Last week, after the horrific murder of nine black people — Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons Sr, and DePayne Doctor — in Charleston, SC, photos surfaced of their suspected killer wearing flag patches of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The twenty-one-year-old even apparently named his website lastrhodesian.com. How on earth, one might ask, does a young kid in 2015 know or care about these receding historical moments?

The answer is that for white supremacists, these sites of antiracist struggle register as profound losses. Although the South African case is better known, the 1965–1979 flag of Rhodesia is a symbol of a similar defeat, resonating with those like the suspected Charleston killer who subscribe to a paranoid, self-pitying ideology of white victimhood — an ideology that has more traditionally been symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, the ultimate emblem of white loss.

The Rhodesian flag also ties the alleged killer to US conservatism, both in its mainstream and extremist varieties. Support for Rhodesia wasn’t confined to John Birchers and white nationalists — respected conservatives in the US, and not only Southerners, backed its white power structure. Central to this convergence between the far right and garden-variety conservatives was the international struggle against communism, which also often ended up abetting white supremacy.