Stupid flags indeed, but they are also symbols with power and meaning.

Freedom of expression is important, but a wise society understand the nature of symbols and the impact they can have on people's lives and interaction. Time also plays a part in this.

For example, I consider the Confederate flag to be an obscenity, the symbol of a deeply evil philosophy happily consigned to the cesspit of history. Personally, I find that the flying of such a flag is a direct insult to African Americans and indeed, the many brave men who died to wipe out the stain of slavery from the record of one of the noblest countries of the world.

But the Civil War was nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, and no-one left alive of that generation. The symbol has morphed into a mild shadow of rebelliousness, of difference, of myth and romance. It no longer reflects slavery except in the minds of a few deluded souls. Thus, my historical anger and sense of personal affront has no place in changing the views of others.

However, had some one raised the green crescent to flutter over the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers, with the legend "Mission Accomplished" written neatly in Arabic on its cloth, I suspect we would have found it difficult to find anyone defending the perpetrators' "right" to free expression -and rightly so.

Somewhere in between the two then, it becomes acceptable for symbols to mutate and become anodyne - to relinquish the chains of their history.

I submit that the Nazi flag has not done this - it retains its evil symbolism, and is routinely used for that symbolism to perpetuate hurt and a celebrate a message of unspoken violence. There are people alive whose families went to their deaths under that flag, and whose menfolk died to liberate us from that wickedness. That flag symbolises everything that the United States abhors, everything that the Stars and Stripes rejects - and her wielders have bled to protect the world from it and its symbolism.

It has no place being flown in that country, to insult the memory and the living. Maybe in a thousand years that evil, jagged thing will mean nothing more than a footnote to history - but not now. Not now.