hanging Symbols and the Swastika
Chilocco Indian Agricultural School basketball team 1908-09
Symbols serve as a significant way to express identity within society. Crosses generally identify someone as a Christian, a hammer and sickle as a communist, and black and white houndstooth as a University of Alabama fan. Of course, that simple equation provides an arena for significant competition about exactly which symbol represents which ideas. The apparent incongruency of Native Americans wearing swastikas on their basketball uniforms (Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma, 1908) derives from the assumption that symbols have a defined meaning. As with identity labels generally, the meanings of symbols like the swastika shift over time, and seldom does a symbol have only one meaning.
The swastika is one symbol whose meaning is particularly contested today. In Europe and the United States, the swastika has become intimately tied to Nazi ideology since the Nazi party adopted it in 1920. Its use predates that adoption by millennia, found in artifacts from in North America, the Iranian plateau, South Asia, and various other locations. The meanings and explanations for these various appearances of the symbol are uncertain, but are generally assumed to be auspicious. (A 1933 pamphlet provides an interesting account of its presumed prehistorical meanings.) In regions such as South and East Asia (and among those who identify with those areas), the symbol is frequently used today not to convey a Nazi identity but as an auspicious symbol. While the Nazi swastika typically is right-facing, people in various parts of Asia display swastikas turned in either direction, often depending on the aesthetics of its creator and the context of its application.
With globalization, the swastika has become a point of contention. People in Europe and the Americas who use the symbol feel compelled to explain their use of the swastika to distance themselves from Nazi ideology. The standard line is that the swastika is an ancient, auspicious symbol that Hitler misused. When some in the EU proposed banning the swastika, groups of immigrants primarily from India campaigned against the ban. Ramesh Kallidia of the Hindu Forum of Britain reportedly asserted, “The swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace. This is exactly the opposite of how it was used by Hitler.”
While the swastika has apparently been used for millennia, though not always labeled with that Sanskrit-derived name, the narrative of pure origins and corruption homogenizes a complex symbol, assuming a singular, true meaning. Having no intrinsic content, the meanings of symbols, like identity labels, are constructed socially. Reading a meaning back into history or across communities misses that lack of inherent content. Therefore, both those who assume that any use of the swastika reflects Nazi ideology and those who assert that Hitler corrupted a positive ancient symbol construct a consistent meaning for the symbol that ignores the malleability of symbols
How the world loved the swastika - until Hitler stole it
Published
23 October 2014
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IMAGE SOURCE,STEVEN HELLER
By Mukti Jain Campion
Kiev
In the Western world the swastika is synonymous with fascism, but it goes back thousands of years and has been used as a symbol of good fortune in almost every culture in the world. As more evidence emerges of its long pre-Nazi history in Europe, can this ancient sign ever shake off its evil associations?
In the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being". The symbol has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millennia and is commonly assumed to be an Indian sign.
Early Western travellers to Asia were inspired by its positive and ancient associations and started using it back home. By the beginning of the 20th Century there was a huge fad for the swastika as a benign good luck symbol.
In his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? US graphic design writer Steven Heller shows how it was enthusiastically adopted in the West as an architectural motif, on advertising and product design.
IMAGE SOURCE,STEVEN HELLER Image caption,
20th Century fad: Fruit packaging, a Coca-Cola pendant, and a pack of cards, all from the US
"Coca-Cola used it. Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. The Boy Scouts adopted it and the Girls' Club of America called their magazine Swastika. They would even send out swastika badges to their young readers as a prize for selling copies of the magazine," he says.
It was used by American military units during World War One and it could be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. Most of these benign uses came to a halt in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.
The Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th Century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans.