In the academic year of 1994-1995, I ended up doing graduate work in Eastern Europe studying nationalism and ethnic minorities. Though I totally love the people, cultures and landscape of Eastern Europe, I was deeply homesick for the forests of Cascadia, specifically the Willamette Valley forests I grew up around. One day in spring as I sat on a hill with my companion, I explained to her what the landscape of my home looked like. I said those vast vineyards if at my house would be vast green forests; the distant mountains of the Matras would be the snowcapped Cascades with white clouds hovering above; and above that might be the blue sky. The three colors of blue, white and green came to mind and that the pine tree in front of us would be a Douglas fir. The image stuck in my mind and spent a lot of time obsessively drawing the flag which really annoyed my soon to be wife. That period of time was crucial in regards to what was happening in Cascadia at that point.
It doesn’t sound like that much of a stretch. If you got someone unfamiliar with these flags and had them pick some colors, I wouldn’t be surprised if they picked the same ones.
The flag on the other wiki cites this page for the flag
The “Republic” and its flag are based on the so-called “Northwest Imperative,” a longstanding call by some white supremacists, including Covington, for white people to move to the Pacific Northwest and establish their own country there. Covington promoted this idea on the Internet and in various novels.
Covington, ostracized by most of the white supremacist movement, had few followers, but did have a significant Internet presence that could catch the attention of would-be white supremacists.
Then from this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Covington
He launched a website in 1996; using the pseudonym Winston Smith (taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four), Covington became one of the first neo-Nazi presences on the Internet
So if anything, it sounds like this guy based his flag off of the other one because it was popular at the time, and continues to be more well known than his one.
So again:
- two flags can have the same color scheme and be ideologically opposed to each other
- It doesn’t make sense to crap on symbols because a separate group is using a similar symbol. Doing so only weakens the positive symbol and strengthens the bad one
While Lemmy doesn’t have a wiki yet, you can totally have a calendar elsewhere to then add to the sidebar and/or as a pinned post in the community. There are also some bots that you can use to automatically post content from an RSS feed.
We have previously considered running an instance of Mobilizon, which is another event sharing platform that federates, but we weren’t sure if there was interest for it. Mobilizon/Gancio do seem like decent platforms for what you are trying to do. If there is enough interest in having our non-profit (Fedecan) run an instance of one of them, we’re still open to doing it!
Since this community is still fairly small, you might not get that many people familiar with Gancio here. You could try asking in [email protected] or a similar community.