On Color

by David Kastan

  FIGURE 19: The “big blue marble”: view of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew

  Both candidates declared victory following the election on June 12, 2009, but the electoral commission declared Ahmadinejad the official winner. The Iranian legislature quickly confirmed the result. Nevertheless, large public demonstrations protested the outcome, and an even larger association of reformist groups came together, giving voice to the newly articulate aspirations of a country that had long been traumatized both from without and within. In the aftermath of the election, the movement became known as the Green Path of Hope (Rah-e Sabz-e Omid). It used the vivid imagery of an explosion of highly saturated light green paint from an oval woven basket as a symbol of the burst of confidence and conviction that the political alliance at once represented and released (see Figure 18).

  Green, as the Iranian Green Movement’s founders certainly knew, has been historically associated with Muhammad. He was reputed to have worn both a green turban and a green cloak, and when he died, according to a traditional account, his body was covered with an embroidered green garment. It became the color of the Fatimid Caliphate, which ruled all of North Africa from the tenth almost to the end of the twelfth century, and green continues to be a marker of Shia Islam. The name and imagery of the Green Movement was no doubt intended in part as a link to this history, which Seyyed Mir Hossein Mousavi claimed by lineage. Indeed that is what Seyyed means: it is more a title than a name, asserting direct descent from the Prophet. The Green Path of Hope was a way of declaring that the Iranian Green Movement was neither heretical nor an anomaly but a legitimate democratic impulse finding its voice within the Islamic Republic.

  It is impossible to miss the green that appears all through the Islamic world. It is noticeable almost everywhere, except of course in the desert landscape. It is on flags (for example, of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya) and in mosques (as in the beautiful Great Mosque of Muhammed Ali in Cairo). Shias often wear green wrist bracelets inscribed with verses from the Qur’an or green ribbons that have been wiped on holy shrines. It is also a prominent feature of the next world: the Qur’an says that the inhabitants of paradise will be “clothed in green silk” (76:21).

  But the Green Movement in Iran was designed (in both senses of the word) to show what might grow in this world. A collection of Mousavi’s writings is called Nurturing the Seed of Hope, and the movement’s vibrant green represented a hopeful commitment to change and growth: the willingness to imagine an inclusive, democratic Iran that the party’s pluralist, grassroots origins had prefigured.6 The inescapable green imagery was neither selected by focus groups nor suggested by some sophisticated public relations firm. Rather, it was chosen by Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a distinguished artist and academic, and approved by Mousavi, who is himself an architect and an accomplished abstract painter. They both knew that color matters.

  Sadly, however, the seed of hope seems to have needed a more hospitable environment in which to take root. The Green Path of Hope underestimated the willingness of the conservatives to use intimidation and terror in the face of a significant challenge to its authority. In 2011, Mousavi and his wife were placed under house arrest, where they remain today, suggesting both the success and the failure of the movement. In Iran it isn’t easy being green, and it is hard to feel at all confident that it will get easier any time soon. But the seeds remain buried in the native soil, and maybe one day they will sprout.

  Politics gets color-coded for obvious enough reasons. Color is instantly identifiable, highly memorable, and readily adaptable for any of the various forms and contexts in which it may be displayed. Its main disadvantage for political imagery is precisely its “vivacious versatility,” in Lord Byron’s words, “what is call’d mobility.”7 And that is its main advantage, too. It perhaps seems inevitable for any of the ecologically driven green parties, but it was also available with an unrelated associative logic to express and animate the idealistic oppositional politics of the Iranian Green Movement. And on other grounds, or maybe none, it is capable of representing still different principles of solidarity—for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement of Greece, the Taiwan independence movement, the African National Congress in South Africa, and the government of the Chechen Republic in exile.

  Political color is promiscuous; or, maybe better, it functions like some visible “free radical,” which you may remember from high school chemistry: those molecules with an unpaired electron that enables them easily to attach themselves to other atomic structures with similarly unpaired electrons. Free radicals attach themselves with no difficulty, but, as chemists tell us, the attachments are inherently transient and unstable.

  Just how unstable political color can be may be seen in the vocabulary of “red states” and “blue states” used in the United States to refer to those with either Republican or Democratic majorities. That usage now is inevitable; it seems to be an immutable fact of American political history, probably dating from the Revolution, or least the Civil War. Yet it originated only in 2000, in the disputed election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Before that time the terms don’t exist. There was of course color coding in political campaigns, but both major parties used the full panoply of American red, white, and blue to identify themselves.8

  With the widespread availability of color television in the late 1960s, color-coded electoral maps had become a feature of the coverage of presidential election returns; but that was for differentiation, and nothing had been standardized. Neither red nor blue had yet taken sides. In Cold War America, permanently identifying one party as “red” would have been impossible without being accused of bias, so in different elections and on different networks, red and blue were variously assigned to Democrats and Republicans. For example, on NBC in 1980, when the Republican Ronald Reagan soundly defeated the Democrat Jimmy Carter, carrying forty-four of the fifty states, one television commentator pointed to his color-coded studio map showing the massive Republican victory and said it looked like “a suburban swimming pool.” On another station, the reporter commented on the “ocean of blue” that was appearing on the map as the vote count was reported, while Republican staffers watching the returns on television gleefully referred to what in another context might have been called a landslide as “Lake Reagan.”9

  Yet in the aftermath of the 2000 election no Republican victory of whatever size would ever again be described using blue imagery.

