Symbol of peace or barbarity?

There is interesting news this morning on the web regarding a move by Germany to want to make Holocaust denial and the display of the swastika a crime across Europe.

There’s just one problem – the swastika means different things to different people, and surprisingly, the association it has with the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazis is actually both new and not widely held, from a global perspective.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? In Europe and the US, it's an instantly recognisable symbol of everything the nazis stood for and of the evil that was perpetrated in Europe during World War Two. Anyone raised in my culture on a diet of war movies - everything from The Great Escape, to Indiana Jones to Schindler's List - will immediately associate it leather trenchcoat wearing bad guys.

So isn't it an interesting that we presume it means the same thing everywhere? For example, I remember the first time I saw a kid’s action figure in Japan with a swastika on the front – I was shocked - and this was on an official product put out by Coke Cola.

But then I started seeing them everywhere – in particular on the ends of the wooden beams protruding out from under the roofs of Buddhist temples. On a Japanese street map, temples are denoted with a swastika. Even on a friends' sat nav in his car, swastikas fly past on the screen as you drive through the countryside.

There's even a martial art that uses it as a crest - Shorinji Kempo - and indeed there's something slightly surreal about walking into a dojo and seeing 30 kids and their teacher all wearing white karate uniforms with what looks like nazi symbols on the chest.

Although, to be totally accurate and fair, the manji, as it is known in Japan, that is worn by practitioners of Shorinji Kempo is actually not identical to a swastika - the nazis reversed the manji to create their logo. In this part of the world, the manji is a buddhist symbol, which represents heaven and earth, good and evil, life and death - the wheel of life.

Interestingly, the Shorinji Kempo headquarters has now started moving away from using this symbol, as it spreads outside of Japan. It's had to adapt to the fact that their logo doesn't always create the right impression!

In any event, the Japanese example is actually not even the best when it comes to showing how this symbol has been corrupted in Euro-centric minds. It's been used by hindu people for literally thousands of years, and do you know what? There's a hell of a lot of them out there.

Why should an intrinsically peaceful symbol be banned? Isn't that another victory for the people who perverted it, thirty years after most of the original nazis died?

Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain had this to say in the BBC article I have linked to at the top of this blog entry.

"The swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace," he said. "This is exactly the opposite of how it was used by Hitler."

He said that while the Nazi implications of the symbol should be condemned, people should respect the Hindu use of the swastika.

"Just because Hitler misused the symbol, abused it and used it to propagate a reign of terror and racism and discrimination, it does not mean that its peaceful use should be banned."

The group said banning the swastika was equivalent to banning the cross simply because the Ku Klux Klan had used burning crosses.

Review: Fatso

Fatso
By Lars Ramslie, New Island, €14.95
Reviewed by Alex Meehan, January 7th, 2007, The Sunday Business Post

Rarely has an author set out to create a ‘hero’ so objectionable as the protagonist in Lars Ramslie’s Fatso.

Rino Hanssen is an obese, sweaty, ambitionless thirty four year old virgin who is obsessed with sex. He lives in an Oslo apartment owned by his father and spends his time watching hard core pornography and engaging in what can best be described as deviant behaviour.

He masturbates in phone boxes while watching a local girls’ soccer team, makes nuisance heavy breathing phone calls and engages in obsessive sexual fantasies about the women he sees around him. He’s a tragic figure, convinced that his physical appearance means he will never find true love, and his resultant behaviour virtually assures that he won’t.

He has one friend, the mysterious and dysfunctional Fillip, a hard drinking low life entrepreneur with a penchant for the strip clubs and prostitutes Rino is too much of a coward to frequent himself.

In short, Rino hates himself and is resigned to a world of loneliness, until his father decides to let out one of the rooms in his apartment to Maria, a sexy young liberated woman. Maria brings the outside world and a semblance of normality into Rino’s life.

She has sexy self confident friends and a boyfriend, Hakon, who intimidates Rino and seemingly never leaves his apartment. However, following Maria’s break-up with Hakon, Rino starts to fall in love. Don’t worry though, just in case you thought he might become a nice person, Rino promptly starts stealing her underwear and stalking one of Maria’s friends.

Fatso is written in the present tense and in the first person – something that gives it a sense of immediacy and vibrancy. It also sadly means that the reader spends more time than they would probably want to inside Rino’s head, seeing the world as he sees it.

In particular the opening pages are well past the point of being pornographic as we get to find out what exactly Rino would love to do to the women around him. Do to, not with.

