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.