When I moved to East TN temporarily years ago, I opened the door to the rental to see a swastika on the doorstep. My first thought was 'oh come on, really', as if every stereotype was right. It was small and in red, maybe lipstick?
So I googled, and realized it was backwards. And that was the apparently the symbol of the article.
I called the owner just to let him know I didn't do it. Really old 'grumpy' white guy. He said 'oh, some sweet Indian family lived here before you, they asked if they could do that and I told them it's theirs to do what they want. You can leave it or clean it off.'
Learned a lot that day, and busted a few common stereotypes in the process. Ended up being an area with a lot of really good people.
FWIW, I ended up leaving it after reading about it. As mentioned, it wasn't big nor offensive looking. I wonder if the next family went through the same thing.
I'm in east Tennessee now, and have seen a few mandalas in front of businesses in the past month or so. It is pretty diverse here really - a lot of the Asian diaspora in particular. Thanks for sharing.
Not relevant just to Asian faiths, as it was a symbol widely used in many Indo-European cultures, particularly Slavic and Roman(and Germanic, but that perhaps hits too close to the problem). You still can see it as ornament carved into wooden beams under a roof and above doors on many old houses in rural areas of Serbia and Romania. Not sure though if it had any real superstitious meaning after the Christianity came, or it was just a traditional ornament that continued to be used purely as a decoration.
Like heaping earth to build which leaves only so many possible forms (like pyramids) there are only so geometric patterns before things start getting massively complex. Just like the Swastika, the hex-star (seal of solomon, star of david), the cross, & the pentagram (which are all very ubiquitous), these are things you would discover yourself looking for interesting geometric figures, likely quite early in your search for designs. It seems to come down to angles that were easily measurable, like (in degrees) 30, 45, 60, 90.
Only just reading this now and wondering if you've any reference regarding its usage in Ireland. The only non-Nazi usage that I'm aware of is the Swastika Laundry (I used to work nearby and unforunately, the swastika is now gone from its chimney stack). When I researched it, it turns out that the founder was inspired by an ornament he saw at the 1910 Great Industrial Exhibition in London: https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/behind-scenes-swasti...
With a layman's interest in history, religion, iconography (and a multitude of other areas that I don't have enough time for), I'd be interested in learning about other or older examples of swastika usage in Ireland. So far, I've found this wonderful blog post: https://rmchapple.blogspot.com/2017/10/always-remember-to-dr...
Imagine if we decided the letter Z needed to be removed from our language because of Russia’s atrocities.
But I think there’s plenty of room for understanding and nuance rather than just saying, “hey people who are offended by this symbol, read your history books and toughen up!” Millions were exterminated by those wearing the symbol.
There is no such thing as ownership of a symbol. It has different, equally valid meanings to different audiences.
- Anyone can re/claim any symbol
- No other symbols have been banned
You may not like or agree with it, but symbols do have owners and they do matter. Look at today's news around the USA football team and the Iranian flag today for an example.
What I was (poorly) trying to communicate is that no one side gets ownership to dictate how a symbol is interpreted by or affects others.
By that I mean that those who see it as a religious symbol and those who see it as a symbol of nazism need to be mindful of each other. Neither “group” has moral authority to tell the other that they’re wrong about the symbol’s meaning.
I think you're shooting at the wrong target. There's a profound and unfortunate association with the swastika in the western world. It doesn't really matter if there are 'good intentions', there are plenty of people still using it today as hate symbol
It doesn't really matter if there are 'bad intentions', there are plenty of people still using it today as religious symbol.
At the end of the day people are free to believe whatever they want from people using a symbol, but it will only betray their own ignorance in its history and still active use in the non-western world. The idea that a symbol still currently used by probably billions shouldn't be used because of connections only westerners make is peak eurocentrism/UScentrism.
>No people are not free. Those symbols can land you in jail.
Aside from Russia which is hardly "western" and Germany are there other countries where the use of the symbol itself is an offense? I completely agree that the presumption of malice is silly, self-centered and it can cause unwarranted escalation however when push comes to shove it shouldn't go further than a neighbor's spat.
Someone at my work actually suggested, with a straight face, that we do just that. I think specifically they suggested we stop referring to "gen-z" because there was a letter Z in it.
If the Nazis had used a common letter like Z, there would not be the same stigma attached to the symbol. That this is so obvious suggests your argument has a flaw.
This is a question without a general answer, because stigma changes on a person by person basis and there isn't a single thing that will end up immune to it, there is no better example of this taken to the extreme as some fringe groups holding the stigma of white supremacy over an "ok" symbol or a bowl cut[0].
