Fun with flags presented by Dr. Lennard Ramone.

Hi everyone,

Ever since I saw the first Olympic Games of my life, the 1984 winter games in Sarajevo, I’ve been fascinated by national anthems and flags. What must it be like to stand there on the podium, with the world watching as your national anthem is played, especially for you, and your national flag is raised to the rafters? 

Well, I’ll never know because I was never good at any sports that feature in the Olympics. My forte is with more leisurely sports like pool, shuffleboard and darts.

So, I’ll get to the national anthems at some point because it’s a lot more work, but let’s start with flags. 

There are 4 basic rules for creating a kick ass flag:

⁃ Use 2 or 3 clearly identifiable colors

⁃ Make it simple. A child should be able to draw it from memory.

⁃ No writing or seals or other clutter 

⁃ Be distinctive or related.

So let’s start with a few examples of good flags. All these examples follow the main rules for making good flags.

One of the most popular designs for country flags is the age old classic, the tricolour.

This design can have either horizontal or vertical bands, as shown in these classic designs used by

France:

Italy:

The Netherlands:

And Germany:

All these flags immediately stand out and are instantly recognizable. Good flags.

Then there are flags that follow most of the guidelines but somehow fucked it up, such as

Spain: 

The basic flag is not too bad, but the bands aren’t of equal width plus that ugly, cluttered state seal is on it. To make things worse, the seal is off-centre, which makes it look like it was designed on Monday morning by someone who had a massive hangover from drinking a little too much sangria the day before. 

Iran:

This is basically a decent tricolour but they ruined it by sticking that emblem in the middle (it represents Allah) and by writing the takbir motto (Allah Akbar- god is great) across it no less than 22 times. I know they take their religion serious over there, and I would even allow them that emblem in the centre, but all that repetitive text around the edges makes it look like the notepad of a nervous religious scholar. 

And before we leave the subject of tricolours behind for now, I’ll give you a few examples of countries that somehow managed to follow the rules but still came up with a flag that makes your eyes hurt.

Azerbaijan:

This simply doesn’t work. The odd shade of blue, combined with red and green (red and green really don’t work together- see the flag of Portugal) just makes for a flag that looks like these were all the colors they were left with after the cool countries had taken up the nice color combinations. I’ll forgive them the star and crescent moon in the middle as this particular image can work well if used correctly, like on the Turkish flag, but overall, just, no. 

Right next door, we find:

Armenia:

This, if anything, is even worse. 

Red, a very dark shade of blue and then dark orange. This is just hideous. Armenia: zero points. 

Now, right in the middle of these two flag molestors, we find the tiny Republic of Artsakh, or Nagorno Karabach as it is often referred to. This is a strange limbo land that, in the days of the Soviet Union, was pencilled in with Azerbaijan, even though the population is 99% Armenian. 

This was a tactic that Ol’ Uncle Stalin employed quite often- he would move large numbers of non-ethnics into a Soviet republic to make sure there was no majority of local nationals (Armenians, Kazakhs etc) which might form a secession movement and threaten the sovereignty of the Soviet Union. The holdover of this is felt, sadly, to this day, as the ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine decided to say that they’d rather be part of the Russian Federation than Ukraine which, ultimately, led to the current conflict in the country. 

As soon as the Soviet Union was dissolved, Azerbaijan and Armenia went to war over the territory of Artsakh and, 30 years on, they still regularly start launching missiles at each other. The people of Artsakh are stuck in this weird halfway point, caught between two countries who hate each other, and both claim that Artsakh is theirs. The area is controlled by the Armenian millitary and there is only one road into it, which is constantly blocked by the army who will only let you in if you have permission from the Armenian government, which you won’t get. 

Their flag has strong resemblance to the Armenian one, in fact is the Armenian flag, but the top right corner has this weird pixelated 80s video game bit clipped out of it:

In any case, this flag is slightly less crappy than the Armenian one, but only just. 

Okay, enough about tricolours for now. Let’s look at some of the flags in the “related” group. 

If you look at a map of world flags, you’ll notice that a lot of Slavic countries have flags that are red, white and blue, such as:

The Czech Republic:

Their former conjoined twin Slovakia:

A number of former Yugoslav republics, such as:

Croatia:

Slovenia:

Serbia:

And, ofcourse, Russia, whose flag was inspired by the Dutch flag, but I’m not putting up a picture because I don’t want to highlight a murderous dictator who is killing children in Ukraine at the moment. 

