Fun With Flags

[Ivor the Engineer]

From the same article I linked above there is this bit of history that is relevant to US foreign policy today:

...

It started in 1953. Iran’s leader, Mohammed Mosaddegh, was brought to power on a popular developmentalist platform. After his election, he introduced unemployment insurance, abolished forced agricultural labor, taxed land rents to fund social spending, and sought to renegotiate ownership of the country’s massive oil reserves. This latter move caught the attention of Britain, which had controlled Iran’s oil since 1913, and provoked a retaliation: With assistance from the CIA under the Eisenhower administration, the British Secret Intelligence Service toppled Mosaddegh in a coup d’état. In his place, they installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who rolled back Mosaddegh’s reforms and ruled the country as a dictator for the next twenty-six years, most of that time with U.S. support.

The Iran coup was the first move in what amounted to a war on developmentalism. There were many more to follow. One year later, the same story played out in Guatemala. Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Árbenz, had just begun a program of land reforms that shifted unused portions of large private estates to peasants who had been dispossessed during the reign of Jorge Ubico, a U.S.-backed dictator who controlled the country during the 1930s and 1940s. The Árbenz administration paid full compensation in the process, but this wasn’t enough to satisfy the United Fruit Company, an American-owned firm that had significant land holdings in Guatemala. At the behest of United Fruit, which had close ties to the Eisenhower administration, the CIA intervened to topple Árbenz and install a military dictator—Carlos Castillor Armas—in his place.

The Guatemala episode marked the official end of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and revived America’s habit of projecting military power across Latin America. The following decades saw many more such interventions. Brazil was hit with a U.S.-backed coup in 1964 that deposed João Goulart, another pro-poor reformer. In 1965, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in order to quash a popular rebellion against the U.S.-backed military junta that controlled the country. And then, of course, there was Chile, which remains probably the best-known case. In 1973, the CIA lined up behind disgruntled national elites to support a bloody coup against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who had been swept to power three years earlier on his promise to create an economy fairer to the country’s peasants and workers. He was replaced by military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who swiftly reversed Allende’s reforms and pried the economy open to U.S. corporate interests.

A narcissistic bully is the perfect distraction for the evil that's always been there to hide behind.

 

[Planigale]

It depends very much on the context. For instance, Danes tend to decorate their Christmas trees with Danish flags.

Two American expats with their Danish Christmas tree.

Growing up with the tradition, I didn't think much about it. It just was. However, my German girlfriend was shocked when she saw it. She considered it to be a sign of ultra nationalism, which I don't think it is, even though nationalism appears to have been at the root of the tradition when it was established 150 years ago.
Unlike my girlfriend, I knew that it was a symbol of Christmas in that context and not really of nationalism. (And the colors go well with Christmas - like the Coca-Cola version of ).

Most Danes also don't think about the heathen roots of bringing a tree into your home for solstice, and nowadays most Danes don't even think about Christ in the context of Christmas. It helps that the Danish word for Christmas is jul.

As a symbol of the nation, I hate the as much as other symbols of nationalism.
(But it does come in handy on Twitter, since Denmark is seven characters and is only two.)

I do like the fact that the Scandinavian coutries all have essentially the same flag just in different colours; Orkney, Shetland, Faroe, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finnland (of course this is how we know Greenland isn't part of Scandinavia).