The whole piece is great - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...
Or if you have 5 mins to spare, the album version with Bill Laswell is even better - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9vMF01Pd8
both the blinding and defiant fist are intentional. there is only one way to die and he controls it
Nationalismus ist eine Kinderkrankheit. Er ist die Masern der Menschheit.
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."
... quote via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Whose flag is blinding whom?
Will Banksy's legacy be more or less the same?
And very likely had very little to do with the current state of the place. Pride at age 21? Meaningless vanity, like being proud of being born with a silver spoon. Pride at age 80? Sure, if it was a life well-lived.
Being cynical that all effort is wasted is played out at this point. Fight for something real. Name what you're against. It should be easy in the UK.
This is the better spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/6EmX2jPiaKRNtNtr8 51°30'19.0"N 0°08'16.0"W
I suspect that Banksy and his fans are sure that it's "the other" Britons that are blinded, it's not a self-reflection prompt for them. Maybe I am wrong.
Maybe a more powerful piece of art would have that self reflection effect across the board. As is it feels about as nuanced as "fuck trump" and similar. If you already agree you already agree, if not then you just think it's stupid. So ultimately feels like impotent art unless I am totally misunderstanding.
“Rage against the machine” by doing what the machine wants type thing.
If you're twelve years old, maybe.
> The luck of the draw.
This is a core tenet of the Rawlsian religion, of which you are a (probably unwitting) fanatic. If you like questioning things so much, you should question why this thing you take for an eternal fact had to be invented in 1971, and what exactly it is propping up.
Westminster City Council has told the BBC it did not grant permission, as it was not given advance warning that Banksy's team was planning this installation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4pvyw82exoCouncil permits are usually quite public (in my country). Sneaking it in becomes part of the artwork.
(Though it's not in /the/ City of London. That wouldn't happen in a million years! City of Westminster is way more culturally flexible)
This contradiction at the heart of it does a lot of work and is a very valuable part of the art. This contradiction has led me to think a lot about rules and their role in society and to what extent pure strict rules based societies are a worthwhile goal and on the other hand what it means of we make exceptions.
... that blinds you to any alternative; that indoctrinates distrust in different perspectives; that elevates the humanity of fellow believers above others.
1. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-a...
What if the design was made by generative model, does the statue become more or less valuable?
> Maybe a more powerful piece of art would have that self reflection effect across the board. As is it feels about as nuanced as "fuck trump" and similar. If you already agree you already agree, if not then you just think it's stupid.
So close. Based on your own statement, it appears that you disagree with the proposed thesis by this piece of art.
> So ultimately feels like impotent art unless I am totally misunderstanding.
Maybe you should re-examine why you think it is stupid/lame. Is it because it calls you out and you don't like that feeling?
I think you're wildly overestimating the general population's capacity for nuance.
Particularly in a world where nuance goes the same way as wood logs near a fire place.
But more to the point, while you may think the meaning is a bit obvious, the fact that the flag is unadorned (which/whose flag is it?), and the man is unknown, makes me think this statue could be the ultimate Rorschach test. I'm sure there are tons of people thinking "Ha ha, this is the perfect commentary on all those idiot <people on the other side who I disagree with> wrapping themselves up in their ideology of <patriotism/social justice/cause du jour> as they march <some particular country/society/the world at large off a cliff>".
In other words, I'm guessing you probably felt the meaning was "obvious" because you filled in the blanks in the above madlibs-style statement in a way that feels obvious to you, and I think folks on "the other side" would probably fill in the blanks with the exact opposite notions in a way that feels "obvious" to them.
Plus the execution is also part of the art.
There are many examples of the same thing: Andy Warhol and the soup cans and screen-printed portraits with different color backgrounds or Led Zeppelin and English folk hard rock songs that have hobbits in them are two of them.
Eventually, it's hard to even process their work in the context of how predictable and trite it seems to be a few decades later.
Not sure who you think "they" are but "This is England" is superb. It deals with a lot of issues, way beyond just nationalism and the like.
Perhaps you would like to fix your gimlet gaze on "A Clockwork Orange" and deliver a further withering critique.
A simple explanation regarding the increase of the number of nationalists within England is the population has increased. QED.
> There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents, as they were to theirs.
Are you claiming to have controlled where and to whom you were born?You did not choose your parents, country, ancestry, class, era, genes, language, or inherited institutions. You may be inseparable from those facts, but you did not earn them.
