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Swastikas & Disputes About The Swastika Symbol

ramonmercado said:
....the ex-communists get over 20% support in most of the east German States.
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Yes, but what percentage of that 20 percent is under 40 years old?
 
OldTimeRadio said:
ramonmercado said:
....the ex-communists get over 20% support in most of the east German States.
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Yes, but what percentage of that 20 percent is under 40 years old?
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Not sure, but in the first election after the fallof the wall the ex CP got 14% of the vote, so its rising. Also, the groups that they have linked up with in the west of Germany are largely based on young people. Even in Berlin, their leader Lucy Redler is 26 & drop dead gorgeous. Err, her politics are definitey good as well, non-Salinist.
 
Well, if we're going to have a Communist leader arising in a unified Berlin even this old Anti-Communist would prefer that she be drop-dead georgeous.

The last time it was Rosa Luxenbourg.
 
I think it's high time the swastika was reclaimed by Hindus (and indeed the other cultures that happily employed it with no negative connotations until the 1930s.)

The longer people get antsy about openly displaying it (in context, I'm not advocating blithely daubing every building in sight with them), the more it's power of taboo is consolidated.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Well, if we're going to have a Communist leader arising in a unified Berlin even this old Anti-Communist would prefer that she be drop-dead georgeous.

The last time it was Rosa Luxenbourg.
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In her younger days Rosa was rather attractive as well.
 
There an article here about the Berlin Demo:

Berlin. 80 000 people came to visit the "Cemetary of the Socialists" to remember to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the founders of the German Communist Party. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by "Freikorps" Soldiers after World War I.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/360042.html
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360049.jpg

The left party (former SED in GDR).
 
But nobody in the photograph looks under 30 to me and perhaps not even under 40.
 
ramonmercado said:
If you go to the link you will see younger people.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/360042.html
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Viewing all the photographs collectively there seem to be around a dozen or so "young" people among the individuals close enough to the cameras to recognize. And that includes children tagging along with their parents, which may not count. (Had my parents been flat earthers when I was 10 or 12 I'd almost certainly have been one at that age.)

I'm younger than a number of the people in the photographs.
 
Back in 1935 the United States Government requested that the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol (which was largely staffed by Cheriokee Indians) abandon the swastiksa which appeared on their cruisers. This request was obeyed but it caused a lot of hard feelings among people who wondered why a traditional Native American symbol should be censured for the crimes of a foreign dictator

[I say "requested" because I don't believe the Federal Government has any constiitutional authority to issue formal orders regarding such a purely State matter.]
 
OldTimeRadio said:
ramonmercado said:
If you go to the link you will see younger people.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/360042.html
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Viewing all the photographs collectively there seem to be around a dozen or so "young" people among the individuals close enough to the cameras to recognize. And that includes children tagging along with their parents, which may not count. (Had my parents been flat earthers when I was 10 or 12 I'd almost certainly have been one at that age.)

I'm younger than a number of the people in the photographs.
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Well it shows a small section of a crowd of 80,000. I thought i saw more than a dozen youngsters.

As for kids, I was on my first demo at 2 in a pram. Supporting Cuba during the missiles crisis.
 
ramonmercado said:
As for kids, I was on my first demo at 2 in a pram. Supporting Cuba during the missiles crisis.
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Yes, but I doubt that you were there through any true volitional choice of your own. And that's true even if you are proud as heck today for having been there.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
ramonmercado said:
As for kids, I was on my first demo at 2 in a pram. Supporting Cuba during the missiles crisis.
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Yes, but I doubt that you were there through any true volitional choice of your own. And that's true even if you are proud as heck today for having been there.
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Thats where you are wrong. I had already organised the local creche, the Red Flag flew over it and it was run under toddlers control.
 
Yes, on second thought it does seem like something a two-year-old would come up with. <ggg>
 
So, I had a friend (!)...so, I had a friend who used to collect old junk. Some of the items in his collection included old postcards - cards that had already been sent and which had then somehow ended up in the hands of antiquarian traders.

He showed me one of these cards. Now, I am not sure of the exact date of it, but it was just post the Great war and most definitely pre-Second World War.

It was one of those black and white photos which had then been coloured in with printed coloured ink,in the way that they used to do. It was some idyllic rural scene, maybe Hampshire or somewhere like that. So far, so ordinary.

In the bottom left hand corner, however, there was a...swastika. My friend explained that this was in use as a good lick symbol at the time.

Now I know full well that the swastika does not belong to Nazi Germany and that it has been around for a very long time. It appears on both Hindu and Buddhist icons, and no doubt existed before that.

I do find it odd, though, that it was both well known enough, and acceptable enough, to have been used in mainstream greetings cards -in the (officially)Judaeo-Christian culture which was Britain between the wars.

Can anyone explain further?
 
I think this has arisen before. Its Eastern associations caused Kipling to adopt it as a monogram.

I remember noticing it on some old editions as a child.

I put it down to him being a bit right-wing!

For a short period in the thirties it was used by The Gramophone Company (HMV) to designate electrical recordings made by a new system which avoided royalties payable for the Western Electric system. It appeared in the run-out grooves with the matrix numbers. I don't think it appeared on the labels.

Ironically, it seems, one of the last sets of discs to use the symbol was the youthful Yehudi Menuhin's recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto. More details here. The swastika concerned was the mirror version of what became the Nazi emblem. :eek:
 
Thanks for that. Yes, Kipling was a very widely read writer in his day,so perhaps he popularised it.(Maybe in the way that the Yin-Yang symbol has been made into an icon in our own day). That would make some sort of sense.