The swastika is a bit more complicated because the western world's exposure to it isn't all that big, but I don't see how a symbol that is used by probably over 10% of the world population today and has been used for over 5000 years should be shunned, especially when you consider that it's not even the same symbol most of the time!
At the end of the day most of this stigma wouldn't be an issue if people would just stop assuming malice from others by default.
I remember when people would sell various bits of plumbing such as valves and pipe fittings with swastikas on them, claiming them to be WW2 German artifacts, when in fact they were prewar products of the American Crane company:
> “A rose by any other name is a rose,” he said. “In the end it’s how a symbol affects you visually and emotionally. For many, it creates a visceral impact and that’s a fact.”
I'm sympathetic to both sides of this argument, but I think the "rose by any other name" allusion is inapt. The rose by any other name would smell as sweet, because the physical existence of the rose is independent of our social or cultural understanding of the rose. The swastika is a symbol and its offensiveness is due to our cultural understanding of its meaning as a symbol. The swastika is neither inherently a symbol of hatred and murder nor one of peace; it has no objective meaning or reality in itself.
The symbol is going to be associated with nazis so long as nazis keep using it, and people in the west (especially for places and people affected by the nazis) will find it offensive.
Yeah. Any talk of “reclamation” isn’t going to work very well as long as actual nazis are around and using the symbol. People are welcome to try, of course, but to act like victims when they’re politely asked to hide the symbols is hypocritical.
Such symbols have been used way before the Nazis and are still present in Asian societies today. What’s hypocritical is being woke about issues like this then denying the culture and heritage of others. These people shouldn’t have to modify their cultures to accommodate the inability of westerners to distinguish the semantics of this symbol. To describe these people as “acting the victim” is seriously bordering on racism. The world does not revolve around the west.
So foreigners don’t need to respect the local cultures at all? They can fly the most offensive symbols and say “well in my home country it’s fine” and then play victim when everyone around them is like “hey, take it down a notch”?
Give me a break. Pure hypocrisy. It’s not racism to have basic decency.
I do not disagree that when in rome, act as romans do. However, your original comment did not specify a context like the one you're stating now. If so, my point still holds, generally speaking. And again, they are not hypocrites or playing the victim; people have cultures of their own and are able to semantically distinguish what these symbols ought to mean in different context. I live in an Asian country that has been involved in the second world war, stories about the atrocities of the nazis and the imperial japanese army still survive through our grandparents and educational curriculums. We also have schools that bear the symbol of the swastika. Yet all of us are able to discern the difference in semantics when it comes to that symbol. The case here being that we can respect the culture of others by not intentionally conflating two completely different things together, the only reason for which is because you think your culture is the only one that matters, which is what I meant by "bordering on racism". Your reply, as with your original comment, willingly conflates two completely different meanings of the swastika symbol. In fact, the symbols are not even identical (one is a rotation of the other). With that, the only hypocrisy I'm observing here is your view that your culture is the only one that matters. Once again, the world does not revolve around the west.
The assumed context was the article, which specifically states it’s about Asians living in the West. I wasn’t assuming the West is the only culture that matters, just that the West was the specific culture under discussion. When it comes to what’s okay to fly in America, I think it’s fine to say “no swastikas or reversed swastikas”.
It's not being "woke" at all. Usually "woke" people are accused of accommodating other cultures to the detriment of "Western" culture. But here you're using it to criticize Westerners for not accommodating another culture.
Most westerners find the symbol offensive, so the symbol should not be publicly displayed in western countries.
Yes, the world does not revolve around the west. But when you live somewhere, you should respect the local culture, be it in "the west" or anywhere else.
An irony is that this symbol coexists in Hindu temples with that other symbol known in the West as the "Star of David" -- which is not, actually, a specifically Jewish symbol.
2.
That this also appears in American indigenous cultures is extremely interesting, because it points either to very old origins (before people crossed the Bering Strait), or to co-evolution (almost like the "discovery" of mathematical abstractions).
Related, there is some evidence that some American indigenous myths, related to the constellations, share a common structure with myths from ancient Greece and elsewhere. Again, this may point to very old origins before the human diaspora across the continents.
I wonder how much culture is shared, dating back to the neolithic.
3.
This then is a second irony: That symbols from closer to the root of the linguistic and phylogenetic tree -- symbols that are more in common to us -- are used to divide.
I have a late 1920s or early 1930s "Better Homes and Gardens" type magazine, that has a single panel humor cartoon in it of the "you always want us to keep up with the Joneses" variety.
The Native American teepee in the cartoon is depicted with a swastika on it; apparently it was a symbol of good luck with some tribes?
Yeah, that is when the movement was already rather large and growing. Also, the previous Beer hall putch was know about internationally - it was big news.
Those dates don't predate nazism nor the symbol usage by Hitler.
You can read the link above, from the city of Albuquerque; the building built in 1927 had swastikas incorporated in its decoration at that time.
quote:
"Information about the swastikas at the KiMo Theater.
Swastika and skulls detail at KiMo Theater
The KiMo was designed and built in 1927 using the style and designs that were very common to several Native American cultures in the American southwest at that time.
Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the design elements of the KiMo Theatre are preserved for their original cultural significance.
Although today the swastika can evoke negative emotions, the KiMo invites visitors to remember that the original meaning of this ancient sacred symbol is one of life and prosperity.
"
There is also a Red Swastika Society in China [1]. In Singapore, there is a Red Swastika School [2]. AFAIK, the Jewish society in Singapore has never objected to its presence.
Renaming Nazi uses of the symbol to 'hakenkreuz' seems like a good idea to me. But we should expect changes in connotation to happen slowly, and in a way that's not entirely controllable.
At the very least, I hope we can avoid getting the state involved in censoring or punishing genuine religious displays, as happened in one case described in the article.
When I was teaching in China I went with a student to a paint-your-own pottery shop. She painted a little cat and finished it off by drawing two 卍 on the ears. I wonder if this is part of the Chinese inheritance from India? Chinese families also commonly paint bindi dots on the foreheads of toddlers.
I'm not going to say you can't use a swastika in India, but the people the article opens with are extremely naive, and should recognize that, or they're just trolling. You can't live in the US (Queens is in NY, right?) and think you can simply display a swastika, mirrored or not.
> You can't live in the US and think you can simply display a swastika, mirrored or not.
The US has the First Amendment. This would clearly be protected First Amendment speech.
Obviously a condo board or co-op board can have its own rules about displays in common areas inside the building similar to a HOA. But even these are subject to the Fair Housing Act, and cannot discriminate based on religion.
May be, but the people are allowed to think something else, and say that too. So, bad luck if they get grouped with neo-nazis, and that's it? When in Rome...
> Why not? You don't get to impose your beliefs on your neighbour.
It’s nothing to do with belief, more with common sense and respect. Tourists are advised to cover their heads when visiting Middle East countries; or not wear shorts when visiting Buddhism temples. It’s the same here for visitors to Western countries, where Nazis have left a deep deep scar in the society.
I mean, I most certainly would never use a crooked cross for the reason you point out, but it's a bit much to demand that an ancient culture change their behaviour because of your lack of discernment with regard to usage and intent.
It's also worth pointing out that the Nazi's barely did anything in the US. They inflicted their horrors on millions of people in Europe. The horror of genocide against native Americans in the US wasn't perpetuated by Nazis.
If you want to fight back against such evils in the present day, rather than making a fuss about symbols, the world would be be better served if you helped fight back against those who inherited the hate of the nazis and now perpetuate it on Palestinians in Palestine. In fact many who carry that torch come from USA to squat on and steal Palestinian lands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbPnF8Hvj0I
> This silliness of taking things out of context and then attacking them has got to stop.
A comment in a thread about a swastika should not be used as an opportunity to connect Judaism to Israeli policy. The discussion of the suffering of the Jews of Europe and their sensitivity to this symbol is orthogonal to that YouTube video you linked.
This is an example of a commonly used anti-semetic tactic to try and link these two together in order to justify lack of sympathy for Jews.
> millions of people in Europe
Many of whom immigrated to the United States after WW2.
> A comment in a thread about a swastika should not be used as an opportunity to connect Judaism to Israeli policy.
Fair point. I withdraw that and apologise for going off on a tangent. But I still don't accept that Nazis or Jews should have a say in the use of the symbol when used in the old ways as it was used before Hitler corrupted it.
And fwiw I agree that no one should try and suppress using the symbol in the old ways.
Context is important (putting it on a billboard in queens would obviously have a much higher chance of being misinterpreted) but cooler heads will prevail.
But in this context [not accusing you, just giving context for why I’m commenting at all] it’s just alarming when encountering a world view where people auto jump to jews are centrally organizing to try to control ~thing~. I understand it's very hard to quell this habit once it starts.
It's not that unusual to see swastikas in their appropriate context among the various Indian communities living in Canada; I've seen them on homes, temples and on Diwali holiday cards.
> "It's nothing with Hitler. We don't follow Hitler. We don't follow even extremist people right now, okay? We are a religion against that," he said. "Believe me I don't know that's his symbol. That's a Hitler's symbol? I don't know."
Naive is a little harsh, but maybe it's the right word. It's usually not trolling. When I was a kid, a family in our neighbourhood, recent Chinese immigrants, initially chose the English name Adolph for their son. They'd certainly heard of Hitler; but they were unaware of the intensity of the name taboo.
