Falun Gong, founded 1992, uses it.
I was born, and was proud to be born in a country known as “Land if the Aryans” but truth be told, I’ve never met any Iranian-Americans who feel the need to proclaim themselves “Aryans” or demand to “reclaim” the word.
For that matter, I’m not sure how many Navajo or Indians really use the swastika anymore.
It was an issue during the war itself, several British Indian army units forbade usage, at least informally.
No, but we can recognize that it means something different in another culture and take it in the spirit that it’s intended. Indians have been using the swastika to mean good luck and “l’chayim” for millennia. I say take as evil when it’s meant to be hateful and as good when it’s meant to be good. Why should that horrible little man ruin yet another good thing?
To you it may be a good thing - to me it’s an evil thing. I have the same right to hate the swastika as anyone else has the right to venerate it.
Naturally, I wouldn’t condemn anyone using it in good faith a part of their cultural customs. It’s just I don’t see the need to change the negative perception another culture may have of it. There’s nothing wrong with negative perceptions.
I visited Hyderabad in 2011 and passed by a Hindu cemetery where plenty of the gravestones were adorned with swastikas.
Aside: even though I knew the Hindus had first dibs AND were using it as a symbol of good luck, it was still… slightly jarring to see.
Like everyone else, I wonder why the OP feels we need these particular symbols. (Are there any symbols that are universally and unambiguously regarded as “good”? In most cases they seem to be just another way of separating “us” and “them”. Crosses, crescents, sickles, hammers, flags… you name it.)
No, but we can recognize that it means something different in another culture and take it in the spirit that it’s intended. Indians have been using the swastika to mean good luck and “l’chayim” for millennia. I say take as evil when it’s meant to be hateful and as good when it’s meant to be good. Why should that horrible little man ruin yet another good thing?
Because he ruined it. You can’t change the past, no more than you can bring the people he killed back to life.
:rolleyes:
Really? You cannot identify the cultural context in which they are being used? It’s “jarring” that people are using their own symbols, in their own way in their own country.
True story here.
As a young articling law student years ago, I was working on my apprenticeship with a lawyer who did a lot of municipal law work.
One of his clients came to him with a very odd problem. They wished to build a community centre, with a playground, classrooms, and meeting spaces to serve their ethnic community. The problem: for some reason they did not understand, the local municipal planning board was actively hostile to them. They were throwing up roadblocks, refusing perfectly reasonable requests, and outright refusing to process required paperwork. What could be the matter? Were they a bunch of racists - given that our clients were from southern India, and rather dark-skinned?
The answer to all of their problems was obvious from the letterhead on which they wrote to their lawyer for advice: on it, they identified themselves with a name that included the word “Aryan”, and it was decorated with a heading including a swastika!
The clients were genuinely mystified by the problem here - namely, that the planning authority thought they were some sort of neo-Nazis, rather than rather traditional Indians from India.
The solution was a short essay written to the planning authority describing the history and cultural symbols of this group. It worked. Like magic, the wall of hostility melted away.
Yes. Because our first reaction to stuff like this is emotional, not intellectual. I spent a lot of time in Japan, and never really “got used” to seeing it at every little shrine you’d see all over the place. It was jarring.
Well jeez. Here I thought what was objectionable about what the Germans did was the genocide and the invasions, not the usage of a particular symbol. If they had used a cross, would you have such a reaction? Or a sword? A star? A picture of a couple of flowers? Or everytime you use Hugo Boss products.
Certainly if you’re not used to it.
I’m sure most Americans and especially most African-Americans would be quite shocked if when traveling through Spain or Italy, they saw people engaging in a religious ritual dressed in white robes and a white tri-corned hat.
I remember the audience in the awful Tom Hanks movie about Opus Dei reacting in shock when his character showed the photographs of that happening.
The symbol evokes the atrocities.
Yeah…no I think there really is little difference.http://farm1.static.flickr.com/56/139365724_a0b48ee38c.jpg?v=0
Germany’s Ministry of Transportation is looking to update their brand and they want something that speaks of efficiency.
…Too soon?
I absolutely CAN identify the cultural context, thanks. And you twisted my words to make it sound like I was jarred by the fact they were “using their own symbols, in their own way”. That wasn’t my point at all. I was pointing out my instinctive, emotional reaction - baked into me by a lifetime’s exposure to Hollywood & UK war films, TV documentaries etc etc - to the symbols, which was entirely at odds to my intellectual reaction.
Let’s take back that Bellamy Salute/Olympic Salute the Nazis stole!
I simply repeated your words. Did not twist anything. You are it seems rather ethno-centric in outlook, by your own admission. Is it really so difficult to grasp that other people have different outlook on things? Or are you dominated by your emotions?
Eh, you kinda did. jinty wrote:
The “it” was seeing gravestones adorned with swastikas.
You wrote:
He didn’t write that, and in fact explicitely noted that the Hindu population had every right to use it and did so as part of their own cultural practices.
For most in the West, the swastika symbolizes the ultimate evil. That’s going to provoke an emotional reaction when one it seen, regardless of the context, and it’s not accompanied by some resentment toward Hindus or admonishment for them to change their ways. It’s not voluntary, either; see the Implicit-association test.