THERE HAS never been a more symbol-conscious age than this. The swastika armband, the Victoria Cross, the toppled statue of the tyrant in the market place, the orphan of the tsunami, the emblematic photograph that captures an idea more simply and dramatically than words: this is the visual vocabulary by which we understand the world. Our wars take place amid the ferocious clash of symbols; political campaigns are fought less for ideas than over specific, graphic images. Under television’ s defining eye, upheaval and change come freighted with symbolism, and dramatic events become instant symbols.

Medals matter. The presentation of the Victoria Cross to Private Johnson Beharry was not just in recognition of extreme bravery, but a statement of ringing symbolism. This was the first VC to be awarded to a living soldier since the Vietnam War, a tribute hammered out of the bronze cascabels of a Chinese-made cannon captured at Sebastopol in 1854, but also a moment of pure human heroism in the middle of an ugly, messy battle. People will remember the fact of this VC long after they have forgotten what Private Beharry actually did to win it. That is what symbols do. They simplify, represent (or misrepresent) and commemorate, but they seldom explain.

We have become so addicted to symbols that without them, we are in danger of forgetting. Veterans of the wartime Arctic convoys are pressing for a special campaign medal that they surely deserve; the medal does not change what they did, but it fixes it in memory. Yet if there was proof of the way symbolism can be hijacked and debased it is the array of military insignia and regimental badges worn by Michael Jackson at his trial for child molestation.

The Iraq conflict was, and continues to be, a battle of symbols. Indeed, the war of images has taken up more of our screens than the war of bombs and bullets. Saddam Hussein, of course, built his regime on the personal symbolism of the megalomaniac: murals, posters, statues, all representing the different propaganda Saddams, in Homburg, battle beret, tribal turban and so on. I have a school textbook, found in a Kuwaiti school after Saddam was driven out in 1992, with a picture of the dictator on the cover: within hours of invading Kuwait, hundreds of thousands of these books were distributed to every school in the country. No dictator of the 20th century, with the possible exception of Hitler, better understood the oppressive potential of symbolism.

So symbolism became the battlefield. When Saddam fell, his portraits were beaten with shoes representing extreme degradation in Arab tradition. Out came the palm fronds, emblems of victory celebration dating back to pre-Islamic Sumerian times, and the clay discs or turbas made from the soil of Najaf, sacred to the oppressed Shias. The American approach was blunter, made for TV symbolism: they took a tank and knocked over the biggest statue of Saddam in Baghdad, leaving two vast and trunkless legs . . . then came the stark symbolism of Abu Ghraib.

Statue-smashing has become almost a cliché of regime-change. Communism collapsed across the Soviet Union with a deafening crash of cement statuary. This year, the new rulers of the Congo came up with the inspired idea of erecting a statue to the repulsive and widely hated Belgian King Leopold II; sure enough it was pulled down within hours, leaving everyone feeling much better and thoroughly (if briefly) unified. Sometimes it takes a while for history to catch up with symbolism. This week the very last public statue of General Franco, a 25-foot bronze monstrosity in the centre of Madrid, was winched on to a truck and trundled into oblivion. The destruction of enemy symbols is among the most symbolic of political acts: the Taleban’s wreckage of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan, sacred symbols of peace for 2,000 years, was a calculated act of political vandalism, a proudly worn badge of fundamentalist bigotry.

The French revolutionaries started it with those dreadful bonnets, but now every revolution must have a symbol: Velvet (Czechoslovakia, 1989), Orange (Ukraine, 2004), Rose (Georgia, 2003), Carnation (Portugal, 1974), Cedar (Syria, now) and Tulip (Kyrgyzstan, forthcoming). Then there was the Hungarian Umbrella Revolution of 1848 when a crowd marched under umbrellas from Pest to Buda, leading to the fusion of Buda, Obuda and Pest as capital of the new constitutional state. If we ever get round to having a rebellion in the UK it will be the Lycra Revolution, or possibly the Empty Bottle of Alcopop Revolution.

Symbols work for good and ill. The plaques put up around Paris by Charles de Gaulle to commemorate Resistance heroes may not have told the whole story, but they helped to cauterise France’s moral haemorrhage. Nazi symbolism lent Fascism a brutally attractive and enduring aesthetic.

The danger comes when symbols acquire their own momentum. In the end, however powerful they may seem, symbols are merely convenient shorthand for ideas; they may signal certain things to certain people, but too often they are an excuse for not thinking at all, emotive badges and simple signifiers deployed for effect.

This was demonstrated by the ridiculous fuss over Prince Harry and the armband. It was assumed that some sort of thought must have gone into the selection of this symbol, when it was quite clear that no mental process worth the name had been involved at any stage. The political reaction was extreme, with calls for the swastika to be banned throughout the European Union. An outlawed symbol is lent greater, subversive power, as demonstrated by the fish symbol of early Christianity. Examine the loathsome ideas that created the swastika, mock it and despise it, campaign to restore it as an ancient Hindu and Buddhist symbol perhaps, and remember it for what it meant and continues to mean to a sad, hopeless few; but never ban it. In one respect, the swastika is quite a useful badge these days, since one can swiftly identify anyone who wears it as a moron.

A symbol is not an idea, but the simulacrum of an idea: a substitute, and a likeness, but not a reality. The reality that the symbol covers up, or commemorates, is important, not the thing itself. It is not the medal on Private Beharry’s chest that matters in the end, but the scars on his head that earned it.

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