Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, who will go down in history for turning the government logo upside down because it did not feature an armillary sphere, was shocked to find it upside down at an official ceremony in Luanda, Angola, on Tuesday. It was during the Portuguese prime minister’s tribute to Angola’s first president, whose memory Montenegro has visited with pomp, ceremony and a protocol error.
The moment when the Portuguese flag flies backwards at the Dr. António Agostinho Neto memorial – also known as “Fogetão” for its Soviet and North Korean-inspired architectural style – was soon used on far-right websites to fuel colonialist-inspired conspiracy theories. An upside-down flag, according to military codes, signifies that the territory has been captured by the enemy. This principle will fuel neocolonialist movements, but we cannot conclude, even metaphorically, that Angola intended to seize Portuguese territory.
Implementation of the Inverted Republic
Moreover, Cavaco Silva suffered the same misfortune on October 5, 2012, when he raised an upside-down flag on the balcony of the Lisbon City Council on the occasion of the official ceremony of the establishment of the republic. The embarrassment forced the then Lisbon municipal president, António Costa, to apologize for the “unpleasant incident,” for which he took responsibility.
Cavaco’s flag will be the most famous, but it will not be the only one. In March 2021, then-Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva held a press conference with the inverted flag in the background. That same year, in June, it was the turn of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security to fly the inverted flag on the Praça de Londres in Lisbon.
However, don’t think that it’s only the national flag that suffers from this problem. Angola has also seen its national symbol mocked on social media when in 2020, the Angolan delegation of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God displayed an upside-down flag during a visit to the Holy Land…
The House of Cards Case
But the controversy over upside-down flags gained wider publicity in the United States with the premiere of the TV series House of Cards in 2013, in which the Union symbol appears upside down and, what’s more, without the stars that North Americans claim to symbolize. In the context of the show, the display of an unconventional flag was intended to symbolize a nation in peril or in a state of emergency, circumstances that not all Americans understood.
Author: Alfredo Leite([email protected])
Source: CM Jornal
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