The Color Wheel of Politics
The Color Wheel of Politics

The colour wheel has been used for centuries – by artists, painters, children in kindergarten, in fact anyone who wants a quick reckoner of how to combine the three primary colours (blue, red, and yellow) to form the three secondary colours (green, orange, and violet), and then on to any other hue that the artist may want to produce.

(Of course, mixing paint and mixing light are very different. With light – such as the spotlights illuminating a stage, or your computer monitor – the primary colours are red, blue, and green – hence the well-known RGB [red-green-blue] screen. With light, red+green=yellow; with paint, red+green=brown.)

Oscar Wilde, in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, hypothesized that that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Well, maybe. But whether Art imitates Life or Life imitates Art, the colour wheels of politics and of art seem to imitate each other.

Originally, the Tory Party in Great Britain used the red-white-blue colours of the British national flag as its colours. But by the late 19th century, the Labour Party had adopted the red of socialism as its colour, so the Tories dropped the red. And since white looked like mere background, the colour of political conservatism became blue.

This subsequently spread to most of the world; hence today, blue is the colour of the Conservative Party in Britain, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement) in France, the Freiheitliche Partei ײsterreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, the Nationalist Party in Malta, the Obטanskב demokratickב strana (Civic Democratic Party) in the Czech Republic, the Likud Party in Israel, and many other right-wing or centre-right parties. (The USA, where the Republican colour is red and the Democrat colour blue, is an interesting exception.)

In general, then, blue is the colour of conservatism. That is to say, blue is typically associated with more traditionalist political ideologies, reactionary parties, movements which tend towards established patterns of behaviour and resist change.

Yellow, another primary colour, traditionally represents cowardice and treason.

So what do the primary colours blue and yellow yield? – Well, blue and yellow combine to produce green – the colour of Islam since its inception. The minarets of many mosques have green lights at their tops, Korans often have green bindings, the graves of Sufi saints are traditionally draped with green linen. Most Muslim countries have green-themed flags (Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, and Yemen are interesting exceptions).

The Koran (sura 76:21) describes that among the delights that the Believers will enjoy in Paradise will be “fine green silk garments with gold embroidery”. During the Crusades, green was so predominant among Islamic armies that the Christian Crusaders never used green in their flags or coats of arms, to avoid being mistaken for Muslims on the battle-grounds.

Green – the colour of Islam – a combination of blue and yellow: indeed a strange admixture of the blue of reactionary conservatism and the yellow of cowardice, with a healthy dose of treason for good measure.

In recent decades, the green of Islam has been mixed together in the international political palette with the red of socialism/communism. The green of Islam and the red of socialism/communism combine to produce brown.

Brown is the political colour of Nazism, and has been ever since the stormtroopers of the S.A. identified themselves by their brown uniforms in Germany shortly after the First World War. So universal is the identification of brown with Nazism that a common appellation for the S.A. was the braunen Bataillone, the “brown battalions”. Today, however, the “brown battalions” are the peculiar admixture of the green of Islam and the red of the political hard left.

Those “brown battalions” were the Moslem and left-wing protestors marching through Amsterdam in January 2009 chanting “Hamas! Hamas! Joden aan het gas!” (Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!), in which the Dutch socialist Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel and his fellow leftist Gretta Duisenberg mixed their red socialism with the green of Islam to produce that particular version of brown.

Those “brown battalions” were the Moslem and hard left rabble marching through Hamburg a month later, chanting “Raus! Raus! Raus! Aus Palestina” (Out! Out! Out of Palestine). The guttural German screams of “Raus! Raus!”, applied to Jews, seemed eerily familiar – from other brown battalions on those same streets.

Does Art imitate Life or Life imitate Art? Is there a psychological connection between color and behavior? Maybe it doesn’t make all that much difference.

The colour wheel of politics turns, and the politicians mix their colours, dip their paint-brushes in the palette, and paint their ideologies.