From
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a398333427d59.htm
>>At the site, you can see images of the symbole as they are described in the
text. A<>E<>R <<<
}}>Begin
One of the World�s Great Symbols Strives for a Comeback
Culture/Society News
Source: New York Times
Published: July 29, 2000 Author: SARAH BOXER
Posted on 07/29/2000 12:40:50 PDT by H.R. Gross One of the World�s Great
Symbols Strives for a Comeback
Friends of the Swastika Should the swastika be rehabilitated? For centuries it
stood for good luck. Above, for instance, Jacqueline Bouvier wore one as a
young girl.
It's a simple question: Can the swastika ever be redeemed?
Before the Nazi party adopted the swastika and turned it into the most potent
icon of racial hatred, it traveled the world as a good luck symbol. It was
known in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, China, Japan, India and the
United States. Buddha's footprints were said to be swastikas.
Navajo blankets were woven with swastikas. Synagogues in North Africa,
Palestine and Hartford were built with swastika mosaics.
Now there is a small movement afoot to help "the swastika get on with its
benign life," to separate it from "the sins of the Nazis." Is that really
possible? Should it be possible?
The swastika gets its name from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning well-being
and good fortune.
The earliest known swastikas date from 2500 or 3000 B.C. in India and in
Central Asia.
A 1933 study suggests that the swastika migrated from India across Persia and
Asia Minor to Greece, then to Italy and on to Germany, probably in the first
millennium B.C.
The fateful link was made by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. From
1871 to 1875, Schliemann excavated the site of Homer's Troy on the shores of
the Dardanelles. When he found artifacts with swastikas, he quickly associated
them with the swastikas he had seen near the Oder River in Germany. As Steven
Heller, the art director of The New York Times Book Review, writes in "The
Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption," "Schliemann presumed that the swastika was
a religious symbol of his German ancestors which linked ancient Teutons,
Homeric Greeks and Vedic India."
Pretty soon swastikas were everywhere, rotating both clockwise and
counterclockwise. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society,
included the swastika in the seal of the society. "Rudyard Kipling combined a
swastika with his signature in a circle as a personal logo," Mr. Heller
reports. And the swastika was part of the logo of the Bauhaus, under Paul Klee.
The swastika spread to the United States, too. Coca-Cola issued a swastika
pendant. Carlsberg beer etched swastikas onto its bottles. During World War I,
the American 45th Infantry division wore an orange swastika as a shoulder
patch. At least one train line had swastikas on its cars.
The Girls' Club published a magazine called The Swastika. And until 1940 the
Boy Scouts gave out a swastika badge.
How did the Nazis get hold of it? According to Mr. Heller, the Germanen order,
an anti-Semitic group that wore helmets with Wotan horns and plotted "against
Jewish elements in German life," used a curved swastika on a cross as its
insignia. By 1914, the Wandervogel, a militarist German youth movement, made it
a nationalist emblem.
The Nazi party claimed it around 1920. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler, who had
artistic aspirations as well as political ones, described "his quest to find
the perfect symbol for the party." He toyed with the idea of using swastikas.
But it was Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from Starnberg, who designed the flag
with a black swastika in its center. "Hitler's major contribution," Mr. Heller
writes, "was to reverse the direction of the swastika" so that it appears to
spin clockwise.
The swastika came down as quickly as it ascended. In 1946 it was
constitutionally banned from any public display in Germany. In the United
States there has never been a law prohibiting the display of swastikas, but the
aversion is still there.
The question now is, should the swastika be reclaimed from the Nazis or should
it, as Mr. Heller argues, continue to represent their "unspeakable crimes"?
The issue is complicated by the swastika's history in India and other parts of
Asia, where it has none of the connotations it has in the West. In India there
is Swastik soap; in Malaysia, a Swastika photograph studio; in Japan there are
Pok�mon cards that have "manji," counterclockwise swastikas; in China, the
Falun Gong uses the counterclockwise swastika as its emblem.
And now swastikas have crept back into sight in the Western world.
In the 1960's, for example, the swastika was a recurring motif in geometric
abstract art and hard-edge painting, notably in an exhibition at the Guggenheim
Museum.
But the most concerted effort to redeem the swastika comes from Friends of the
Swastika, a group formed in 1985 and based in the United States. The group,
whose Web site promises that it "has no connections to any racist propaganda"
and no intention of denying the Holocaust, is led by an artist named ManWoman
who claims to have 200 swastikas tattooed on his body. In order to "detoxify"
and "resanctify" the swastika, the group sells T-shirts, stamps, postcards and
"other cool stuff" with swastikas. Their watchword is, "To hell with Hitler!"
And already, they say, their mission is working. "The swastika is re-emerging
in the alternative pop culture . . . in the punk rock world, in the flying
saucer cults, in the street gangs." There are teenagers wearing swastikas just
because they think they look cool.
"In the 1973 film 'Sleeper,' " Mr. Heller notes, "Woody Allen sarcastically
predicted that in the distant future, the swastika will be worn as a fashion
accessory." The distant future is now.
It has become an icon of rebellion. The logo for ZZ Flex skateboards looks a
lot like a swastika. The label on the heavy metal CD Sacred Reich has
interlocking swastikas. The logo for the band Kiss, which originally had three
Jewish members, was made to look just like the insignia of the SS -- not quite
a swastika but rather two parallel, jagged s's made to look like lightning.
Does it matter whether people use a swastikain ignorance, in hatred or to
rehabilitate it? No, Mr. Heller says: "Nazi icons were strong enough to seduce
a nation and still contain a graphic power that can be unleashed today." The
swastika defenders counter with the question: "How can a symbol be guilty for
the acts of a madman?"
End<{{
A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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