Part Two: Behind the Swastika - podcast episode cover

Part Two: Behind the Swastika

Aug 31, 202354 min
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Episode description

Robert is joined again by Chelsey Weber-Smith to continue to discuss the secret history of the Swastika.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

H what wasn't my Sophie, Sophie, I'm just trying. I'm trying to recapture that what's boiling my pig Anus's energy? That I still like.

Speaker 2

The class what's cracking my peppers? That's still one of my favorite ones you've ever done. I know it's been four years.

Speaker 1

Again never again, fine, just going to make it more and more off putting. You know, you know, what's trafficking my children?

Speaker 2

That kind of stuff just going to be a problem us.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Uh well, this is Behind the Bastards podcast Worse People tell you all about them? Uh and today getting behind really behind the Nazis by getting behind the Swastika with Chelsea Weber Smith.

Speaker 3

Oh, this has been so interesting so far, and I just have no idea really where it's going. So thanks for having me here and taking me on this journey.

Speaker 1

Thank you for being here. Chelsea Weber Smith, whose podcast American Hysteria is pretty cool and people should check out Chelsea.

Speaker 3

Yes you ready, I'm ready, are ready?

Speaker 1

And then a bunch of like anyway, I don't know why I hate that.

Speaker 2

That's who we are now.

Speaker 1

That's like so our uh uh well, I probably shouldn't tell that story. But I come across periodically old pieces of like Nazi paraphernalia. It's a it's a hazard of the job. And there's definitely been a few times when I've been like, oh, that would be an interesting like that book would be interesting to have because of you know, this person who signed it, and then like, no, I don't need that in my house. What am I? What am I doing? You're you're you're you don't you don't want to.

Speaker 3

Have this, Robert, this haunted ass book.

Speaker 1

Yeah, this haunted ass Nazi book. I was given through someone else, a like family heirloom that was an old Hitler youth dagger, and I had no idea what to do with it, so I just kind of like put it in my trash pile out in the yard and it's just slowly decaying, which I think is the right thing to do with a Hitler youth dagger.

Speaker 2

Was that the one that was mailed to the corporate office?

Speaker 1

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. We get all sorts of weird stuff. So in the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties you might have heard about this. The Nazis rise to power, they solidify their grip on power, you know, and while sort of the while the Nazis are kind of like moving up in their inevitable kind of like path towards taking control of the German government. There's all sorts of fighting in the street. You know.

You got your old timey anti fascists, both kind of social democrats and communists, you know, duking it out with the Nazis in the streets. And these street fights, these big brawls, these murders and assassinations are kind of a regular call of fascination in the world media, right, Like, they get a lot of attention in the American newspapers in particular, and so they start sending over reporters to

cover all of this unrest in Weimar, Germany. In nineteen twenty seven, an American journalist from Town and Country magazine traveled to Austria to report on fighting between local social democrats and Nazi aligned fascists. Being a dumb American, this person, she did not worry much about the fact that she had gone to Austria in nineteen twenty seven with her girls club ring which bore a swastika on it.

Speaker 4

So she's gotlub Yeah, she's.

Speaker 1

Like showing up to like embed with the social democrat like street fighting gangs, and she's got a swastika ring, and like one of these guys has to take her aside and be like, I can't be wearing that here, Like I know you don't mean it, but you gotta take that thing off.

Speaker 3

God, that is amazing.

Speaker 1

That's so funny.

Speaker 3

Oh, it's amazing. Well, history is so rich.

Speaker 1

History is rich. But also there have always been you know, as someone who's done conflict reporting, I know a lot of great journalists, a lot of people I respect a lot, but the majority of journalists who do that kind of work are always like shitheads, right, and like it is a shitheaded thing to like go to travel to like report on the fighting between these Nazis and these other groups and not be like should I bring my swastika ring?

Like maybe I should leave this at You did not do that much research.

Speaker 3

Yeah, you didn't possess the very most basic knowledge that you would need to report for newspaper off those events.

Speaker 1

It is nineteen twenty seven, you had some time.

Speaker 3

Wow, Yeah, sloppy, sloppy.

Speaker 1

Six years later, in nineteen thirty three, Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany. This obviously supercharged international resistance to the regime, and American anti fascists held a rally in New York City to protest the newly minted dictator. One journalist with The New Yorker showed up to cover the event and realized very quickly that his pocket watch, which wasngraved with a swastika, might be a bad thing to

have out on the street with it. Right, Like, really again, but it does kind of show I'm making fun of these people, and I think they should be. But it does show you, like how banal it was seen as, where like somebody might show up and be like, oh, fuck, I can't have this thing on me. I didn't realize this would be a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Starting in the early thirties, American use of the swastika began to decline, and this was matched throughout much of the Western world.

