Yellow flag red stripes trump Patch#

Variants of this flag’s iconic snake design and motto are a common sight among American gun owners.

Yellow flag red stripes trump Patch#

Participants at the Capitol’s armed takeover have only begun to be identified, but media outlets captured what appear to be Vietnamese Americans holding up the South Vietnamese flag.You have probably seen this flag before: A bright yellow banner with the image of a hissing coiled rattlesnake standing over a patch of grass and the words “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” sometimes without an apostrophe.

Hours before the Capitol insurrection, he urged supporters to “ fight like hell” to defend his administration.Ī handful of Vietnamese Americans heeded that call, participating in local “stop the steal” rallies in California. Last year, he tweeted for his followers to “ liberate” the country by force from COVID-19 lockdowns. I have also observed how Trump employs old anti-communist tactics that appeal to some conservatives in this community. I have interviewed Vietnamese American soldiers who fear American freedom is failing and fervently believe in the United States’ activity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.įor them, flying the South Vietnam flag is a show of nationalism – a militarized patriotism that is simultaneously South Vietnamese and American. The flag reflects community solidarity, but it also has a more fraught symbolic meaning.Īs I wrote in my 2018 book “ Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory,” some Vietnamese Americans view their fallen homeland as an extension of the American push for freedom and democracy worldwide. Richard Koci Hernandez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images Today, they invoke the ongoing cultural value of this “fallen” regime by flying the South Vietnam flag at Lunar New Year parades and musical concerts.Ī vigil in San Jose, California, on April 29, 1995, marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Many Vietnamese refugees sought asylum in the United States. The war killed nearly 50,000 American troops and displaced about half a million people. The fall of Saigon was the turning point of the Vietnam War, which caused over 1 million North Vietnamese deaths, military and civilian, and a quarter-million South Vietnamese casualties. Crashing through the gates of the main palace, they seized the building and raised the flag of the revolutionary northern government.

In 1975, opposition forces overtook the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. American ground troops formally joined the war to defend the south in 1965. helped establish and back South Vietnam, a pro-Western democratic republic that fought communist North Vietnam. A nationalist flagĪfter Vietnam gained independence from French colonial rule in 1954, the country split into two, sparking a civil war. The South Vietnamese flag recalls Vietnam’s own “failed” democracy – and the people’s struggle to save their nation.