America is not that open minded. Even though the commercials say so. As long as we give folks privilege because of the color of their epidermis white/black/yellow/glow in the dark pink. If they can't get past realizing that it's performance that matters vs your shell. They will never get past symbol stories. Just the reality on the ground. No matter how much money you throw at it.
It's not "a white person." It's not about "PoC". It's the horror of the Nazis vs. some ancient symbol co-opted by religions (and AFAIK, one of many symbols in these religions, and never the main one), being on display in the US, not in Eastern Asia.
Nowhere in the mein kampf by Hitler does he call it a swastika, in the original German publication He called it haken Cruz which literally means hooked cross, it being a hooked Christian cross. t was a Christian bishop who translated it to English and translated hakencruz to swastika. Effectively taking the blame off Christianity and pushing it onto eastern religions
In German, there are no two terms for those, both are called "Hakenkreuz". And the Nazi ideology actually made references to eastern culture and peoples, claiming that Germans were descendents of the Aryan peoples: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1
And while Nazi antisemitism was of course descended from the traditional christian antisemitism, there were also parts of the Nazi movement that called for a replacement of christianity by an "Aryan" or "German" religion, which seems to have been a mixture of Germanic/Norse religion and more modern esotericisms.
So yes, while eastern religions are blameless for what the Nazis made of their symbol, it also isn't of christian descent either.
Hitler wasn't a Christian, and it isn't a hooked version of the Christian cross. And it doesn't matter what he called it. This is about the symbol itself, as it's on display. It is seen as a Nazi symbol in the US. That's where these people live.
> taking the blame off Christianity and pushing it onto eastern religions
Nonsense. Nobody in their right mind blames Eastern religions for what the Nazis did.
Then why did the Bishop translate Hakencruz to Swastika? The words are completely unrelated, the symbology is more similar to the "hooked" version and nothing to do with Swastik which has dots on it. It was a clear attempt by the Church to wash their hands.
I'm neither Jewish nor Asian, but I do always have a large tin of this delicious Chinese vegetarian barbecue sauce in the fridge with a prominent 卍 on it.[1] It's a fantastic marinade, among other things.
Anyways, it resembles a Nazi swastika enough for the uninitiated to look twice when opening the fridge. It causes me some cringe when I think about it but my Chinese friends and family assure me it's common, has nothing to do with hateful values, and long predates the Nazi use, and ... shrug?
Indeed, it predates the Nazis by centuries if not millenia and has nothing to do with the Nazis. So why should Chinese (and East Asians in general) change their ways because a crazy foreigner in a small country on the other side of the world used a similar symbol?
As usual, cultural diversity is abhorrent to the symbol-minded. A shape which has been drawn by humans around the world since prehistory is effectively banned because a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.
I don't see anyone trying to ban crosses or raise a fuss about them, and Christians have historically used it as a symbol while perpetrating many horrifying acts. Nobody is trying to ban the flags of any of the other countries which engaged in slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression, and those are at least reasonably unique. Why should this ancient religious symbol be forever tainted?
> A shape which has been drawn by humans around the world since prehistory is effectively banned because a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.
Yep.
Trying to minimize WWII and the holocaust is not a good point to start an argument from.
It would also help if there weren't a resurgence of them to deal with today.
How exactly was I minimizing anything? I even mentioned "slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression", so what did I miss? These bullshit insinuations of antisemitism are garbage, show me what I said that was wrong, show me where I trivialized anything, don't just accuse me of thoughtcrime based on your own kneejerk assumptions.
I didn't accuse you of antisemitism, interesting that you're defending yourself. I just pointed out that Nazi ideology and symbology are a current political concern in the United States today.
"Insinuation" != accusation. It means stuff like "interesting that you're defending yourself."
You did accuse me of minimizing the Holocaust, and still have not responded about what exactly you found to be objectionable. That in itself is basically an accusation of antisemitism.
> small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.
Try again. A genocidal regime that conquered western europe by force, almost succeeded in overthrowing world democracy and caused the deaths of tens of millions.
40-50 million in the war itself to be precise, but that doesn't account for all the millions of people who died in years directly after the war as a consequence of hunger, diseases, revenges, crime, political fights and persecution caused by the new division of powers... especially in Eastern Europe and Germany itself.
Isn't that a lot of European civilization going west and east? We don't taint all of Europe although they were responsible for some pretty bad things. I mean the Belgians did horrible things in the Congo. Churchill starved West Bengal causing a famine that killed 4m people. From a non-European point of view Hitler was bad but so were other European colonizers as well.
The Nazi party only had ~10% of the German population as it's membership at it's peak and gained power through nondemocratic means. They did a lot of nasty things, including slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression, as I mentioned earlier. Which part do you disagree with?
