In some places she can. Not everywhere, but topless and/or nude beaches, nudist camps, etc.
Believe it or not, there’s no law against it. You’ll be thought of as an asshole, but you won’t be arrested.
That’s a sanitation issue.
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Look, I get where you’re coming from-it certainly makes ME uneasy to see them. I can only imagine an Israeli would feel! (There used to be a guy who’d come in to Kmart with one tattooed on his cheek!). But, if you know said person is Buddhist, or Hindu, really, are you going to think of them as the enemy?
A man walks into a bar, sits down, and sighs. He turns to the bartender and says:
“This is driving me crazy. Seriously - I just don’t get it. Answer me this: I grow apples. I must have picked millions of apples over the course of my lifetime. Butdo people call me Bob the Apple-Picker?”
“No, they don’t, Bob.” said the Bartender.
“No, they don’t. So how about this: I also build lots of fences. Hundreds of miles of them - I’d say two-thirds of all fences in the county were laid dow by me. And still, do peple call me Bob the Fence-Builder?”
Because as we all know, constutionality is the same as moral correctness. I guess black people magically became 2/5 more of a person when they achieved full citizenshop :rolleyes:
So, if Germany bans the swastika, that destroys freedom everywhere?
Are you drunk?
Let me say this one more time, and see if you understand. You ARE free to display a swastika here in America, although you’re a dolt if you do. The fact that Germany and France have laws against displaying the swastika has nothing to do with it.
You’re in America. Let your freak flag fly. But if you’re a white American or European who displays a swastika, I’m going to assume you’re a neonazi, get it? Or, if you’re not a neo-nazi, you’re an asshole who doesn’t give two shits about what conclusions people will draw. I’d assume you LIKE the hate and fear you are guaranteed to cause by displaying that little symbol.
Get it? Fly your fucking swastika, but you’re an asshole if you do, no matter what you think you’re doing. You’re in America.
Or do you feel the burning need to go over to Israel and display swastikas? Dude, only a major league asshole would display a swastika in Israel, regardless of whether it’s legal or not. Are you a major legue asshole, or not?
I’m not using swear words in Great Debates, for one.
Bwa? Huh? I’m not allowed to analyze morality irrespective of location? Don’t you get it?
If I were one to wear swastikas as part of my everyday couture, and people jumped to conclusions about my intentions based on that, I would care only to the extent that it endangers my life and immediate legal freedom. Since I don’t, I won’t. If people are naive and willfully misinformed enough to not care that the symbol of hatred and oppression is seen otherwise by billions of others, why care about them?
What exactly is the point of displaying a symbol? What’s the purpose? Is it really that important to you to display an ancient buddhist good luck symbol that you don’t give a rat’s ass that lots of people will believe you are in favor of rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps and starving and exterminating them? You really don’t care?
If people are so naive and wilfully misinformed that they don’t know that the swastika was the symbol of Nazi party, what does that say about them?
I have yet to see anyone here claim that they do not know that a swastika was a symbol of the Nazi party. And thanks to those assholes, the majority in the West now associates any swastika with the Nazi party. To discontinue that false association and restore the original meaning of the swastika is the purpose of displaying that symbol.
And if I did not give a rat’s ass about people’s beliefs, I sincerely doubt I would written the OP. The point of this exercise is to gauge those beliefs. That said, I think the tide is finally starting to turn, and within a few years, the swastika will be ‘reclaimed’. Yet even then a swastika will still be associated with the Nazis and their crimes. Which is no reason in my book to continue to allow hate groups to use it to spread their messages.
I sincerely doubt that any Christian or Jews would care the appropriation of their symbols by hate groups.* Yet if it happens to a non-Western religion, too fucking bad for them, heh? All Hindus and Buddhists and Native Americans are now dolts? Well, we have definitely have been called and suffered worst.
The only dolts I can recognize are those too ignorant and/or stuck on one brief period of history to see that the appropriation of the swastika was another injustice perpetrated by the Nazis, and one that has equal value in being corrected.
*Though the Iron Cross almost had been - now its more likely to represent West Coast Choppers and the like.
I thought we were supposed to have religious tolerance in America. If a symbol of the Hindu religion HAPPENS to be a similar symbol to the one the Nazis used, how is it being an “asshole” to still want to fly that symbol on a flag outside your house? Is it the fault of a billion Hindus that Hitler was a mass-murdering maniac? These folks have THEIR OWN CULTURAL TRADITIONS that have nothing to do with Nazis. As another poster pointed out, Hindus who live in Jewish neighborhoods fly these kinds of flags (I have a Jewish friend who lives in a neighborhood with an Indian family who does this). The neighbors are smart and tolerant enough to understand that this family does not have the least thought about anything having to do with Nazis, Jews, or anything else of the kinds when they fly that flag.
Exactly. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the Christian cross has been used as a symbol of hate, and in the name of the Christian religion, no less (which isn’t even the case with the Nazis…it’s not like they were using it in the name of the Hindu religion). Yet, we Christians go right on using that symbol, because we know that using it as a symbol of hate is perverting its meaning. Why should the Eastern religions not be afforded the same respect?