> There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents
> we were so fortunate to inherit from them.
These two statements appear to be contradictory. > It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors
And what was your contribution to those achievements to justify this pride?You have to be careful to not fall into the trap of borrowed glory: treating an ancestor’s achievement as your own personal merit, or using ancestry to rank yourself above others.
> toiled and strived to deliver the place that we were so fortunate to inherit
> our responsibility to defend and improve that place for the coming generations of our people.
Are you implying that the place belongs more fully to descendants of earlier inhabitants than to newer members of the community?So then Native Americans have a stronger claim than European descendants? Or is that a standard to only be applied moving forward?
That's also like the caste system in India: only children of brahmins can be brahmins, children of shudras can only be shudras. One is superior to another by inheritance, not merit.
That's ugly and abhorrent.
> It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors
Are you then also ashamed of their crimes?Ouch. How warped does one's thinking have to be to call "A theory of justice" (1971) for pluralistic, democratic societies, a "religion"?
It seems to me that right-wingers love hyperbole and rhetoric, without addressing the meat of the matter.
Your post is no different, being entirely free of reason. A good day to you, Sir.
The City is dead at night. If an artist wants to put art there, they'd just as somebody else said, dress up like they are workmen and be fine.
Criticizing someone of being popular is just a way to silence them. If they are popular then they are "cringe", and if they are unpopular, they can be safely ignored and that statue would have been removed by the police and forgotten without any news coverage.
Banksy may be popular, but he is not completely establishment, because well look at the statue. Its an obvious critique of the Iran war, and yet the Iran war still grinds on and UK bases continue to be used for Iran war operations. So apparently there is someone in the establishment that does not agree with Banksy. Someone boldly stepping into the void.
One of my favorite contemporary musicians is a Socialist Filipino rapper who lives in LA. I can enjoy the music while finding the ideology abhorrent because they are two separate things.
And of course there was a fucking gift shop at the end.
It is vague enough to appear deep to those trying to find something deep but not concrete enough to appear as anything that will stick in people's minds for more than a week. Unfortunately a lot of modern art is like this.
This is part of what's obvious. The whole thing, including this oooh aahh Rorschach part, is obvious. It's thoughts that we all had in high school, and it is hack.
Banksy is from Bris'l which is sort of north Somerset (Somerset keeps on morphing faster than a sci-fi shapeshifter).
Cornwall has had a white cross on a black flag since 18something. Devon decided to adopt a black edged white cross on a green flag. I remember seeing Devon flag car stickers in the '80s - its a little older than that. Somerset now has ... a flag. Yellow and red I think.
No idea why because people can't decide what it is! The land itself knows exactly what and where it is but the political boundaries ebb and flow with the phases of the moon. Is Avon included ... what is Avon? Ooh, BANES - Somerset? Not today thank you. It goes on. Anyway, do Devon and Somerset and co really need a flag? No of course not.
What we really need is a Wessex flag, which will take over Mercia ... and a few other regional efforts ... and end up as a red cross on a white background. Then we could munge that with a couple of other flags and confuse the entire world with something called the Union Flag.
Then we can really get complicated ... hi Hawaii!
There's a (mostly terrible) documentary about a previous bansky "statue" deposited in London that, in one of its better moments, tracks down the people who actually make statues for artists like banksy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banksy_Job
edit: I feel I should clarify that this is not an official Banksy documentary. He made "Exit Through the Gift Shop" which is an amazing film which I highly recommend to anyone.
"I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded." -George CarlinThe statue is in Westminster, right by Whitehall. The heart of British government. It depicts a figure in a suit, marching off a ledge, completely blinded by a flag.
Who wears a suit and marches through Westminster under a flag?
- Businessmen? No. Merchants have no country.
- Officials? They wear suits but don't march
- Old-guard politicians? Rarely march or flag-wave with any conviction.
So who are we left with? The populist. The Nigel Farage archetype. The suited firebrand who wrap themselves in nationalist fervor, stoke the rabble, and blindly march everyone right off a cliff.
Banksy isn't known for complex, multi-layered messaging. He is popular precisely because he uses visual shorthand to say plainly what the general public is already thinking. There is no hidden 4D chess; it's just blunt satire about blind patriotism.
