For the citizens of the United States, the flag is a symbol of freedom and the values the country was founded on. When people walk into Penfield Library, they can see paintings of the American flag but there is something very different about them. Artist Paul Peter Piech has removed the 50 stars from one of the flags, which represent the 50 states, and replaced them with swastikas.
The swastika is widely known for its use by the Nazi party that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, when they were defeated by Allied Forces. During his reign, Adolf Hitler was responsible for millions of deaths in his concentration camps. Piech must have had some opinions about the U.S. for him to do such a thing.
Piech was born in Brooklyn and later served in the U.S. Air Force during WWII. After the war he stayed in England where he started his own printing company and taught art at universities.
Veterans usually have some resentment towards the military after serving but still have pride in their country and the flag. Piech’s work signifies that the U.S. is turning into Germany. Many of Piech’s anti-American artwork was made during the Vietnam War, which was protested by many people at the time.
The U.S. has grown to become the premier superpower across the globe over the last 70 years. Since the world wars the country has engaged in other foreign wars whether the U.S. should have or not. To our enemies, the U.S. is seen as an evil empire just like Germany during Hitler’s reign. A big difference is that the country is not conducting a mass extermination of people like the Nazis did. That could be Piech’s message of replacing the stars with swastikas, the United States got too big and powerful.
The American swastika flag is also used in a three-part flag painting representing racism in the U.S. The first painting is a regular flag with the word “It’s,” followed by a flag with faces replacing the starts and the word “now” over it and last, the swastika flag with the words “or never” over it. Piech was sending the message that if we do not fix our social issues, the U.S. end up like Nazi Germany.
With racial issues still a problem in America, Piech’s work still has relevance today. With unarmed African Americans being killed by police and the arrests of Native Americans defending their land in South Dakota, people need to unite and fix these issues.
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This put-swastika-where-the-stars-should-be in the U.S. flag is nothing new. Illustrators have done it before. Nothing Paul Peter Piech presents is noteworthy.
Further, Peich’s message is incorrect, and largely shows that this would-be artist lacks basic creative thought.
The U.S. has never been more cognizant on a social and legal level about racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. Laws and practices that were put in place to keep people from jobs and facilities based upon ethnicity or sex are gone (except, perhaps, for gender-specific restrooms).
Ironically, the BEST evidence that the U.S. continues to have racist, sexist, anti-Semitic issues are the policies that employers and institutions are putting in place to make the workforce and school systems “more diverse.” Those policies look to race, sex, and occasionally religion in selecting candidates for specific positions.
What the mainstream media and civil rights groups are currently doing is pointing to anecdotal incidents of bias. Sure, Dylann Roof killed nine people last year because of their race, but that is one person, and the incident does not reflect the thoughts or actions of a nation of 320 million.
Statistically, the U.S. is more sensitive — perhaps hyper-sensitive — to the old “isms” than it has ever been in the past.