Glyn Ford on the Scarlet Flag
Red Threads; A History of the People’s Flag by Henry Bell published by Pluto
Bell covers the good, the bad and the ugly of the people’s flag. It has Establishments recoil in horror when they see it waved. Silicon Valley’s thought police firmly exclude it from their 259-long list of flag emojis. The virtual world only follows where the real has been. France banned it in 1832 and again in 1849, and a majority of US states in 1919. That ban stood until 1931, when it was overturned by the Supreme Court. Subsequently, Charlie Chaplin – if inadvertently – raised the scarlet standard high in Modern Times (1936).
The flag was symbolic of the Paris Commune, where in its shade 10-20,000 communards were massacred in defeat. The “colour line” in the US, separating black from white, was the Capital’s greatest asset and Labour’s weakest link. The establishment has no such qualms; in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the victor Bismarck released French POWs to assist in putting down the Commune. Here, the colour line was red. Yet the deaths in Paris were almost as nothing. In Indonesia in 1965, under the conniving watch of Washington and London, following a claimed attempted coup d’état, a million members of the Communist Party were brutally murdered.
It was loudly flown over Lenin during the Russian Revolution and came to serve as a proxy for the emergent USSR. El Lissitsky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge saw his painting set the compass for the future. It is from here that the musical wing of the Anti-Nazi League commandeered their name. A flag of steel and coal, factory and workshop; albeit appropriated from time to time by field and farm. The Russian Revolution started a civil war; the Chinese ended one. Mao had a flag, a book, and an opera as he traded in a version of Marxism-Leninism focused on anti-imperialism in peasant dress.
Yet there is much to live down. In China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward starved tens of millions and the Cultural Revolution tortured and tormented the survivors. Yet this very destruction provided the soil in which Deng Xiaoping’s apostasy could grow and flourish. Under Stalin, the Moscow Trials and the purges saw the revolution gorge itself, to the extent, on old Bolsheviks, their families, friends and acquaintances. What played at home played away, with Stalin’s henchmen at times more intent on counterrevolution and the physical elimination of the heterodox communists during the Spanish Civil War than fighting Franco’s fascists.
Bell recognises blood and brutality can colour the flag, but it can be in good cause. As he says, armed struggle is the path oppressors often impose. Revolution is wedded to the machine gun not by choice, but by circumstance. It has thus lived a dual life that stretches from history’s comfort blanket clutched by some on the social democratic right to a flag symbolic of the break into uncontrollable anger at continuing discrimination and oppression. There were too often, like with Spain, two red flags facing off against each other; one fluttering over reform and the second signalling revolution. When the German SPD – in the aftermath of defeat in World War I – presided over the 1919 state-sanctioned assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – Spartacus League leaders that had earlier split from the SPD – they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. It was the bitter recriminations between the Socialists and Communists that, a long decade later, were key to the failure to create a united red front against Hitler.
The “Red Flag” is an anthem no longer on the Labour Party playlist. Perhaps to no one’s surprise. After last year’s General Election, the very idea that the PLP might echo the class of 1945 with a joyous rendering on the floor of the House of Commons was unimaginable – the probability is that amongst the all so carefully winnowed winners barely a majority would know the words, less still the tune.
Bell does a fine job with his pleasantly meandering text, visiting a global cornucopia of stories, myths and legends rallying around the Flag. But the real question is its future. In the Dar al islam, the red flag of revolt has long been hauled down in favour of the green, while in the West, the black flag of reaction, for the moment, flies high.