Approximately 14 million German soldiers served in WW2. And many non-party members co-opted or looked the other way. They may not have been formally registered as members of the NSDAP, but they're generally counted with the bad guys.
Hitler managed to get a 66% supermajority to change the constitution. The enabling act had 444/647 vote. It's actually much, much worse than people realize. They got 68% voting in favor of becoming dictatorship. Wikipedia enabling act.
The overcame supermajority obstacles. Pretending they didn't represent the majority is detached from history. Nazism resonated deeply in Germany. He truly got most Germans willing to follow him enthusiastically.
> So I would say Hitler and Germany is a lesson in how not to set up a democracy. It basically enabled his rise to power.
And indeed, constitutions and electoral systems took these lessons into account afterwards. Nowadays it is hard to win an election with 1/3 of the vote:
The Netherlands, Belgium, France (effectively), Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Italy (towards the end), Poland, Czechoslovakia. Which part of Western Europe is missing? The British isles?
> nor did it almost succeed in “overthrowing world democracy”
I'm amazed at your easy dismissal of this. Or is your trite point that hardly was any democracy to begin with?
Do you have anything at all to justify your last paragraph? I’d love you to point to a WW2 historian who corroborates your claim. In school in the UK we were taught the opposite
Occupied is not the same as conquered, and they had a weak grasp of those places, with life going on as normal in much of France. Even if they had conquered those places, how is does this mean the world was on the brink of a collapse of democracy?
Of course that happened in some places but in much of France the occupation was extremely light handed to the point where peoples lives were barely affected. It wasn’t total domination. You are making stuff up. There is more to France than the north
Your examples are extremely powerful religions and countries, rhat's why any movement to curtail their symbols is a non-starter. If the Nazis had won, it would be the same with their symbols.
% of total population in 1930s Germany that were ardent Nazis vs. the rest of the world’s population shows that it was a small group of people.
Three hundred years from now, no one will care about said symbols anyhow.
When’s the last time we see people be superstitious or negative towards a worse person like Ghengis Khan? He’s part of popular culture; projecting into the future, as depressing as it sounds, so will Hitler be.
1939 Germany had about 80 million inhabitants. By far not all Germans were Nazis, but then not all Nazis were Germans, so let's just use that as a first approximation. At the same time, India had about 320 million inhabitants, or four times as many.
Maybe calling Nazis a small group is a bit far, but they were definitely a minority of swastika users even at the time.
> a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.
It sounds like you might not understand the vast scale of the Holocaust, and that it affected every Jewish person in Europe. It sounds like you might not realize what also happened to the Polish Christians (and other Slavic peoples) under the Germans - which was another attempted genocide by itself.
We spent 1000 years in Poland, and our entire culture was totally destroyed in just a few years. 90% of the Jewish people in Europe were murdered. In many places, no Jews remain at all.
I think the point was that the number of nazis is small compared to all of the people in the world from the beginning of time until who have used the symbol.
That doesn't take away from the horrors that the nazi's did.
Hundreds of millions of people still use it regularly in India, it's everywhere. It's pretty innocuous. Unless you stop them from doing so somehow, history is not rewritten. Attempts to colonize ancient symbols will not succeed.
Living and working in Asia for many years I have enjoyed seeing this symbol on many temples ... its a beautiful energy boost obviously absolutely nothing to do with hitler influence ... long live this symbol
To say that Hitler was appealing to some shared aryan culture by using the hakenkreuz symbol turns out to be just absolute bullshit. Hitler was a Christian fundamentalist. And his hatred for the Jews originated from his belief in Christianity. It was certainly not because Aryans hated the Jews. Or some such ludicrous thing.
>Nakagaki’s research also shows the symbol was called the hakenkreuz in U.S. newspapers until the early 1930s, when the word swastika replaced it.
I think further research will show you that Hitler himself never used the word Swastika and always referred to his own symbol as the hooked cross.
I’m guessing that maybe the leading Christian voices of the time were so guilt stricken by what Hitler had done in the name of their religion that they were happy to blame his pathology on him dabbling with obscure alien philosophies rather than admitting that he was just being a “true Christian”.
It has taken a long time for Christian religious institutions to absolve the Jewish people of the crime of “killing Jesus Christ”. Or have they? I don’t know.
For Hitler himself, the motivation to use the hooked cross was probably to symbolise a return to the roots of Christianity and for that he chose the oldest version of the cross he (or his designer) could find.
Somewhat related; another symbol Nazis used is the Fasces[0] has managed to continue widespread use to this day. Despite its obvious etymological roots in common with Fascism.
You'll even find it in the currently used Seal of the United States Senate[1]!
