The bitter truth is that we had guys with Nazis war trophies back home who were waving Confederate flags the year after their deployment ended. Hell, we had guys like Mark Fuhrman, who were decorated detectives in the LAPD back in the early 90s with a naked well-established fetish for European fascism. And that's before you get into the Ratlines that imported thousands of Nazis into Latin America under cover of the CIA and Opus Dei.

This isn't something that got lost in translation or distorted through history. It's a direct consequence of American fascism reproducing itself in America as an outcropping of American tendencies.

The Stars and Stripes is as much a symbol of fascist oppression in Vietnam and Indonesia and the DRC and the Oklahoma Reservation system as any German flag.