Edit: This also explains why the government is happy to keep this particular Banksy on display.
As seen by the raised fist, the man is angry because the operation Epic Fiber has caused a blockage just in the strait of Trump, so is a metaphor about the dangers of having too much nuts in the world. Banski has planned also that the flag ends totally white by seagull activity; so this, always evolving and deceivingly simple piece of art, gives us hope for a future restoration of the blockage soon before we end nuking everybody on the process.
Denouncing the raise to nuttionalism while providing hope for the future. A powerful message.
See?, this is art, everybody can sell anything with a little practice. If they can sell a banana taped in a wall, so you can too.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicians_who_oppose_Donald_Tr...
Welsh for river.
I don’t understand this. What speaks pro-establishment in this piece?
If you asked 100 people to imagine a particular flag to attach to that statue, 95% of them are going to be current, unrecognized, or former states.
I think his name not being blasted everywhere has more to do with it being thoroughly uninteresting than any gentlemen's agreement.
Historically, the black flag is strongly associated with anarchism, anti-state politics, revolt, and rejection of national authority.
Had he colored it in the union jack, then I would've said it was nationalism, and the person is blinded by nationalism.
But. This is Banksy, black-and-white Banksy, so there may be no symbolism behind the black flag, but it's just very interesting. I can't accept that he would not have considered the color of the flag.
More generally, I am wondering if anyone has a good explanation of what makes an artist "click" with the world, become famous, and usually raise the price of his/her artwork. I can bet that today it costs a lot to own anything by Banksy, considering that most of his work is not even "detachable" from its original creation point.
![]()
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
May 1, 2026
![]()
The new statue was installed overnight in Waterloo Place. Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
A new statue possibly by the artist Banksy was erected this week in the middle of the night in central London. The artwork depicts a suited man, blinded by the wind-blown flag he is carrying and walking unknowingly off the ledge of a tall pedestal.
When the sun came up on the statue Wednesday morning, people were quick to note Banksy’s signature scrawled along the base of the statue’s plinth. On Thursday, the artist’s Instagram account posted a video seemingly confirming his involvement—the post includes footage of the statue’s apparent installation, interspersed with cuts to London icons including Big Ben, a statue of Winston Churchill, a black cab and a guardsman soldier.
“Personally, I think what’s rather clever about it is he’s got the proportions perfectly right for the space,” says Philip Mould, a London-based art dealer whose gallery is near the statue, in an Instagram video of his own. “I also rather like it when art, which is often forgotten, can be controversial, can be stimulating in this way.”
The statue, which Mould speculated is made of fiberglass, shares a similar height and finish to the many others in Waterloo Place. In its vicinity are statues of King Edward VII, who reigned between 1901 and 1910; Florence Nightingale, widely regarded as the founder of modern nursing; the Crimean War Memorial; and several other monuments to military figures, dukes and lords.
Authorities on Thursday placed safety barriers around the statue as growing crowds of onlookers gathered. As of May 1, the provocative new installation is still standing, and Reuters’ Paul Sandle reports that London authorities say they don’t plan to remove it.
“Banksy has a great ability to inspire people from a range of backgrounds to enjoy modern art,” a representative from the office of London Mayor Sadiq Khan tells the New York Times’ Michael Levenson in an email. “His work always draws great interest and debate, and the mayor is hopeful that his latest piece can be preserved for Londoners and visitors to enjoy.”
Did you know? Banksy’s latest
The surprise statue continues Banksy’s recent run of new public art installations. Days before Christmas in 2025, he unveiled two identical black-and-white murals of two children laying on their backs, gazing up, interpreted as a statement on child homelessness.
Still, given the often limited public lifespan of many of Banksy’s past works, some fans of the elusive artist aren’t taking any chances. For example, in September 2025, Banksy painted a mural on the Royal Courts of Justice depicting a judge bludgeoning a protester with a gavel. Authorities swiftly destroyed it.
“With Banksy, it’s a limited time event because it’s public art—you don't know how long it’s going to be up,” Ollie Isaac, a 23-year-old student observing the statue in Waterloo Place, tells BBC News’ Aurelia Foster.
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Banksy unveiled two murals depicting children laying on their backs in London in December 2025. Stefan Rousseau / PA Images / Getty Images
A Reuters investigation published in March aimed to reveal Banksy’s true identity, but the artist declined to confirm or deny details.