I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. As I tried to illustrate with my little Talmudic fable up there, life is not neccessarily fair. Good does not negate evil, no matter what the proportions. If you drop a teaspoon of e-coli into a vat full of milk you throw the vat away, even if the “good” milk was there longer than the “bad” bacteria.
Look: the whole subject of this debate smacks to me of a sort of weaseling. When I hear “the swastika is an ancient sign of good luck,” I also hear “Arabs can’t be antisemitic - they’re semites” or “Israel was a historical mistake that should be corrected” or “Jews could not have been persecuted for so long without being a bit responsible” or “some of my best friends are Jewish”. I am NOT ascribing any malice to you personally, Pagan. However, I believe that in rehabilitating the awastika you may find some unexpected allies of the kind you weren’t looking for. I suspect that many of the people use swastikas for less savory purposes will welcome its rehabilitation - will welcome the public accptance of nazi regalia. Because if a Buddhist can wear one, why couldn’t they fly one over their house, black in a white circle in the center of a red flag?
And even if that doesn’t happen, I still don’t like ithe concept of “rehabilitation”. It has a vaguely Orwellian stink of historic revisionism. I don’t want certain things forgotten, not by me, not by anyone. That’s why, Monty, I hope I never accept the swastika - not anywhere. I want my hand to curl up into fist whenever I see one. I want to hate the Nazis. Not to obsees over them - that would be unhealthy - but to keep that hatred somewhere on a back burner, ready when I need it, in case I forget.
And no, I can’t object to Hindus displaying the swastika, although you can’t force me to like it. If you’re not a Hindu, though, we’ve got a problem. Malice may not be intended, but it will be assumed.
Well, they can now, if they want to, and then we would know exactly what we should all think of them.
I can understand your point here, but it’s not historic revisionism if the swastika is being used in the context of an Eastern religion, which is not what the Nazis were using it to represent.
And you are well within your rights to dislike it, just as a Hindu would be well within their rights to do it.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, either. While intentionally provoking hatred is more wrong than banning such expressions (if they are indeed an expression of violent hatred), you’re both wrong (if they are indeed banned.)
Too bad life’s more complex than any metaphor. I don’t feel strongly enough about the symbol to use it one way or the other, but nothing is going to prevent me from thinking that those who are too blinded by hatred to see that others have a perfectly good use for a religious symbol and will use it regardless of what some other fools thought it meant some decades ago are :wally es
This is where I emphatically disagree with you. That goes against the very core of my beliefs. No life is not necessarily fair. Yet by that standard, no injustice is worth fighting. Que sera, sera. Bullshit. Outside of the physical laws of the universe, everything about human society is an artificial creation, and we are the sole determinants of what can be fair. To surrender to the resignation voiced by your statement above is anathema to my beliefs. All evil can be overcome. I refuse to believe otherwise. And the milk can be repasteurized. There is no reason to disgard it.
Even the evil of the Nazis will be overcome in time - not forgotten, not forgiven, but their actions subsumed by the remainder of humanity. I do not neglect all those that died because of that regime. My beliefs provide answers to explain that horror, but that is beyond the scope of this thread.
I can understand those sentiments. The symbol and the regime will never be separate for some, nor should they be for some. But even they should recognize the difference between the Nazi swastika and all the others, and I am not saying that you do not. I understand that you will never be comfortable with that symbol, regardless of the context or motive of the wearer. And that is absolutely your right. But only on a personal level. I could not agree to it as a matter of policy for any politic, just as I would not agree to the prohibition of any symbol.
I believe ignoring the history and current use of the original swastika has been the act of historical revisionism that needs corrections. And you have my sympathy that you want to keep that hatred within you. I am personally trying to overcome mine, but it is a powerful feeling. Anger is righteous. And the Nazis deserved much hatred and deserved to be destroyed. But I feel that allowing that hate and anger to remain is to continue to grant them power they should not have. Let them fall to the wayside with ridicule, scorn, pity.
An aside, why is there such a lack of equal hatred and anger towards the Hammer and Sickle? Lenin and Stalin was as evil as Hitler, if not more so.
Some people do consider the symbol just as evil as Western Nations tend to regard the hakenkreuz.
For those who do not, while Communism may have been implemented with as much cruelty as Nazism, it was not founded on a prinicple of hatred.
The Hammer and Sickle is a new symbol created for a specific ideology that is unlikely to have any association other than that of Marxism, so one is not likely to find a separate society or institution employing it as a symbol of goodness separate from its original meaning. There is no chance that a believer in some ancient religion is going to want to employ the Hammer and Sickle to demonstrate their love of God next to the home of a Gulag survivor.
That is a good question. You still see the Hammer and Sickle on t-shirts, despite the fact that this is another regime that starved and outright murdered millions of people.
I see it all the time on young Soviet immigrants. But, the t-shirts they wear all express derision for the communists and celebrate the fall of communism. A common design is a hammer and sickle in a circle, above CCP and the words “Party’s Over!”
Oddly (to me anyway) the local Russian market has many brands of bread, tea, honey, etc bearing the names and likenesses of czars, czarinas, and Rasputin. But, there are no Marx, Lennin etc brands.