Then there are all those countries in (mainly) central Africa that have flags in different permutations of red, yellow and green, such as

Ghana:

Mali:

Cameroon:

Guinea:

Benin:

And a whole bunch of others. These flags are all inspired by the flag of Ethiopia, the only African nation that was never colonised by Europeans. 

Then there is one more group that we need to mention and that’s the penchant of countries in the Middle East for coming up with flags that are all different combinations and designs that combine some, or all, of the colors associated with Islam- Red, white, black and green. 

Take for example Libya:

(Libya used to have a flag that was entirely green, for some reason)

Egypt:

Kuwait:

The United Arab Emirates:

and a whole lot more

The only 2 countries there that deviate from this template are Lebanon:

Who have a tree on their flag and, for obvious reasons, Israel.

Next up, let’s look at another category, which is best described as Colonial Nonsense. These are all flags of countries and territories that were once part of the British empire and, for reasons that are beyond me, still feature the Union Jack on their flag. 

Examples include:

Australia:

New Zealand:

Fiji:

Montserat:

And then, again for reasons I don’t understand, the US state of Hawaii, which was never a British colony to begin with. 

Fiji was in the process, a few years ago, of changing their flag to something without the Union Jack on it, but then they won their first ever gold medal at the Olympics (in rugby, no less) which was accompanied by a lot of flag waving and then they decided to keep it. 

New Zealand, around the same time, held 2 referendums to decide whether they wanted a new flag. 

First, the locals could vote on a shortlist of designs (hundreds were sent in, including one with a crudely drawn kiwi bird that had laser beams coming out of its eyes) and the winning design then went one on one with the existing flag to see which would be the preferred flag. The original flag won, so in the end the country spent 30 million Dollars only for nothing to change. 

Anyway, let’s move on to something else: countries that break one or more of the Rules set out above, but still have a cool flag.

My favorite in this category is South Africa:

This flag has 6 colors, the design is complicated and hard to replicate with lines going in all directions, but it’s still a kick ass flag! The many colors represent the diversity of the Rainbow Nation, as the country is often referred to.

The designer of the flag, a man called Frederick Brownwell, came up with some story about the lines representing the different cultures who started out at different points (the diagonal lines on the left) but are now united and are moving forward to the future together(the parallel lines in the middle that go to the right), but what people don’t normally realize until you tell them, is that he did something very simple. 

As you probably know, South Africa, or at least large parts of what is now South Africa, were Dutch colonies in the 19th and part of the 20th century. This is also the reason that white people there still speak Dutch (okay, it’s officially called Afrikaans, but it’s really just Dutch with a bit of bush lingo mixed in).

So he took the Dutch flag to represent the past:

En then took the flag of the ANC, the most popular movement and political party for black South Africans, to represent the future: 

And he basically just squeezed them together.

Another flag that breaks all the rules, but still looks pretty cool, is Brazil:

It has 5 colors (blue, white, yellow and 2 shades of green), an image of the night sky that is cluttered with too many stars, and it has a banner with writing on it.

This should not work, but somehow it does. It looks cool, is instantly recognizable and, bonus fact, it’s the only flag in the Western Hemisphere that has the Southern Cross on it. Didn’t spot that? Check the flag. It’s right below the P in Progresso. 

And speaking of stars, there’s one more flag I want to talk about before we move on:

The flag of the USA has too many bands (13, referring the original 13 states at the time of the Declaration of Independence), a canton (this never looks good) and the canton is filled with no less than 50 stars which, ofcourse, refer to the 50 states in the union. Still, I think it’s an awesome flag, and it’s one of the most recognizable in the world. 

Okay, so we now know the basic rules, the flags that use them to good effect, the flags that use them but still look bad, and the flags that ignore them but still manage to look cool. 

So let’s now look at some truly terrible flags. 

Belize:

This is a truly terrible flag, and possibly the worst national flag in the world. 

It has 9 colors and is completely cluttered with imagery. It has both writing and a coat of arms on it and that messy wreath around the centre. On top of that, it is also the only national flag that has humans on it, and the humans are carrying weapons. Having weapons on your flag is always a bad idea. (Looking at you Angola!) 

This flag looks like the President fed his 6 year old nephew a gallon of Red Bull and then set him to work on a primitive version of MS Paint. Belize.. zero points.

