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Kekistan

Kekistan is a fictional country invented on 4chan, adopted as a joke ethnicity in January 2017, and carried as a flag at American political rallies from April 2017 onward — including into the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. It is the national-identity wing of the Cult of Kek: where the cult supplies the god, Kekistan supplies the flag, the anthem and the passport.

Everything about it is documented and dated, and nothing about it is ancient. Its flag is a point-for-point parody of the Nazi-era German war ensign. Its national anthem is a 1986 Italo-disco single. Its history is a self-declared fiction about conquering two invented countries named as insults. This page gives the paper trail, because the paper trail is the whole of the subject.

The flag of Kekistan. Green ground in place of the Reichskriegsflagge's red, the 4chan clover in the canton in place of the Iron Cross, and a KEK device in place of the swastika disc. Vector artwork by Kevin Marks, 2017, released into the public domain.
The flag of Kekistan. Green ground in place of the Reichskriegsflagge's red, the 4chan clover in the canton in place of the Iron Cross, and a KEK device in place of the swastika disc. Vector artwork by Kevin Marks, 2017, released into the public domain.

The paper trail

So the coinage window is narrow and visible: a filename in December 2015, a place-name in December 2016, an ethnicity on 30 January 2017, and a national infrastructure of Twitter feed, website, subreddit, manifesto, hashtag and anthem inside two days of that. Four weeks from a joke to a nation.

The fictional history

Kekistanis are said to have "invaded and overthrew" two invented countries, "Normistan" and "Cuckistan" — the first named for "normies", the second for a slur. They adopted the internet personality Gordon Hurd, in his "Big Man Tyrone" persona, as a jokey president. The SPLC describes Kekistan as "a satirical fictional kingdom said to have been overwhelmed by 'Normistan'" and a second, slur-derived "istan".

That is the entire national history, and it is declared as fiction by the people who wrote it. There is no claimed antiquity, no claimed territory and no claimed diaspora. Anyone asserting an ancient basis for Kekistan is contradicting the sources inside the movement, not only the ones outside it.

The flag

This is the part that matters, and it is also the part on which every source agrees without hedging.

The source flag is the Reichskriegsflagge — the Nazi-era German war ensign: a red ground, an Iron Cross in the canton, an off-centre swastika disc, 3:5 proportions.

The Kekistan flag substitutes, element for element:

The sources, in their own words:

That last clause is the design's stated function in the words of its sympathisers' own cataloguers: the resemblance is not an accident and it is not deniable, because the recognition is the point. A parody flag works only if the original is recognised. This page reproduces the flag because explaining the subject requires showing it, and captions it as what it is.

The anthem

"Shadilay" is a real record: a 1986 Italo-disco single by the Italian band P.E.P.E., released on the Magic Sound label, whose sleeve shows a green frog holding a magic wand.

The coincidence is genuine. A band called P.E.P.E., in 1986, on a label called Magic Sound, with a wand-wielding green frog on the sleeve, is a real object and nobody made it up. Adherents cite it as evidence of memetic synchronicity, and it is the single strongest-feeling item in the whole corpus.

It is also exactly the kind of coincidence that becomes available when a very large number of people search very hard for one. Both of those statements are true, and a page that gives only one of them is not being straight with the reader. The record exists; what it demonstrates is a separate question from whether it exists.

Where the flag has been carried

The Kekistan flag worn as a cape, Boston Common, 18 November 2017 — the KEK roundel, which stands in the position of the swastika disc on the flag it parodies. Photo: Marc Nozell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Kekistan flag worn as a cape, Boston Common, 18 November 2017 — the KEK roundel, which stands in the position of the swastika disc on the flag it parodies. Photo: Marc Nozell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Green Kek Warrior

The best-known photograph of a person in Kekistani costume was taken at the Portland rally of 4 August 2018. The man wore a bright-green bandana tied across the eyes, over the bridge of the nose; a long green gauntlet and green gloves; dark teal trousers with a loose green overskirt; a black mesh athletic vest; and carried, low at his side, a round green shield painted with the KEK logo. The internet named him the "Green Kek Warrior". The photographs circulated as mockery rather than as coverage, and one of the most-shared edits put him beside a cartoon character in a similar green mask under the caption "Worst. White supremacist rally. Ever."

Three points of accuracy, each of which is usually got wrong:

Searches for the other things people remember — green morphsuits, full-body frog costumes, green-costumed groups at the 2016–17 rallies — turned up no evidence of any of them. Pepe masks are documented, but at the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, a completely different political context. See Pepe the Frog.

One item in the archive that establishes nothing

On 16 November 2018 the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that a 15-year-old had been charged with the first-degree premeditated murder of his mother, and a BuzzFeed News reporter posted a screenshot showing a Kekistani flag as the cover image of the accused's Facebook page. It is recorded here because it is in the archive and because leaving it out would be a selective reading. It establishes nothing causal and should not be used as though it did.

What is not established

See also

Sources

Coverage

The dated paper trail from the December 2015 "kekistan.jpg" file on /int/, through the 14 December 2016 /pol/ island thread, the 30 January 2017 "Kekistani" coinage and the 48-hour build-out of Twitter feed, website, manifesto, subreddit, hashtag and anthem, to the February 2017 Encyclopedia Dramatica page and the September 2017 Destiny 2 removal. The self-declared fictional history of "Normistan" and "Cuckistan" and the jokey presidency. The flag as a point-for-point parody of the Nazi-era Reichskriegsflagge — green for red, the 4chan clover for the Iron Cross, the KEK device for the swastika disc — quoted from Wikipedia and the SPLC, including the SPLC's note that the recognisability is the design's appeal, with the flag reproduced from a public-domain vector and captioned as what it is. The anthem's real origin as a 1986 Italo-disco single by P.E.P.E. on Magic Sound with a frog-and-wand sleeve, its dated September 2016 discovery, and both halves of the honest reading of the coincidence. Where the flag has been carried, from Berkeley in April 2017 to the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. The Green Kek Warrior described in prose with the three usual errors corrected — one man not a group, never publicly identified, photographs unlicensed and therefore not reproduced — and the negative findings on morphsuits and costumed groups. One criminal item recorded as establishing nothing. A closing list of what is not established, including that there is no ADL designation of Kekistan.

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