This book was originally published in Norwegian and is author Lars Ramslie’s fourth novel. Ramslie is one of the leading lights of a new wave of young Norwegian authors, writing gritty modern stories that show the ugly underbelly of modern Europe.

Gritty is certainly a word that could be used to describe Fatso, and certainly if your easily offended, this is probably a book to avoid. The sexual references are extremely graphic and while Fatso is very well written, it’s ultimately hard to figure out why Ramslie bothered.

The motif of the self-loathing loser redeemed through the love of a good woman is a familiar one, but in Fatso that’s not really what we get. Because Rino isn’t redeemed, his repulsive behaviour is essentially rewarded and the end of the book sees him essentially unchanged and certainly no more worthy a character.

In one sense, it’s possible to feel sorry for this pathetic person, after all, it can’t be easy to be extremely fat in a world which values superficial ideals of beauty. However, in this case any such sympathy is short lived, because Rino is ugly on the inside as well as on the outside.

Winter sun

Caught a few days hols in Gran Canaria last week. Fantastic to be somewhere warm and sunny while the heavens opened on green old Ireland at home.

A wicklow walk in winter

I haven't posted many images here lately, but here are some I took on a recent hike into the Wicklow hills on a cold and crisp winter day.


Sometimes, this country we live in can be very beautiful.

Another one bites the dust

I don't read many blogs online - few are worth the time - but I do read those of people I know or have met. One such blog is that kept by Roger O'Donnell, who used to play keyboards for The Cure but is now out on his own as a solo artist. His album is fantastic and I have a lot of time for him - he's a generous and approachable guy.


Anyway, he recently surprised me by posting this on his blog at www.rogerodonnell.com:

"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” Pythagorus

“Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all living beings, we are all savages.” Thomas Edison

30/12/06> One of the weirdest things that happened to me this year was to stop eating meat. I have been a fully paid up member of the carnivor club all my life, in fact I dont really eat any vegetables, potatoes of course but not much else. When I met Erin and she told me she was a Vegetarian I didn't think too much about it and over the years she has never tried to convert me. We live next to a dairy farm and now see animals every day and they have become real living things to me, not
just a tray in the supermarket wrapped in plastic. This summer I happened to be talking about all the conflict in the world with some very intelligent ( well I thought they were ) people and casually suggested that until we stop killing animals unecessarily to feed oursleves how could we ever expect to stop killing each other. I probably had a ham sandwhich in my hand at the time and certainly wasnt judging anyone but the reaction from them was so shocking and defensive and irrational it took me aback.

It really made me think about how we don't even question doing what we do, in most things actually, let alone having animals slaughtered in our names by the millions every day of the year. So if you have ever thought about it why not think again? its not easy but as I say every time I finish a meal "nothing had to die" ... in fact I got those quotes above form a page of quotes and reading what these people have said over the years makes so much sense. I particularly like the one about not making your body a grave yard for animals !

So I am not going to start preaching but just think about it. If every time you were hungry something had to die and you had to kill it could you, would you do it ? and no Im not going to join Morriseys band hahahah, or Mobys for that matter....

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

Well, I finished watching Lost last night - all of it, so I feel like I did something productive with my christmas.

That's a grand total of 54 episodes - two series on DVD and the first six episodes of series three. In total, I've watched 50 40-minute episodes in the last week - that's 33 hours of Lost. (I skipped the first four in this sitting as I'd already seen those).

It's an incredible piece of writing. The first series is undoubtedly the best so far, but then much of its appeal lies in the mysteries on the island - where is the island, who are the others, what's down the hatch? What is the monster? After watching series two, I now know the answer to some of those questions, but now I want to know what the effect of the electromagnetic pulse was? What is the purpose of the Dharma Initiative? How the hell do polar bears end up on a tropical island and what has the Black Rock got to do with the story so far? Also, what's up with the giant statue of the four toed foot?

Hmm.

Probably the most impressive thing about Lost is that after watching 50 episodes of this show, I'm still not sure what it's about and if it's a supernatural thriller or a techno thriller. Does magic work in this world or not? Is there are reasonable explanation for everything that happens or not?

This breaks one of the rules of well, rule breaking in writing. If you want to write science fiction or fantasy, to maintain believabilty you're meant to make it clear early on in the story what rules of the real world don't apply. In Lost, they haven't done that, and strangely enough it works. Still, I'm starting to wonder whether the very thing that makes it the excellent TV series it is will be its undoing. The script writers have a tricky problem - how long can you pose unanswered questions before people tune out. At the same time, if you answer those unanswered questions, will that cause people to tune out as well?

Roll on the second half of series three, though, I'm seriously hooked. This is the best television I've ever seen.