Speaking of weapons on flags..

Mozambique’s flag is also very bad.

The basic flag is not even all that bad, despite the use of 5 different colors.

The problem is with the red triangle on the left. If they had made the triangle entirely red, this would have been a passable flag. Not great, but acceptable.

But first of all the put a yellow star in the middle of it, breaking the integrity of the triangle. Then, on top of the star, is an image of a book. And then on top of the image of the book are a hoe, an agricultural implement that is apparently popular in Mozambique, and then to top it all off, the deadly cherry on top of the stupid cherry on top of the design disaster that is the flag of Mozambique, there’s a goddamn AK47! 

I said a few paragraphs ago that weapons on flags are bad. LISTEN UP, MOZAMBIQUE! Putting a Soviet era assault rifle on your flag is Mega Bad, okay. Back to the drawing board! 

One more, and then we’ll get to the best flags.

For this, we return to Central America and the nation of Dominica:

Again, this is such a design fuck up that I can’t believe any government ever passed this as a proud symbol of the nation. 

The flag uses 8 colors, and is also the only national flag that has purple in it. Like Mozambique, the basic flag is not that bad. It’s what they did after that. 

They smacked a bright red emblem in the middle with a fucking parrot on it! A crudely drawn parrot, at that, surrounded by 10 stars.

This is wrong on so many ways that they can only thank Belize for keeping them off the bottom spot in the Cool Flags ranking. 

Okay, now let’s go to the part we’ve been looking forward to: the best national flags in the world (in my opinion).

These are in random order, it’s not a ranking. 

First up:

The Marshall Islands:

I really like this flag. The design is eye catching, different and really pulls in the viewer’s attention. 

The blue background represents the Pacific Ocean, the white and orange bands together represent the Equator and, separately, sunrise and sunset. 

The star in the top left corner represent the islands and their location in the world, just North of the Equator. 

All in all, a very strong flag. 

Next up is:

South Africa.

I already explained this flag earlier in the story, so I’ll just repeat that I really like this flag, despite it breaking several flag rules.  

USA

Like South Africa, this flag came up earlier in the “Break the rules and still look cool” section, so I’ll just give some facts about the Star Spangled Banner. 

The Star Spangled Banner is, ofcourse, also the name of the American national anthem. 

The original American flag had 13 stars and 13 red and white bands. The stars were arranged in a circle, not unlike the stars on the European Union flag these days.

The original idea was to add a red or white band for each new state, and keep the 13 stars as a reference to the original 13 colonies, but the government soon realized that this would not be practical, design-wise, so they switched it around and kept the original 13 bands but started adding stars to the canton for each new state.
If you’ve ever seen images or video footage of US army uniforms, you may have noticed that the flag on the shoulder looks like it is the wrong way around, with the canton on the right, rather than the left, as it is usually depicted:

The reason for this is that, in order to visualize the forward thinking nature of the American spirit, the flag must always face forward when going into battle to show the courageousness and spirit of the American people. So now you know. 

One more, and then we’ll move on to the next flag- There are 50 flagpoles with one American flag each in a circle around the Washington Monument in Washington DC. The monument is there to honour both George Washington and the 50 states in the Union. 

Moving on, we now get to the flag of Macedonia.

This one is just awesome. It is unique, both in design and color scheme, it stands out and is instantly recognizable, and it is brilliant.  If I had to pick one flag as the best national flag in the world, then it would probably be this one. There is no other flag quite like it and the only other flag I would consider for the title of best national flag is….

Scotland

Now THIS is a battle flag if ever you saw one. When you enter the battlefield and you see a flag like this on the opposite side, you just know you’re fucked. 

This flag is brilliant. It is simple, yet distinct. It is the exact right shade of blue and has the bright white St. Andrew’s cross which makes it different in design from any other national flag in the world. It is instantly recognizable and everyone instantly knows this flag represents Scotland. This is as close to perfection as it can get. 

So, that was my story about flags. And before we wrap up for today, here are a couple of random facts about flags.

The flag of Jamaica is the only national flag in the world that does not have red, white or blue in it. 

Cyprus and Kosovo are the only countries that have a map of the country on their flags. 

The flags of Switzerland and The Vatican are the only flags that are square.

The flag of Nepal is the only flag that isn’t rectangular. It consists of 2 triangles on top of each other.

 I hope you enjoyed my story and I’ll see you soon for the next one.