You may learn much about a nation, its past and future, by looking at its flag. Beyond that, flags not only tell us about nations, but they also tell us something about the significance of Western Civilization and what that civilization means to mankind.

The ideals of individuality and freedom valued by the ancient Greeks, and the belief in one God who created the universe that comes to us from ancient Israel, are two pillars of Western Civilization. These pillars have held up nations over the course of history. Today, one nation that represents these values in its flag is the United States of America.

Nevertheless, there are other visions at work in the world that stand against Western values. The two most significant threats today to Western Civilization are a vision of a bloody and polytheistic past, and an atheistic and materialistic future. These visions are symbolized in the flags of Mexico and the People’s Republic of China.

The flag of the People’s Republic of China is a red field with five golden stars. The flag was adopted in 1949. The red represents the communist revolution. The five stars and their relationship represent the unity of the social classes (not individuals) of the Chinese people: the Workers, Peasants, Petty Bourgeoisie, and National Bourgeoisie. These social classes are united under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (the largest star).

The flag of the People’s Republic of China embodies the ideals of Marxism, a failed ideology created in the West from the worn out fabric of anti-Semitism, and then exported to the East. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China everyone becomes a slave to the state.

A metaphor that describes the People’s Republic of China comes to us from science fiction. The film and TV series "Star Trek" introduced viewers to an alien race of cybernetic organisms called the Borg.

The Borg traveled through the universe in a cube shaped vessel absorbing and assimilating whatever civilizations they found into their hive mind. It is not a great leap to go from the Borg to Communist China, and the Chinese vision of the future: We are China. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

The flag of the People’s Republic of China

If the Chinese flag represents a human future where individuality is submerged in a one party state, the Mexican flag represents a racial past of barbaric cruelty, where the cult of death dominates.

Bandera de Los Estados Unidos de Mexico

Adopted in its present form in 1968, the central emblem on the flag is the Aztec pictogram for Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). The symbol of an eagle holding a snake in its talons while perched on a prickly pear cactus recalls the legend that inspired the Aztecs to settle on what was originally an island in the middle of a lake.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris maintains that the Aztec empire was the world's only state-sponsored cannibal kingdom. Some anthropologists disagree with Harris’s classification, but few deny the fact the Aztec gods ate human hearts and the Aztec people ate human beings, a theme explored in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green.

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Aztecs built an empire in central Mexico by using oppressive military power. They ruled with cruelty and imposed gruesome myths on the people they conquered.

It is estimated that the population of central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest was about 25 million, with 250,000 people sacrificed yearly at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. That’s an average of about 40 people a day, or about 2 an hour.

The eagle and serpent on the Mexican flag are not neutral symbols like the Canadian maple leaf.  They are reminders of a bloody past and the possibility of a bloody future. Beyond that, the symbols on the Mexican flag, like the symbolism of the Chinese flag, represent cultural values at odds with Western Civilization.

The Flag of the United States of America

The flag of the United States of America has a basic shape of stars on a blue union with red and white horizontal stripes that represent the 13 British colonies that declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1776. The flag of the United States, sometimes called the Stars and Stripes, has changed over the years as more stars were added to the blue union to represent new states.

Robert G. Heft designed the present U.S. flag with 50 stars in 1958. He was 17 years old at the time. Heft designed the flag as a high school class project while living with his grandparents in Ohio.

The flag of the United States of America is a symbol that points beyond the colors, the stars and the stripes. That beyond is not often apparent to those who live outside the circle of Western Civilization. Nevertheless, for many Americans that beyond is something felt, if not always put into words.

Although continuing efforts have been made, even today, to deny or submerge the classical Greek, Christian, and Judaic foundations of the United States of America, these efforts have always met with resistance. When you consider the flag of the United States of America and the pledge that attends it, “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” the flag’s association with the ancient ideals of Western Civilization become apparent.

Cultures do not change much over time. Herodotus would see in China today the same slave mentality he saw as the Persian generals beat their soldiers into battle against the free Greeks. Likewise, Cortez would see in the Mexican drug cartels the same worship of death he saw in the flayed and dismembered bodies that tumbled down the bloodsoaked steps of the Aztec temples at Tenochtitlan.

From Voltaire to Marx, from Montezuma to Stalin, from Pol Pot to our present-day progressives and beyond, many have tried to dismiss the aspirations embodied in the flags of Western Civilization. Yet, flags are often like poems; they go beyond reason to human emotions where they are long lasting, to the dismay of the cultural relativizers who live among us like crystal ghosts.

Flags lift up the particulars of a nation and show us something universal. Flags remind us that for Western Civilization, the natural state of man is to be free from a barbaric past that worships death (Mexico) and a collective future that obliterates individuality (China).

How long the flag of the United States of America will continue to fly remains to be seen. The flag may be already at half-mast. Western Civilization seems to be in retreat. The future will belong to the Borg and the Soylent Green Corporation.

For now, some men and nations, even some Americans, are confounded by the liberty and justice for all seen in the rippling Stars and Stripes. They know that for the time being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob stands behind that banner and they hate it.