To be honest, the first time I saw the “West Coast Choppers” logo, I thought it was from a white supremacist group. Mainly because the logo is a huge Iron Cross, which has been used by modern pro-NSDAP fascist-type people, associated as it is with militaristic (and, hence, fascist) Germany of WWI and WWII.
Even though I have seen only white guys were such apparel, it became clear that this wasn’t some neo-Nazi phenomenon.
But, is that an Iron Cross? Am I wrong in believing that the Iron Cross has a connection with a connotation of fascist Germany? Do the people know what this means?
Mostly biker gear, skulls, wings, iron crosses, swastikas, etc., is more for shocl vak]=lue than anything else. It’s a corrupted expression of freedom of speech: “Fuck you, we can do it and you can’t do anything about it.”
I rode with the Iron Cross MC in Atlanta in the late 1960’s. We weren’t anti-semitic, not even black/white racist. We didn’t care. Mostly we wanted to be “in your face.” Most of us were disaffected recently separated VietNam vets along with a bunch of older hard-core bikers. Our logo was a large red iron cross. We weren’t neo-nazis by any stretch of the imagination. We discriminated against everyone equally.
There are several similar logos that have survived as ‘outlaw biker logos.’ Don’t mean nuthin’.
Dago Choppers, of San Diego, CA, used a pseudo-SS emblem as its logo. The building burned down in 1997 and to my knowledge the company is now defunct, but a painted brick wall undamaged by the fire and featuring the logo can still be seen on Voltaire Ave.
The Maltese Cross is a bit older, and there are lots of different variations of it, some very iron-ish (look down the page a bit for examples): http://www2.prestel.co.uk/church/oosj/cross.htm
-I had always presumed that the iron cross was a variant of the (much older) Maltese, but I never really looked it up before.
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The iron cross is a symbol of the German miltary and does not have the same connatations as the swastika which was a symbol of the Nazis. It is still used by the German military.
That’s a bit complicated.
The short answer is that it has been designed over a century before the nazis and has been in use as a miltary symbol ever since. Even today it is the official logo of the armed forces.
But OTOH it is true that using it in non-military contexts is seen as a right-winged and probably nationalist statement. The iron cross is in fact sometimes used by neo-nazis because using nazi symbols is a crime.
Hmmmm. Someone else out there remembers Big Dadddy and Rat Fink? As a kid, I had a big plastic model Rat Fink on my nightstand. My folks thought it was hideous (it was), so that made it cool automatically. I think the reason bikers and surfers etc like Iron Crosses is because other people are highly annoyed by it, just like having a Darwin fish thingy on your car instead of a Jesus fish thingy. It’s all about messing with people for fun.