Statues are a relatively rare medium for Banksy, who is better known for his murals, including his Girl with Balloon series, which debuted in London in 2002. But in 2004, the artist installed in London The Drinker, a satire of Rodin’s famed The Thinker statue, depicting a man sitting in a similar pose as the original but also wearing a traffic cone on his head.
October 16, 2023
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If the man holding the flag had been wearing a thawb instead of a suit, or if the statue had been of a woman, I think the establishment's response would be quite different.
1. From https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y9wlnwl85o "We're excited to see Banksy's latest sculpture in Westminster, making a striking addition to the city's vibrant public art scene. While we have taken initial steps to protect the statue, at this time it will remain accessible for the public to view and enjoy."
2. From https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/world/europe/banksy-londo... "Banksy has a great ability to inspire people from a range of backgrounds to enjoy modern art. His work always draws great interest and debate, and the mayor is hopeful that his latest piece can be preserved for Londoners and visitors to enjoy."
But from an American perspective a guy wearing a suit while carrying an "anarchist" flag wouldn't be inappropriate, either.
You said, "Whether we think he's a hack", which fundamentally changes what is being discussed.
The only reason we're talking about this is because of Banksy. Not because it is a clever or "deep" piece. It's disappointingly surface level, and the fact that we're talking about that doesn't suggest otherwise.
Can you point me to where he expressed agreement with the global bureaucratic regime? Interested to educate myself.
Seriously, this is part of the fun of art. Neither of you are wrong for reading different messages into it.
Communists are blinded by the flag with the hammer and sickle.
Teachers and doctors are blinded by trans ideology and its flag.
Examples abound, but wanna transgressor blanksy knows who butters his bread.
Waving a flag is not a problem in itself. You can be proud of being part of whatever group you like and not hurt anyone. The problem is when the flag becomes the prism through which you see the world. Or, as the statue puts it, when you’re blinded by it.
Clearly it depends on your actual object-level position on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Or in general, what specific nationalisms you mean when you talk about being "blinded by nationalism".
And that's the main reason why I think this is a mediocre piece of art. Very few people actually are genuinely anti-nationalist for all possible human groups that have some sense of themselves as a nation. All anti-nationalist rhetoric is implicitly aimed at a specific nationalism that someone has a problem with - and also everyone knows this. So everyone wants to use the blank slate of bansky's featureless flag as a canvas upon which to paint a nationalism they don't like in order to discredit it. And I personally think that's boring. Maybe engendering that reaction was itself part of Bansky's artistic vision, but I still don't think that makes for good art.
The Brexit vote was a decade ago and though many mourn the outcome, it’s a bit late to be erecting artwork about it. References to being blinded by a flag now are probably about the particular far-right organizing of the last year or so that employs the English and UK flags in a very particular way. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Raise_the_Colours
Baloney. It's a guerilla sculpture put up in the center of London. My guess is we might be talking about it more if it were unsigned as a case of whodunnit.
But for me personally, I roll my eyes at all the ex-art students who always complain "it's a hack" for any piece of art that appeals to a wide audience and isn't some obnoxious 8-layers deep meaning. You literally see it all the time, and half the time it just strikes me as thinly-veiled jealousy, if not from the art student perspective than from the "I'm so much more sophisticated than the unwashed masses" perspective.
It happened on HN a few months ago in a post about Simon Berger, an artist who makes portraits with cracked glass. The artist has achieved relatively wide appeal, and many of the comments here were along the lines of "Meh, he's a talentless hack, he just stumbled along a 'cool' technique but the subjects are boring."
I'd have a lot more respect for folks that could just say "it's not my bag" and move on, rather than pretend they're so much more sophisticated than people who enjoy this art.
There's always a response that his work is "anti-establishment", despite it often giving support of the establishment's viewpoints (read: liberal).
The hypocrisy seems lost on his fans/proponents.
Just imagine thinking this piece is somehow anti-establishment / thorn in the side of power, yet it was erected in one of the most surveilled areas in London and he's somehow got away with it?
Give me a break.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_art_in_St_James...
It's not exactly subtle. A man goose stepping while blinded by a flag is a contrast to the other military figures portrayed in victorious poses.
That's argumentum ad speculum[0]. You can speculate what the response would be if the statue was different in a way you imagine, but the thing is, it's not.