It's also often seen displayed prominently on stone buildings across the US. I was recently walking around downtown St. Charles, IL and there were Fasces overhanging the entrances of an old stone apartment building.
Fasces are not a Nazi symbol. They were very common in Fascist Italy—due to its association with Ancient Rome Mussolini was a big fan of—and the Fascists were culturally and ideologically allied with Nazi Germany. But AFAIK it was not a Nazi symbol.
But they're not a Fascist icon either, despite what your comment suggests. The fact that it appears on the Senate building probably refers to the Roman meaning. The point of TFA is pointing out that these symbols are NOT owned by the Fascists or Nazis but should instead be returned to their cultural origins.
> The fact that it appears on the Senate building probably refers to the Roman meaning.
The roman meaning is very much fascist, if phrased in modern terms. Fasces were carried by lictors accompanying a roman official, symbolizing the "imperium", or absolute, king-like power, held by that official over his domain. While for a time, the imperium of lower officials was somewhat curtailed during the republic, military commanders with imperium still held the absolute and immediate power over life and death of their subordinates (other officials still had power over life and death, there just was an opportunity for citizens for appeals and vetoes by equal-ranked officials) . Lictors with their fasces were not only bodyguards but also a small police force at the discretion of the commander, who would seize an offender, hold him for a drumhead trial by the commander and then punish (e.g. execute) him if so decided. Under the later roman dictatorships the dictator (imperator, emperor or caesar) of course also held those powers, with the same symbolism of imperium represented by the fasces. Fasces always have been a symbol of capital punishment, justice by drumhead or thumbs down, and absolute power.
No, the Roman fasces are not fascist. Imperial Roman power is not fascism, even if fascism tries to fashion itself to Imperial Rome. If A claims inspiration from B, it does not mean that they're the same thing nor interchangeable.
The difference between the two is 2000 years and one being an entire civilization that spanned hundreds of years, and the other a relatively short lived political ideology, based on reactionary nationalism, autarchy and later anti-semitism (racial purity was more a Hitler kinda thing).
Roman imperial power isn't fascism in that some important aspects do differ. E.g. fascism uses a special kind of modern aesthetics that Romans wouldn't recognize, even if fascist monuments copied Roman building style. Fascism also practiced a cult of youth and rejection of conservativism that is quite the opposite of what the Romans practiced (as far as the 2000 years of separation allow us to compare this). In that sense, you successfully built a straw-man argument ("Imperial Roman power is not fascism") and disproved it.
But, more importantly, "imperium" doesn't mean what you think it means. There are two meanings to "imperium", one being the overall realm that Rome controlled, the Roman empire. This is the meaning you did use in your above straw-man. Usually, this meaning of imperium is represented by symbology such as the eagle and the S.P.Q.R. signature. Italian fascists also used those symbols, but the international fascist movement mostly didn't, because just the Italians wanted to rebuild their Roman empire. However, the fasces represent the second meaning of "imperium", which is the absolute power of one single individual official to rule and impose order in his assigned domain or subdomain. They represent the ordering principle of fascism and nazism that a strict hierarchy of individual leaders ("duce" in Italian, "Fuehrer" in direct German translation) should rule the state ("Fuehrerprinzip" in German). Fasces also represented the primacy of punishment and violence in imposing order, of swiftness and immediacy in carrying out justice, very much what modern day fascism wanted to return to. So Roman fasces are representing what modern day fascists intended for the principles of leadership, justice, punishment, and order to look like. But beyond those aspects, there can be no inference made, because modern-day Fascism encompasses more aspects than just those.
That there is a 2000 year difference between the cultures in which to interpret the aforementioned symbolisms is a problem indeed. However, it is a problem that was created by people like the americans thoughtlessly using symbols because "well, Rome was a republic, we want to build a republic, let's just steal all of their iconography". Even back in that day, the actual meaning of fasces was known and clear. It was known and clear to the Romans as well. Hell, look at the list of uses for fasces in the wikipedia article: mostly police forces and departments of corrections, monarchies and off-with-the-heads mobs (such as the early french post-revolution order).
"Holocaust survivors in particular could be re-traumatized when they see the symbol, said Shelley Rood Wernick, managing director of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Center on Holocaust Survivor Care."
It's not just the immediate survivors who were affected by the Holocaust.
A significant portion of the Hasidic Jews in the US are descendants of Holocaust survivors. For example: members of the Satmar dynasty. A significant number of non-Hasidic Jews in the US are descendants of holocaust survivors who immigrated after World War 2. This includes, children of survivors, grandchildren of survivors, and great-grandchildren of survivors. I assure you, the Holocaust remains a very difficult subject for many Jewish families, including mine, and it also affects a lot of Jewish families who weren't directly affected.