For reasons I probably don't need to spend too much time on, right, not not surprising that it does start to decline in its kind of anadyne usage. In Nazi Germany, the new regime actually encouraged this at first. The ubiquity of the symbol had been good for them right in the early years when they're rising to power. It's free pr but now they're in power, and the hundreds of men have died fighting under the swastikab so it has

become this kind of holy symbol of sacrifice. And once they're in power, the Nazis kind of find it horrifying that some company might use it to sell coffee. In nineteen thirty three, Joseph Gerbels announced the Law for Protection of National Symbols. Quote. If the symbol is used on an object or in connection with it, it may only be used if the object itself has an interrelation to the symbol. The use of symbols for publicity purposes is

in any case forbidden. So basically this law means you can't use a swastika to sell a cigar or whatever, right unless it's like you're doing a fundraiser for the Nazi Party, then you can probably get away with it. For the Nazis, the swastika then had come full circle from a symbol that they co opted to mainstream their image to a sacred object restricted from commercial use unless

that commercial use was Nazi in origin. This created problems for a number of people, particularly people outside of Nazi Germany and Some of those people were Canadians who lived in the quaint northern Ontario town of Swastika, named after Yeah, just picking up the news one morning, like you know,

you're living out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe you don't check in for a while, and then like you see that like Hitler's taking power in Germany and you look at the banner behind him, like, oh, fuck God, this is going to be a problem for us. Swastikers now Swastika Ontario woo. Swastika Ontario was named after the Swastika gold mines staked in nineteen oh seven. The town name was inspired by the Sanskrit symbol, not the other thing. Several mines soon came to dot the boomtown, and all

of them were kind of Swastika themed. There was the Swastika mine. There was also the Lucky Cross mine. In nineteen forty, as the war breaks out, members of Swastika or citizens of Swastika started to feel preture to change the town name. There are a couple of articles at the time where like people in town are like, we're not changing the name. They don't get to take it from us, Like this has been our name longer than

they've been using it, you know. But eventually the provincial government overrules them and they send like I don't know, mounties or whatever to take the swastika sign outside of town and replace it with one that says Winston.

Speaker 3

Winston doesn't have the same ring to it.

Speaker 1

No, no, no, no. Yeah.

Speaker 2

People should have owned like an NFL team with that energy.

Speaker 1

Although it does make me think what if Hitler had adopted as a symbol just a man named Winston or maybe a carton of Winston cigarettes. You know, it is different. World War Two. Yeah, a lot of Americans and Camels writing to Nurember or to a fucking Normandy. So yeah, they changed the town. The provincial government tries to change the town name to Winston, and the Swastikas are so adamant that, like, we're not going to change our town name.

They tear down the Winston sign and they put up their own news sign for Swastika, telling reporters still with Hitler, we came up with our name first.

Speaker 3

Hey, I appreciate the dedication.

Speaker 4

You know, this is where things g Yeah, I mean, you know they're not wrong, right, like because it's not their fault, you know.

Speaker 3

Like that might not be the right hill to die on.

Speaker 1

I wouldn't. This is not the hill I would pick to die on. Just my little town in Ontario has the name, but it makes me think. So, Like, the first big piece of like conflict reporting I did was after the Botoclon massacre in two thousand and fifteen, when Isis murdered dozens and dozens of people in France at that like mass shooting type deal. I did this article where I went through like eight or nine hundred pages of like Isis propaganda and like wrote this thing about

their weird magazine. But like I remember, I spent like two or three days just kind of like stuck in my little office writing this thing, and then I go out to like do laundry at the laundromat near my house, which was the Isis laundromat. So I just remember like looking up at it and being like, that's probably gonna be a problem for you guys.

Speaker 3

Man in the similar vein, we have a dry cleaner that is just called Q cute.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's not on you.

Speaker 3

But I know if we did it first, they haven't changed it.

Speaker 1

There is another funny story about this of Swastika Mountain in southern Oregon. Uh Now, Oregon has a famously bad Nazi problem, so you might assume probably a dark.

Speaker 3

History mountain is a combination of words.

Speaker 1

Swastika Mountain in Oregon. Yeah, in Oregon. But no, it was it was again, it predates the use of that. It was just somebody, some guy decided call it Swastika Mountain. It got renamed like a couple of years ago. It was not all that law ago that that the state was like, you probably shouldn't.

Speaker 3

Have this, Like what year are we talking? Like a couple of.

Speaker 1

Years ago, Like not all that long ago that mountain got renamed northwesterners. It wasn't a big it's not like a major mountain, right, It's not like hood. It's not

one of your money mountains, you know. I also, I can remember there's this farmhouse I used to spend a lot of time in pretty old farmhouse outside of about an hour and a half outside of Reading, in the middle of fucking nowhere, north central California, that the original owner had burnt into the wooden roof all of the different cattle brands from different ranches in the area, and one of them is a fucking swastika, and it was

one of knowing the area. Like I actually knew a guy who had been in the Hitler youth as a kid out there, although he was not a Nazi anymore. You know, the warned when he was fourteen. It's not really on him, but like seeing that and being like just knowing the history. This could just be a thing that people had way back in the day before the Nazis, or it could be a Nazi ranch like rural California, equally likely.

Speaker 2

I looked it up. It's August twenty twenty two, the Open Geographic Nemes Board confirmed that it would no longer be called swastikamountains.

Speaker 1

We did it, guys, We did it, guys.

