this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Antifascism
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I think the pale yellow might be dispatchers?
Its all so stupid.
I thought yellow was first responders like EMTs
I think that's orange?
Again, its all pretty stupid imo. EMTs, FFs, police, whatever, already have iconography.
The "thin" whatever flags are all bullshit. It all comes back to an 80s documentary about a cop being killed, I think it was Dallas in the 70s. The flag crap all stems from that, which btw found evidence the person convicted of the murder to be innocent (his conviction was overturned after the movie was released). The name was a bit of irony about how cops perceive themselves, and how its different from reality.
Not that you'll find anyone with one of those flags who has any idea what the origins are of course.
Edit: This is the man who was convicted
This is the movie
I thought they all really started popping up as a counter movement against the BLM signs. At least, that seems to be the implication around here.
They did, but that's not where the reference comes from. It actually goes back WAY further to the 1800s, but that's not super relevant (Scots in the Crimean War). The blue line has been referenced in the US for about a hundred years iirc, and had been a reference throughout PDs for themselves since around the 50s.
The movie I mentioned popularized the term outside of the PD, and the thin blue line flags started popping up as part of Blue Lives Matter in response to Black Lives Matter. Which is particularly gross to me, because it comes across as the police being in conflict with people of color, which just kind of proves the point of Black Lives Matter to me.
It took very little time for it to be a white nationalist symbol as well, in no small part due to many police also being members of the white nationalist movements out there...
So the flag is a response to Black Lives Matter, but the "thin blue line" has a much longer history that the flag is a reference to.