[0]: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Hypothe...
My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
>you did not earn them
My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
Everything I have today has been hard-earned by my ancestors. Everything my children have will be hard-earned by my ancestors and I. We earned them.
>These two statements appear to be contradictory
Only if you believe such things to be due to purely random chance. I can feel 'fortunate' that my parents got me the bike I really wanted for Christmas, but there's no randomness in my parents working overtime and budgeting responsibly that made it possible.
>And what was your contribution to those achievements to justify this pride?
I am a part of the same collective, the long and continued story of my people. I am proud of those who came before me.
>You have to be careful to not fall into the trap of borrowed glory
You have to be careful not to fall into the trap of nihilistic individualism. You are part of something much bigger than yourself. Be suspicious of anyone trying to sever your connection to your people and your history.
>Are you implying that the place belongs more fully to descendants of earlier inhabitants than to newer members of the community?
That makes sense, yes. To your example, I would say that Native Americans have very little claim to the modern USA as practically everything was built by Europeans. They failed to defend their lands and were successfully conquered. In the same way, it would be absurd in my view for the majority non-White population of London (almost all of whom are very recent colonisers) to gaze around at the infrastructure and architecture and think "We made this."
>Are you then also ashamed of their crimes?
Sure, but not nearly as ashamed as our enemies would like us to be. Isn't it funny how we are supposed to recoil in shame and horror with the constant reminders of the worst parts of our people's history, yet we are condemned for also proudly owning our best?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Raise_the_Colours https://manchestermill.co.uk/the-men-who-raised-the-flags/
Even the new positioning of the art on a plinth in some open space is enigmatic. If it were a critique of the powers that be, why would officialdom collaborate in propping it up?
Sure, they might have had generated enough sacred reverence, those bloodbaths of past.
This campaign, which has been highly visible on social media and in physical neighborhoods, claims to promote patriotism. However, it has been deeply polarising, with critics and anti-racism groups arguing it is being used by far-right groups to mark territory and intimidate immigrant communities.
We anarchists with careers do in fact exist. There are probably dozens of us outside of tech, even!
Modern Slavery Stats:
1. Asia and the Pacific: ~29.3 million (6.8 per 1000 ppl)
2. Africa: ~7.0 million (5.2 per 1000)
3. Europe and Central Asia: ~6.4 million (6.9 per 1000)
4. Americas: ~5.1 million (5 per 1000)
5. Arab States: ~1.7 (10.1 per 1000 [highest] )
It's an offence against public decency however you slice it!
>> Are you claiming to have controlled where and to whom you were born?
> My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
But not you >> you did not earn them
> My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
But not you > Everything I have today has been hard-earned by my ancestors.
But not by you > Everything my children have will be hard-earned by my ancestors and I. *We* earned them.
LoLWhen did that change?
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/29/uk/st-george-flag-england...
It also discounts the value of groups, absent concerns about competition. No man is an island, and the society you grow up in, the people you grow up with, greatly affect who you become and what your life is like. To say it doesn't matter who you live around discards all that, or reveals the profound mistake (or lie) of thinking who makes up a society doesn't affect what the society is like.
If I had to ballpark it, I’d guess something like 1:5 people in tech are broadly aligned with me politically (meaning “less extreme, but directionally similar”) while maybe 1:100 would self-identify as an anarchist and 1:500 both self-identify and align fully with me.
Does that help?
The fact that the statue was allowed to stay up means that the authorities approved it. So, Banksy isn't really counterculture, he's government approved counterculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave
This is arguably the reason why the Overton window has shifted towards the rejection of human slavery over the last century or so, with the growth of fossil fuel use.
Human slavery will thus likely swing back into fashion again in the future as oil, coal and natural gas run out.
Oh, and you'll find it at plenty of football matches, notably Glasgow Rangers, who fly it while singing songs about wanting to be "up to our knees in Fenian blood".
There must be some other solution, surely! If only we could somehow find some other source of energy...
Authorization could be done with permits, or just tacitly by the notability of the artist. And while one can kind of do some handwaving and liken the latter dynamic to some mild corruption, that is still nowhere near the level of motivated corruption under fascism. And at this point comments invoking phrases like "established media" and "global bureaucratic regime" have a general thrust of pushing us away from liberal institutions and towards fascism, so I find those appeals quite disingenuous.