Sorry, Kamala Harris. Flag burning is a noble American tradition

In the film Alam (2022) by Palestinian director Firas Khoury, a group of high school friends living in a small village in the Galilee prepare to hoist the Palestinian flag on the roof of their school.

The night before this big event, two of the main characters trade stories about their lives and dreams.

One of the students tells his friend about his father who died fighting for the Palestinian cause. “The beginning of liberation is to raise your flag” he says, “The highest level of liberation is to burn it.”

Although these teenagers are ready to risk their lives to hoist the Palestinian flag high in Israeli-controlled territory, the wisest among them know that the sanctification of the flag is not the goal of their liberation.

It is an insight born of Palestinians’ intergenerational struggle against oppression. Raising the flag is only the first stage. The highest stage of liberation involves burning the flag that they have hoisted: fighting for actual freedom rather than a simulacrum of it.

US politicians could learn a lot from these Palestinian teenagers about the flag as a vehicle for political ideology. On July 25, former US President Trump said that anyone who burns the American flag should face a year in jail.

This is a threat he first made in 2016 when he declared in a typically inflammatory tweet: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Later that same day, US Democratic Presidential Nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris posted her own condemnation of flag-burning in response to protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fourth address to US Congress: “I condemn the burning of the American flag. The flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way.”

While these politicians prescribe different solutions for dealing with flag burning, they are united in their condemnation of this form of protest.

Both politicians fail to recognise that flag burning is an established practice in America’s antiwar culture. It first gained prominence during the 20th century as a means of protesting US militarism in connection with the Vietnam War. Then as now, these protests took place overwhelmingly on university campuses. 

A long history of flag burning

Many US politicians during the 1960s and 1970s were as outraged by protests against the Vietnam War as US politicians are outraged today by protests against the US-supported genocide in Gaza.

Hoping to shore up the defence of US imperialism, every state except for Wyoming and Alaska passed legislation criminalising the burning of the US flag.

These laws were tested in courts during the 1980s when Gregory Lee Johnson, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA, was arrested for burning an American flag at a demonstration during the 1984 Republican National Convention in Texas.

While at the protest, Johnson took a flag that another protestor had removed from the pole and poured kerosene on it, chanting: “Ronald Reagan, killer of the hour, Perfect example of US power” and “red, white and blue, we spit on you, you stand for plunder, you will go under.” Johnson’s words were a direct critique of US militarism. Specifically, he wanted to draw attention to US involvement in Nicaragua’s dictatorship and the US invasion of Grenada.

The state of Texas arrested Johnson and the case reached the US Supreme Court, where Johnson was defended by prominent civil rights attorney William Kunstler, best known as the defender of the Chicago Seven, as well as by David Cole, who is currently the director of the ACLU.

With a single ruling, this landmark decision struck down legislation criminalising flag burning in 48 US States. This ruling put the US in a small but honourable minority of countries that do not criminalise the burning of its flag.

Denmark has an interesting variation on this policy, which criminalises the burning of every flag other than the Danish one. Even though the free speech implications of that law are not ideal,  the unlimited condemnation it permits of one’s own nation-state is a welcome alternative to nationalism. 

To the extent that the US can claim to have a distinctive jurisprudence on free speech, this view depends on cases like Texas v. Johnson, as well as another ruling the following year United States v. Eichman (1990), which struck down the Flag Protection Act, a federal law that Congress had passed to undermine Texas v. Johnson.

So far, politicians have failed to undermine the interpretation of the First Amendment which sees it as a protected form of free speech. Yet this is not for lack of trying. 

We should therefore be worried when politicians condemn antiwar protests without referencing free speech. Such political statements, whether by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, undermine what is arguably the most noble US jurisprudential legacy: free speech as enshrined by the First Amendment. 

The defence of flag burning as a protected form of speech is of particular concern to leftists and other anti-war activists. Even when flag-burning takes place in circumstances of violence, larceny, or other regrettable circumstances, the power of this specific act of protest is not to be denied.

Before the anti-Israel protests that swept through Washington DC as Netanyahu addressed Congress, the US flag was burned during the Ferguson protests against police violence. For many people around the world, the US flag is a symbol of racism and militarism, and no amount of censorship is going to change that.

In her first campaign video, released the same day that she condemned flag burning, Kamala Harris opened with an image of the US flag, buoyed in the breeze. Midway through, Harris intones, “We choose freedom.” She then names the specific forms that freedom can take, such as: “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead.” 

Notably missing from her list of freedoms are the more intangible and fundamental forms it takes, most notably freedom of speech. The absence of free speech from Kamala Harris’ list of values is telling. Freedom of speech tends to be the freedom that politicians like least because it poses the strongest challenge to power. Yet it is the freedom that we as citizens most need to claim if we don’t want to be ruled by tyrants of any political party. 

I hope Kamala Harris is elected in November 2024, and that she will be pressed into ending a genocide opposed by the vast majority of her electorate. And that, when challenged, she will explain why, in this instance, she failed to stand up for the right of US citizens to criticise their country’s complicity in genocide.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and World Policy Journal and her writing has been translated into eleven languages.

Follow her on Twitter: @rrgould

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.