As for the Dublin laundry company: could it be that they had Irish nationalist sympathies? I understand some of the Irish nationalists sided with the Nazis -in an any-enemy-of -my enemy-is-my friend tactical sort of way.

As for which way round the swastika should go - my understanding is (and I don't know where I got this from) is that it was the Nazis who reversed the direction in which the swastika `points`.

The original swastika was meant to point in the direction of the rising sun...or something. The four arms represented the four directions in which a man's soul could go: heaven, hell, rebirth as a man, or rebirth as an animal. *

(* This from the novel `Wakolda` by Lucia Puenzo - a fictional account of Joseph Mengele's time in Argentina).
 
Zeke Newbold said:
Thanks for that. Yes, Kipling was a very widely read writer in his day,so perhaps he popularised it.(Maybe in the way that the Yin-Yang symbol has been made into an icon in our own day). That would make some sort of sense.

As for the Dublin laundry company: could it be that they had Irish nationalist sympathies? I understand some of the Irish nationalists sided with the Nazis -in an any-enemy-of -my enemy-is-my friend tactical sort of way.

As for which way round the swastika should go - my understanding is (and I don't know where I got this from) is that it was the Nazis who reversed the direction in which the swastika `points`.

The original swastika was meant to point in the direction of the rising sun...or something. The four arms represented the four directions in which a man's soul could go: heaven, hell, rebirth as a man, or rebirth as an animal. *

(* This from the novel `Wakolda` by Lucia Puenzo - a fictional account of Joseph Mengele's time in Argentina).
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The Laundry was established in 1912, long before the Nazis.

There was very little actual sympathy for the Nazis among Republicans. The Nazi German Bund (SD of the SS backed) in the US infiltrated US IRA support groups and sent funds for a bombing campaign in Britain. Tom Barry resigned as IRA Chief of Staff when this plan was adopted. Barry was actually in contact with Admiral Canaris and involved in Abwehr maneuvering against the SS plans.

This spycraft went on above the heads of the IRA rank & file.
 
Yes there was a serious blueshirt movement that supported the Nazis and the fascists of Franco's mob in the '30s. I understand that Maynooth (the Catholic church ascendancy at the time) was fully behind the move. No surprises there.

It needs also to be remembered that there was also a very strong united Irish band that sided against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Many Irish died in the face of the degeneration of European democracy too. As ever, the powers backed the powers and the salt of the earth stood against.
 
The borders of the big bronze WWI name plaques on our cenotaph are made up of swastikas.
 
skinny said:
Yes there was a serious blueshirt movement that supported the Nazis and the fascists of Franco's mob in the '30s. I understand that Maynooth (the Catholic church ascendancy at the time) was fully behind the move. No surprises there.

It needs also to be remembered that there was also a very strong united Irish band that sided against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Many Irish died in the face of the degeneration of European democracy too. As ever, the powers backed the powers and the salt of the earth stood against.
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I recently visited Spike Island in Co. Cork; a former fortress and prison island in Cork harbour. In the museum there, they had a collection of old photographs showing the handover of Haulbowline Island (a naval base on the neighbouring island) from the UK navy to the Irish Free State in 1938, during the build-up to WW2. I was very surprised to see that in the Cobh (the nearset town) that day, a huge swastika flag was flying in the main street!

I wondered at the time whether this was some kind of anti-British statement and decided to investigate. Luckily though, someone has already had exactly the same thought and written a page about it! A very interesting read it is too:

http://jamescsn.tumblr.com/post/53454237794/the-curious-case-of-the-nazi-flag-in-cobh

As it turns out, there is actually a perfectly mundane explanation. Great detective skills though! :)
 
Thanks for that, emina. I visited Cobh on a cruise ship in 2008, and I've just reviewed my photos. I don't think I have one that matches the one shown in your link, however, but it's still an interesting story.
 
What does it all mean?

emina said:
I was very surprised to see that in the Cobh (the nearset town) that day, a huge swastika flag was flying in the main street! I wondered at the time whether this was some kind of anti-British statement and decided to investigate. Luckily though, someone has already had exactly the same thought and written a page about it! A very interesting read it is too:
http://jamescsn.tumblr.com/post/53454237794/the-curious-case-of-the-nazi-flag-in-cobh
As it turns out, there is actually a perfectly mundane explanation. Great detective skills though! :)
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Thanks for the post. That's a perfectly rational explanation for that instance. I've walked past nazi flags in Korea a couple of times - posted outside coffee bars or nightclubs in complete and total ignorance of their offensive impact on culturally educated passers by. In Korea, the original buddhist reverse swastika is flagged outside Mudang (fortune tellers) dwellings, so I suppose the bar owners had been looking at it all their lives without understanding the rotten associations from the European wars of the 1940s. Or they could just be modern-day supporters of Hitler's reich. In any case, I didn't take tea there.
 
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I've seen Nazi flag designs featured in clothes sold in boutiques in both Korea and Japan, but it must be said they're very rare. I'm also not convinced they're used in complete ignorance; everyone knows it's a Nazi symbol but - given the geographic gulf and the populace not having had much direct experience with either Nazism or Judaism - they would reason that that isn't all the swastika - Nazi or otherwise - can represent. The Nazi flags themselves arrived in East Asia through the late-punk ascetic of the 80s and so the symbol they feature has passed through a number of appropriations already.
 
I know you've lived in country, Yithian, which is why I'm surprised at your statement "everyone knows". There are still pockets of Korea that have zero conception of anything outside their own direct family's experience. ... actually those pockets exist in our own countries too, but if the swastika were posted here there'd be a pretty instant outcry.
 
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