  After the election, every night for thirty-six days the country anxiously followed the television coverage of recounts and court challenges before Florida finally became a “red state” and Bush became the forty-third American president. A new political imagery of red for Republicans and blue for Democrats was now fixed in the national imagination. What was once arbitrary and variable became a seemingly natural and permanent feature of political discourse in the United States—and so decisively so that now at times the name of the increasingly polarized country begins to sound ironic.

  This accidental color-coding of American politics reverses the associations of red and blue that exist almost everywhere else in the world. In most countries, blue is the color of the more conservative parties (as with the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom), and red of the more liberal (as with the British Labour Party). Red has historical identifications with workers’ movements and socialist and communist parties. The bonnet rouge, the soft red cap worn by the French revolutionaries after 1790, expressed both their fervor and their solidarity, but red had not yet invariably become the color of the left in France. Indeed, in July 1791 it was still the color of established authority. The imposition of martial law was announced by the raising of a red flag, and fifty protesters demanding the abdication of King Louis XVI were killed in the subsequent fighting. Only then did the radicals claim the color red for themselves, appropriating its authoritarian symbolism for the color of their opposition, reversing the terms and the imagery of French politics, as they asserted “the martial law of the people again
st the revolt of the court.”10

  Red is a hot color. It is easily seen as the color of defiance. In your face, bold, and resolute. In France in 1848, the radicals adopted a red flag instead of the blue, white, and red tricolor (which seemed in its color imagery too agreeably accommodationist), as they did again in the spring of 1871, when they briefly controlled Paris, setting their red flag over the Hôtel de Ville. “The old order writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag,” wrote Karl Marx in 1871.11 And the assertive red flag would become still more visible in the twentieth century in the triumphal emblems of postrevolutionary Russia and of Mao’s China: the solid red flags (with a red star outlined in gold and a golden hammer and sickle in the upper left corner of the Soviet flag, and with a golden star inside an arc of four smaller stars in the upper left corner of the flag of the People’s Republic of China). But the red wasn’t limited to flags. There were waving red banners, large Red Armies, and the Little Red Book—all contributing in the United States to the Red Scare, as Americans through the twentieth century worried about the threat of communism.

  But for all the undeniable forcefulness of red as a political color, it is a color often tinged with mourning. It registers the blood spilled by its martyrs, and it functions to keep the memory of their sacrifices alive. In 1889, in Ireland, the red flag had become the symbol of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. James Connolly, who would be executed by the British after the Easter Rebellion in 1916, wrote the lyrics to a song that became their unofficial anthem and that has been traditionally sung at the conclusion of British Labour Party conferences:

  The people’s flag is deepest red;

  It shrouded oft our martyred dead,

  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,

  Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.

  The embrace of red as a political color almost always is driven in part by this commemorative impulse, although just how appropriate the song remains now for the British Labour Party is open to question. Indeed as early as the late 1960s, as the party first began to downplay its leftist origins, beginning inexorably to move toward the center in a bid for electoral victories, a scornful parody of Connolly’s song emerged:

  The people’s flag is palest pink;

  It’s not as red as most think.

  We must not let the people know

  What socialists thought long ago.

  Perhaps if “the people’s flag” had really been pink, the conservative color would have been periwinkle. But the people’s flag was red, and the oppositional color is inevitably a darker blue (two newly named shades that might well appeal to canny political consultants are Liberty Blue and Resolution Blue). Nevertheless, in whatever shade, the conservative use of the color almost always exists in relation to a politically charged red. In Taiwan, for example, blue (usually in a circular emblem of a blue sky with a white sun in the center) is the color of the dominant party, Kuomintang (KMT). The party was founded on the Chinese mainland by Sun Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren in 1911 after the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the last of the imperial dynasties (the Qing), and KMT was the ruling party in China from 1928 to 1949. In 1949, the Communist Party (the Red Chinese, as they were known in the Cold War West) finally won a drawn-out civil war and drove the KMT to the island of Taiwan. On Taiwan the KMT ruled as the lone political party until reforms in the late 1980s produced a more democratic political environment, though one in which KMT leaders continue to wield great power as part of what is known as the pan-Blue coalition.

