning.

They say, "It means what I think it means."

We should think about flags

for how they trigger reactions in people.

Flags are a barometer of where we are as a society.

When our nation's fundamentals of democracy are being attacked,

people do stand behind their symbols.

What's surprising is finding out

which symbols exactly people are standing behind.

[Wiley] In South Africa, many might say the same thing.

There was a demonstration

by predominantly white right-wing movements

where the old flag was shown.

[Wiley] Sparking a national debate and, in 2019, a historic court case.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation has asked a court to ban it,

saying it represents hate and racial discrimination.

It's too much of a stretch to argue

that it amounts to hate speech to display the flag.

[Wiley] But ultimately,

Judge Mojapelo’s decision was clear.

Any display of the old flag constitutes hate speech

in terms of section 10(1) of the Equality Act.

Our children can sit in the museum, they can study, they can look at it.

But it does not have to be flown in the face

of those to whom it is hurtful.

[chanting]

[Judge Mojapelo] Flags are not cloths which are silent.

It reflects our values.

It reflects our aspirations.

[Wiley] Back in 1995, South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup.

It was the first major sporting event

held in the country since the end of apartheid.

And in a stunning turn, South Africa won.

[crowd cheering]

[Wiley] Even the commentators recognized it was more than a game.

[commentator] A wonderful moment for the whole of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela is cheering along.

A sea of flags.

[Judge Mojapelo] Embracing a predominantly white team,

Nelson Mandela walked onto that pitch to say under this flag,

we can all feel united.

And be as inclusive as the flag calls upon us to be.

[Leerssen] The flag is a blank projecting screen,

onto which everybody can project

their own ideals, their hopes, and their fears.

Who owns patriotism?

Who speaks for the nation?

Who defines our identity and what do we identify with?

Whose streets? Our streets!

[Judge Mojapelo] We did not overnight become an equal society.

We developed to what the flags represent.

[closing theme music playing]