"Never Shall I Forget" by Elie Wiesel
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
A significant number of Americans and Europe whose ancestors weren't directly persecuted by nazis, but who fought in WW2 against the nazis and fascists, and they also find the swastika offensive.
Also note that the nazis also murdered Romani, Sinti, Poles, Slavs in concentration camps and ghettos. They also murdered and starved the general civillian populations of areas they took over.
Of course they exist by this definition, but by default when someone describes an "X survivor" they obviously mean a person who actually went through that thing. Nobody says, "I was a cancer survivor" to mean "my grandma survived cancer".
In the era of socially sensitive language, I would like to see the Nazi swastika referred to with the German term, to rehabilitate the term swastika.
If you are against socially engineering language to make it more culturally sensitive via things like gender pronouns, removing certain slurs etc. Then ok at least that is a consistent ethical position, and understandable.
But if you support the use of more inclusive language, then this would be my request.
So when 'the west' ignore things from other nations we're sidelining them and destroying their heritage. But if we take an interest in their culture and take it on board, it's cultural appropriation? What are we supposed to do. Say how great X is without ever doing X?
What parts of my own culture am I even allowed to partake in because most of it comes from elsewhere.
Can't you just be happy that cultures can take things from other cultures and make it their own and gain a bit of understanding about the former in the process, rather than make it into a culture war.
Wartime Enid Blyton books called it the “Crooked Cross” (which was vaguely mystifying to 8 yo me, 30 years after the end of the war and in the pacific).
I have a set of Rudyard Kipling books with swastikas on them. Printed 1927 they obviously predate Naziism and reflect Kipling's association with the symbol.
Nazism existed in 1927. It started right after WWI. Beer Hall Putsch was in 1923. 1927 is when Hitler got the right to speak in public back. The movement was considerably large at that time and publicly very much known about.
Hitler gained complete control over Germany in 1933.
In fairness, most readers in the 1920s of Kipling's books would have been much more familiar with the swastika as a widely-used symobol in India than the logo of a small extreme right-wing party in Germany.
> Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture. Kipling's use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning "fortunate" or "well-being". He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time
One of the biggest shames in the West is the taboo around Nazi symbology when it was plainly coopted into that political movement. These symbols will be reclaimed. We just have to wait.
The Nazi rampage will be a footnote in history like most tragic events before.
WW2 was the deadliest conflict in human history, and involved both the Holocaust and the first - and so far only - military use of nuclear weapons. To say nothing of the fact that it completely reshaped the international order and led directly to the Cold War.
Even if you zoom out and view it, like Eric Hobsbawm, as belonging to a century of warring ideologies much like the wars of religion, it will remain one of the foremost events in world history for a long time. It would take many thousands of years for it to become a 'footnote', assuming the species even lasts that long.
In the Jewish Roman wars, the Jews murdered 250k men, women and children on the island of Cypress, skinning them and boiling their flesh, and they also completely depopulated Lybia and did similar things in Alexandria. The result? The Romans renamed Judea to Palestine, cypress passed a law that activated instant death penalty on any Jews who landed on the island. Maybe that was the origin of modern day antisemitism? Maybe we don’t move on from stuff like this, instead it becomes racism. Maybe we can be different this time and not say that all these ancient religions (including ancient Germanic paganism) are evil.
Centuries, plausible enough. Thousands? What are the most salient historical events to you over a thousand years old? Would you really bet on last century's Big Thing being so uniquely great that nothing will compare for another thousand years?
I don’t think any jews advocate for suppressing nazi symbols on asian soil, but maybe i misread the article. So, i don’t see what imperialism you’re talking about. Fight against nazi is a traumatic experience for every european, american and westerner in general, because every person in that part of the world has some kind of family history related to this fight.
Of course it's "asian soil", it's land where asians live and wish to continue their cultural traditions. But a very small faction of people is demanding that those cultural traditions be discarded in order to promote their comfort as fifth generation holocaust survivors (read who is quoted in the actual article - everyone complaining is speaking on behalf of a Jewish organization). It's no different than dynamiting Indian temples because erotic engravings offend their sense of propriety.
The Great Seal of the US has fasces on it, the House Rostrum, and many other older decorations relating to Congress do too. That's a symbol the fascists used, and they aligned very closely to the Nazis. It hasn't been abandoned since it was a traditional part of those things well before the fascists, as it was Roman iconography. So too, the swastika has been a part of various cultures that long preceded its use by the Nazis. While we should be sensitive about its use, it's clear many are generally happier to police other cultures than their own.
There's also a story of Genghis Khan trying to impress the strength of unity on his sons by showing them how a single arrow can be snapped, but that a bundle of them is strong.
I don't think it worked, but that's a sort of fasces as a literary symbol.