  In various countries, blue faces off against red, replaying social and political divides that first took their ideological outlines and their primary colors in the French Revolution. Once the French radicals had appropriated the color red for their cause, blue became the inevitable color of the aristocracy, not least because white, the third of the traditional colors in the French political spectrum, can seem for obvious reasons defeatist (though some did adopt it for a while). Waving the white flag hardly seems an effective way to rally your troops. But blue was already the traditional color of French monarchical power. It was the color worn by the elite French guards attached to the royal family and the color of the monarchy itself, from the coronation of Charlemagne to the crests of the Valois and Bourbon kings.

  Political color associations always have histories, but there are so many histories and so few basic colors that the associations of color and politics are inevitably unpredictable, arbitrary, contradictory, and insecure. Red may indeed be the people’s color, the color of a radical left, the color of bloody sacrifice; but it was also, for example, the color of Tudor royal authority, expressing monarchical presence, prestige, and, above all, power. For his coronation, Henry VIII wore a shirt of crimson silk, a mantle of crimson satin edged in fur, tassels “also in crimson,” as the royal account book says, a cap of crimson trimmed with ermine and gold, and an outer coat of crimson satin, as well as his crimson parliamentary robes.12 The king’s crimson was hardly the color of a people’s revolution.

  Similarly, blue may be the traditional color of the French monarchy, but it is also the color of many left-leaning populist political parties, from the Democratic Alliance in South Africa, once the antiapartheid Progressive Party and now a nonracial, center-left oppositional party, to the nationalist and separatist, prolabor Parti Québécois in Canada. We know that blue blood and blue collar point in opposite political directions.

  There are other colors that code political movements. Both Belgium and the Netherlands have had purple governments, ruling coalitions of red Social Democrats and blue Liberals. Brown has been the color of fascism, though, somewhat confusingly, black is the color of the Greek fascist party called Golden Dawn. In 1986 in the Philippines, a Yellow Revolution drove Ferdinand Marcos from power by massive popular protests, during which yellow flags and ribbons served as the sign of solidarity.

  A series of similar nonviolent popular political events in some of the republics of the former Soviet Union have come to be known by political scientists as the Color Revolutions.13 The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine was perhaps the most significant of these. In 2004 in Ukraine, the Oranges (Pomaranchevi) comprised the successful popular protest movement, which adopted the campaign colors of Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party to protest electoral fraud and government corruption and inefficiency, and successfully forced the delegitimation of a rigged election. A new vote was held in which Yushchenko was declared the winner, and he served as president until 2010. But in hindsight, it isn’t so clear that “Color Revolution” was the right term for what had taken place in Ukraine. Certainly it was color-coded, but the “revolution” part now seems more wishful than real.

  Nonetheless its orange remains free to be taken up by political movements of very different casts. In India now it is often the color of an aggressive Hindu nationalism (Figure 20). While in Northern Ireland and in the twenty-six traditional counties that now make up the Republic of Ireland, orange is the color of Protestants and Unionists (that is, those who want Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom). Its use as a political color there dates from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as an expression of loyalty to William III, who became king of England and Ireland after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the deposition of King James II, the last Catholic monarch to wear the crown.

  King William, the husband of James’s daughter Mary, was a Dutchman and a Protestant. He was also the prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau. The Orange of the dynastic title comes, however, as we saw in Chapter 2, not from the color but from a town in Provence, though unsurprisingly the color soon became attached to the family name—and in Ireland it became attached to a cause. To be an Orangeman in this context is to be a Protestant and to be loyal to the British crown.

  FIGURE 20: Supporters of Gujarat’s chief minister and Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Independent, February 26, 2014.

  Orange is usually no more stable in its
political associations than blue or red or any other political color imagery, though in Ireland orange has proven stubbornly enduring. If in Ukraine orange is already now a distant memory, in Ireland it is one that will not fade. In any other context, one might say it is a memory that is still “green,” as Shakespeare says of Claudius’s memory of his murdered brother (Hamlet, 1.2.2). It similarly remains fresh in Irish minds and hearts, whether their eyes are smiling or not.

  But green is the one thing in Ireland orange can never be, though each inevitably suggests the other. Green is the contrasting color in the Irish political spectrum. It might be thought a reference to the verdant landscape of the so-called Emerald Isle, but it is also the color of a fierce nationalism formed in opposition to the Unionist and Protestant orange. “For centuries the green flag of Ireland was a thing accursed and hated by the English garrison in Ireland, as it is still in their inmost hearts,” proudly said James Connolly in 1916, as he looked forward to the day that “the green flag of Ireland will be solemnly hoisted over Liberty Hall as a symbol of our faith in freedom, and as a token to all the world that the working class of Dublin stands for the cause of Ireland, and the cause of Ireland is the cause of a separate and distinct nationality.”14

  It stands also for the related cause of a separate and distinct religion—a Catholicism, which had become green because supposedly sometime in the fifth century Saint Patrick had used a three-leafed shamrock to teach the indigenous Irish about the Trinity. In Ireland the “wearing of the green” was never just an innocent way to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day but was always an assertion of national pride, as well as sometimes a provocation to sectarian violence. As the old ballad, written sometime after the failed Irish rebellion of 1798, has it: “They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.”