St George and the Flag

An Apology... of sort.

My recent post on St George has somehow found itself linked to in a news item on the blog of the Campaign for an English Parliament. This has generated a couple of comments.

One of them, while I understand that it was possibly not very nice, was certainly quite inarticulate and I therefore was not able to reply to it. The other reacted to my affirmation that the nationalist right wing had highjacked St George's flag and insisted that this was only a media driven perception of the situation.

This is where I have to apologise I think. I like to try and be fair and I think that in my hurry to get to the quirky bit of news that post was all about (that St George is the Bridegroom of Jesus and therefore could potentially be the patron saint of same-sex unions), I produced a rather shoddy bit of writing and rather caricatured St George's fans.

I would say however that when the perception of people claiming allegeance to St George might be media driven, a generalisation and not the one some of them would profer, it is how the general public views them. To be fair their has been a move in the past few years, from more main stream members of the public (read: not the National Front or football hooligans) to reclaim the flag and clean it of all the drit that was covering it (so to speak).

At the end of the day, nationalist flag waving individuals make me rather nervous; nationalism having a worrying and recurrent tendency to turn into xenophobia, with disastrous consequences. At a time when human beings from around the world are growing ever closer (despite the wars), when Europe is about to celebrate its 50th birthday (next year), I find it contradictory and difficult to understand, to say the least, to see people turning back on themselves and indulge in what appears to me to be small minded isolationism.

I am happy to be proven wrong. I am just not sure that I am.

Tags: St George, history, St Edmund, jingoism, BBC, England.

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