So your position is "asians have to change their behaviour to atone for what an unrelated group of white people did"? Seems like the real racist here is you.
I, too, hate the peaceful symbols of other cultures.
Seriously, should we stop using Z everywhere because of Russia's invasion? This isn't a super obscure symbol, it's been in use for much longer than the Nazis were around, with far more people than the Nazis.
The Confederate flag may not have anything to do with racism. Should we fly it everywhere then? Are black people hateful for feeling uncomfortable going places that proudly wave it?
Nowhere in the mein kampf by Hitler does he call it a swastika, in the original German publication He called it haken Cruz which literally means hooked cross, it being a hooked Christian cross. t was a Christian bishop who translated it to English and translated hakencruz to swastika. Effectively taking the blame off Christianity and pushing it onto eastern religions
America never ceases to amaze me. So it’s not ok to use « whitelist » or « blacklist » in your *source code* in xcode when coding in swift in case someone may actually be offended just reading those words, but displaying the symbol of nazis is fine, because hey, you shouldn’t impose your own cultural taboos over people with other backgrounds.
I think US will have to admit that they, too, just like every country in the world, have their own culture, with their own taboos and peculiarities, norms and habits, and accept for this culture to have some kind of special status over the other ones. Much like you find it absolutely normal and respectful to take into account the specificities of a country you’re visiting as a tourist.
I think far fewer people care about "whitelist" and "blacklist" (and likewise, "master") in the general population than they do about swastikas. The former is largely isolated to one faction of the tech bubble.
> So it’s not ok to use « whitelist » or « blacklist » in your source code in xcode when coding in swift
Can you explain what you mean by this? This seems to suggest there's some kind of compiler error or warning in Xcode when using those terms, but I just tried it and there's no such thing. No one is preventing you from using those terms, as far as I can see — some people have chosen to stop using them, but they're not forcing their decision on you.
I have an example of Apple _forcing_ you to change terminology.
Apple decided to rename the function IOMasterPort() to IOMainPort() and marked IOMasterPort() as deprecated, for what would appear to be non-technical reasons. You can see that they did it hastily and poorly; e.g. in the documentation of most functions that take a port, the type definition has been renamed "mainPort" but the parameter is still labeled "masterPort" https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iokit/1514494-iose...
If you use IOMasterPort(), Apple nags you to use their new wording instead. If you follow their advice, your program immediately stops working on macOS < 12.0, those OSes don't have an _IOMainPort symbol. If you reject their advice, your program stops working on macOS 13.0, that OS doesn't have an _IOMasterPort symbol
Welcome to the wonderful world of software. You need to use the _exact_ version of the library. Any other version will make the program not compile or crash.
In this case, IOKit is an essential framework of macOS. You can't solve this by using a specific version of the library (or saying that your executable requires a specific version of the library). Apple's backwards compatibility is so bad, you require two versions of your program, one for pre-macOS 13, and one for post macOS 13, just because Apple are feckless
By comparison, Windows still has source-compatibility with their Win16 APIs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alearn.microsoft.com+%22comp... so if you have an application from 1995, it will probably still compile. Microsoft wouldn't deprecate OS functions lightly, and they certainly wouldn't deprecate them simply so they could rename them. The Linuxes and BSDs similarly maintain backwards compatibility far better than Apple, even for functions they know to be irredeemably insecure like gets()
Can't you just add a compiler conditional to use one function if macOS < 12, and the other function on macOS >= 12? How is this different than any other API migration?
You can, and from that point on you have to build and maintain two binaries which only vary by which version of the OS they run on. Instead of just having one file to download, your users need to look at a system info panel to find out which OS they're running, and download the right version, because running the wrong one will print some cryptic error about being unable to resolve a _IOMainPort symbol
By comparison, there is no problem running a binary from Windows 95 on Windows 11, nor is it a problem to run old (static) Linux binaries on modern Linux
What's so awful about this is that Apple is forcing this API breakage for one reason only: to get the word "master" out of the name of one of their low-level API calls. Not a security issue. Not a performance issue. Not a maintenance issue. With this breaking change, Apple virtue-signals about how _little_ it cares about backward compatibility
So I googled, and realized it was backwards. And that was the apparently the symbol of the article.
I called the owner just to let him know I didn't do it. Really old 'grumpy' white guy. He said 'oh, some sweet Indian family lived here before you, they asked if they could do that and I told them it's theirs to do what they want. You can leave it or clean it off.'
Learned a lot that day, and busted a few common stereotypes in the process. Ended up being an area with a lot of really good people.
FWIW, I ended up leaving it after reading about it. As mentioned, it wasn't big nor offensive looking. I wonder if the next family went through the same thing.