Swastika T-shirt backlash forces company to U-turn on campaign

A US clothing company has come under fire after T-shirts appeared online featuring swastikas in a move aimed at reclaiming the symbol as one of "love". The attempt to rebrand the Nazi emblem as a symbol of "peace" was criticised on social media as the public refused to support the campaign. Days after the design appeared, it was replaced with an "anti-swastika" print. The swastika is an ancient symbol said to have represented good fortune in almost every culture in the world. It was adopted by Adolf Hitler, thousands of years after it was first used, transforming it into a symbol of hate associated with the Third Reich. As a fashion symbol, it was likely to prove difficult to persuade the public to get behind this clothing company's vision in working to change these perceptions.

But does this latest backlash prove that there is a line that should not be crossed - even in the publicity hungry world marketing? Or does the fact that the campaign has made the news make it a success?

What were they thinking? It is hard to tell. In an interview with Dazed and Confused magazine published on Sunday, the company behind the campaign, KA Designs, said that they hoped to "share the beauty of this symbol detached from the hatred associated with it".

The company said that none of its staff had experience in the fashion industry and that the design was "nothing new". It added that it "wouldn't care" if the products were purchased by "some kind of neo-Nazi" because the message was that "peace, love and freedom win over hatred, war and prejudice".

"The swastika is coming back, together with peace, together with love, together with respect, together with Freedom,"

The swastika (as a character 卐 or 卍) is an ancient religious icon used in the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and Southeast Asia, where it has been and remains a symbol of spiritual principles and values.[2][3][4] In the Western world, it was historically a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck,[5] but in the 1930s it became the main feature of Nazi symbolism as an emblem of Aryan race identity, and as a result it has become stigmatized in the West by association with ideas of racism, hate and mass murder.[5][6] The swastika is an icon widely found in human history and the modern world.[7][8] It is known in various European languages as the Hakenkreuz, gammadion cross, cross cramponnée, croix gammée, fylfot, or tetraskelion. A swastika generally takes the form of a rotationally symmetrical arrangement (a cross) with four equally spaced legs of identical length each bent at 90 degrees in a uniform direction to create a pattern akin to a four-armed spiral.[9][10] It is found in the archeological remains of the Indus Valley Civilization and Mesopotamia, as well as in early Byzantine and Christian artwork.[7][8] The name swastika comes from Sanskrit (Devanagari: स्वस्तिक), and denotes a "conducive to well being or auspicious".[11][8] The clockwise swastika is a sacred and auspicious symbol in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.[7] In Hinduism, the clockwise symbol is called swastika symbolizing surya (sun) and prosperity, while the counter clockwise symbol is called sauvastika symbolizing night or tantric aspects of Kali.[8] In Jainism, a swastika is the symbol for Suparshvanatha – the 7th of 24 Tirthankaras (spiritual teachers and saviours), while in Buddhism it symbolizes the auspicious footprints of the Buddha.[8][12][13] The swastika was adopted by several organizations in pre-World War I-Europe and later, and most notably, by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany prior to World War II. It was used by the Nazi Party to symbolize German nationalistic pride. To Jews and the enemies of Nazi Germany, it became a symbol of antisemitism and terror.[5] In many Western countries, the swastika is viewed as a symbol of racial supremacy and intimidation because of its association with Nazism.[6][14][15] The reverence for the swastika symbol in some cultures in contrast to the stigma in others, has led to misinterpretations, misunderstandings and mutual accusations.[ The word swastika has been in use in English since the 1870s, replacing gammadion (from Greek γαμμάδιον). It is alternatively spelled in contemporary texts as svastika,[18] while in the 19th- and early 20th-century, alternate spellings such as suastika was occasionally used.[19] It was derived from the Sanskrit term (Devanagari: स्वस्तिक), which is transliterated svastika under the commonly used IAST transliteration system, but is pronounced closer to "swastika" when letters are used with their English values. The first attested use of the word swastika in a European text is found in 1871 with the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who while crudely digging the Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast, for the lost history of Troy (Trojan war), discovered over 1,800 ancient samples of the swastika symbol and its variants. Schliemann linked his findings to the Sanskrit swastika.[14][20][21] The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit root swasti which is composed of su, meaning "good, well", and asti meaning "it is, there is".[22] The word swasti occurs frequently in the Vedas, and it means "well, good, auspicious, luck, success, prosperity".[23][24] Swastika is a derived word and connotes a form of welcome or a sign of something "associated with well-being".[23] According to Monier-Williams, a majority of scholars consider it a solar symbol, and in the ancient Indian texts the base swasti is equivalent to "may it be well with thee! hail! health! adieu! so be it!".[23] The sign implies something fortunate, lucky or auspicious, and when applied to entrances, doors, mandalas or object it denotes or reminds of auspiciousness or well-being.[23] The earliest known textual use of the word swastika is in Panini's Ashtadhyayi, where it is used to explain one of the Sanskrit grammar rules, in the context of a type of identifying mark on cow's ear.[22] Most scholarship suggests Panini lived in or before mid 4th-century BCE (floruit),[25][26] possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.[27][28] Other names for the symbol include: hooked cross (German: Hakenkreuz), angled cross (Winkelkreuz) or crooked cross (Krummkreuz). cross cramponned, cramponnée, or cramponny, in heraldry, as each arm resembles a Crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz). fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture. gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek: τετραγαμμάδιον), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma).[9] tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally meaning "four-legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion [Greek: τρισκέλιον]).[29] whirling logs (Navajo, native american): can denote abundance, prosperity, healing, and luck.[ Although all swastikas are bent crosses based on a chiral symmetry, they appear with different geometric details: as compact crosses with short legs, as crosses with large arms and as motifs in a pattern of unbroken lines. One distinct representation of a swastika, as a double swastika or swastika made of squares, appears in a Nepalese silver mohar coin of 1685, kingdom of Patan (NS 805) KM# 337 [33] Chirality describes an absence of reflective symmetry, with the existence of two versions that are mirror images of each other. The mirror-image forms are typically described as: left-facing (卍) and right-facing (卐); left-hand (卍) and right-hand (卐). The left-facing version is distinguished in some traditions and languages as a distinct symbol from the right-facing "swastika", and is more correctly called the "sauwastika". The compact swastika can be seen as a chiral irregular icosagon (20-sided polygon) with fourfold (90°) rotational symmetry. Such a swastika proportioned on a 5 × 5 square grid and with the broken portions of its legs shortened by one unit can tile the plane by translation alone. The Nazi Hakenkreuz used a 5 × 5 diagonal grid, but with the legs unshortened The sauwastika were adopted as a standard character in Sanskrit. "卍" (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages, including Chinese script. In Japanese the symbol is called "卍" (Hepburn: manji) or "卍字" (manji). The sauwastika is included in the Unicode character sets of two languages. In the Chinese block it is U+534D 卍 (left-facing) and U+5350 for the swastika 卐 (right-facing);[35] The latter has a mapping in the original Big5 character set,[36] but the former does not (although it is in Big5+[37]). In Unicode 5.2, two swastika symbols and two sauwastikas were added to the Tibetan block: swastika U+0FD5 ࿕ right-facing svasti sign, U+0FD7 ࿗ right-facing RESD MORE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

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