Posted on 11/30/2022 10:01:23 AM PST by Olog-hai
Sheetal Deo was shocked when she got a letter from her Queens apartment building’s co-op board calling her Diwali decoration “offensive” and demanding she take it down.
“My decoration said ‘Happy Diwali’ and had a swastika on it,” said Deo, a physician, who was celebrating the Hindu festival of lights.
The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by (i)ndigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.
But in the West, this symbol is often equated to Adolf Hitler’s hakenkreuz or the hooked cross — a symbol of hate that evokes the trauma of the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi Germany. White supremacists, neo-Nazi groups and vandals have continued to use Hitler’s symbol to stoke fear and hate.
Over the past decade, as the Asian diaspora has grown in North America, the call to reclaim the swastika as a sacred symbol has become louder. These minority faith communities are being joined by Native American elders whose ancestors have long used the symbol as part of healing rituals. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Imagine the outcry if Christians tried to save the rainbow from the corruption foisted on it.
Ever go to Thailand? They still have statues of Axis figures.
What is actually interesting is the cross cultural use of the swastika on different continents and people…who had “no contact” with each other.
I understand the concern, but it’s also an opportunity to teach context and cultural history. I live in a high Jewish population town. I don’t think I have enough energy for the history lesson that would come about if I displayed it. But, I understand context.
Because Ukraine has a large bastion of Hindus?
iirc the Hopi Indians used it...
Can’t unring that bell.
I go to the cemetery to pay respects to a friend each month and the Vietnamese graves are beautiful and they have this symbol on most headstones.
Nazi’s bastardized it.
Nothing nefarious about it except for context.
(Do I need a sarc tag?)
卍IT’S LITERALLY A CHINESE SYMBOL卍
The 45th Infantry Division used the swastika as a unit patch well before the nazis ever used it. It was a yellow right facing (not tilted) swastika on a red square (tilted 45°) background. It was a tribute to the tribes of the southwest. It was changed to the current yellow thunderbird on the same red square background.
If anything, I think they should have already known it was a symbol used in other cultures centuries before Hitler used it.
I see swastikas all the time in the USA. They’re VERY popular and I sometimes laugh at reporters who will wear Columbia sportswear while denouncing someone using swastikas...while the Columbia logo IS a swastika!!!
And the symbols meant similar things in their ceremonial uses. But, nope…never any cross cultural exposure there. Lol.
The ancient swastika goes back to the Proto-Indo Europeans living on the Pontic Steppe. Hitler and the Nazis claiming to be the most pure descendents of the Indo-Europens, i.e., the Aryans, asserted the symbol as their own.
This symbol or its near equivalent, exist or existed in almost every culture on earth. India, Native Americans, Meso Americans, Slavs, you name it.
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