Flags stir intense emotions, but meaning depends on beholder
Raised by firefighters from the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center, a flag telegraphed both anguish and resolve.
Around the globe, flags — some of nations, others of affiliation — have wrapped spectators at soccer matches and participants in protest marches, flown over revolutions and holy wars, adorned advertisements and marked lunar landings.
The man police charged with the attack, Dylann Roof, posted photos online showing him burning a U.S. flag and holding a Confederate flag, along with a manifesto laying out hatred of minorities.
[...] in the U.S., particularly since the Civil War, when soldiers leading troops into battle were shot out from under the banners they carried, flags have come to embody ideology and stir passions in ways that have few modern international equivalents, experts say.
People use language to invest it with meaning but because it's not language itself, it's for everybody to say what they think it means," said Carolyn Marvin, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Blood Sacrifice and the Nation:
The annual celebration of Flag Day (June 14), the Pledge of Allegiance recited daily by schoolchildren, the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner" in so many venues, including countless Fourth of July celebrations.
Yet, during the 1960s, the same flag was burned by Vietnam War protesters to signal their disagreement with U.S. foreign policy.
Reruns of the 1980s action comedy, whose lead characters drive a car with a Confederate flag on its roof, were pulled this week by the TV Land network.
In Romania, demonstrations in 1989 that presaged the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu saw protesters assert independence by cutting holes in a national flag to remove its Communist insignia.
Flags can "act as communal 'umbrellas' under which people with vastly different views can gather and unite — whether physically or in spirit — without having to explore the different meanings that the flag in question might have for each of them," Richard Jenkins, a retired professor at England's University of Sheffield and co-editor of "Flag, Nation and Symbolism in Europe and America," said in an email.