Speaker 3

They almost died on that hill.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, God bless Oregon. Finally, Yeah, making progress. Everybody really got that knocked out before the election.

Speaker 3

But that's like, it's so fascinating that you can look at that now and actually truly not know. I mean, you can honestly know if you have a dividing line of time, but with these certain like products, you don't have like such a definitive line that happens where you're like, this is not Nazi shit, this is Nazi Nazi shit, you know, and we can say that without any doubt. It's just I had no idea.

Speaker 1

Yeah, pretty cool stuff. So the use of the swastika as a fashion icon had started to fade, albeit uneven, by the end of the nineteen thirties, as this segment from a ride up in Slate makes clear. One incident in nineteen thirty six made that clear swastika motif receives cold reception. Read a small headline in Women's Wear Daily in nineteen thirty six, buttons crusted with swastika shown by one couture house stirred up some comment among an audience

of New York buyers. The editors wrote, no sales of this particular model are reported. Although no reason for this chile response was given, it might be due to the fact that many important New York department stores were owned or founded by Jews, including b Altman, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, Sax Fifth Avenue, and Macy's. Although the Women's Wear Daily article left the designer of these buttons anonymous, Vogue also reported on a fashion show featuring swastika buttons, identifying the

designer as Marcel rochas a well known French courtier. Unlike Women's wear daily, Vogue found the use of the swastika to be amusing rather than disturbing.

Speaker 2

Now eslately telling me it wasn't co Kerschanel.

Speaker 1

There's a pretty I mean, like Coco. There's a pretty good chance that Vogue had no problem at the swastika because the people running it were pretty fucking racist and kind of fans of the Nazis. They, along with many other publications, were cautiously positive about Hitler in the lead up to the war years. That same year, they ran a spread showing the home decors of Hitler in his mountain hideaway, including a prominent swastika cushion on his couch.

Slat says that this was an example of them humanizing Hitler and trying to reinforce the domestic feel of the symbol. They did also include a profile on British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's house at the same time, so I don't know. The article goes on. As late as nineteen thirty seven, Good Housekeeping recommended creating a swastika out of cashews as a cliver cake decoration. I know that's what I'm doing my next birthday. Cashw swastika. Baby, Wow, you got a

nut allergy. That's a double problem right there.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so I wonder if your local grocery store would go ahead and pop one in frosting.

Speaker 2

Oh, just going there, try, Yeah.

Speaker 1

Just going through my thirty seven issues of a Good Housekeeping and uh yeah, they recommended this. Can you do this cave for me?

Speaker 3

This is what I want.

Speaker 1

But in nineteen forty, the Boy Scouts finally decided they'd had enough of the hook cross. At that year's jamboree in Santiago, Chile, a vote was taken to abandon the swastika due to the fact that Boy Scouts and Scout leaders had been heckled and pelted with shit while marching through streets with swastikas on their uniform And again, hard to blame anyone in nineteen forty for seeing a bunch

of dudes in military style uniforms with white swastika. Isn't going I'm gonna throw some stuff at those kids.

Speaker 3

It's two late boys. You gotta give up the symbol.

Speaker 1

Might have to fuck up a Boy Scout over this. The Boy Scout order of the white swastika was, of course, never sacred, and neither was really the town name of Swastika, Ontario. But all of this does create a very serious problem for the Navajo, the Papago, the Pa and the Hope people, all of whom had used the swastika or the the whirling log in various works of religious significance since time immemorial. Right,

this is a religious symbol for them. It is not as simple as just oh, this weird decoration or name that we used is problematic. Now we got to change it, right Like, this is a thing that is a part

of religious observances, you know. But after the Nazi invasion of France, representatives from each of these tribes, the Navajo, the Papago, the Apache, and the Hope sign a proclamation on the whirling log symbol because the above ornament, which has been a symbol of friendship among our forefathers for

many centuries, has been desecrated recently by another nation of peoples. Therefore, it is resolved that henceforth, from this date and forevermore, our tribes renounced the use of the emblem commonly known today as the swastika on our blankets, baskets, art objects, sand paintings, and clothing. Now I want you to really think about that, right, because they've done nothing wrong and

the Whirling Log has done nothing wrong. They are choosing to give up a sacred symbol because of something a completely different group of people across the world have done with a version of that symbol as an act of solidarity with their victims. And I want to be clear, I'm not saying like this is the right thing or not doing this would have been the wrong thing, because I don't think it would have been wrong if they'd said, look,

this is our religious symbol. We're not going to change it just because of these assholes, right, I think that would have been fine too. I'm just saying that's a really noteworthy decision to matter, especially prior to Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 3

I think that's like it is, like you said, it seems like an act of solidarity. We can't exactly know what was going through their heads or their conversations, but it does. I mean, what else could it be except like we can no longer abide this, even if it's like a huge important story in our culture. It's like, what's more important is no longer allowing this symbol to have a power that we don't consent to, Right, it's like,

no matter what. Now, I think it's it's obvious that this, this horrible superpower has basically usurped the use of this and it's just not going to Yeah, you know, it just can no longer mean what it means to outsiders. And maybe that would have been fine if it were just like an internally used symbol, but yeah, what, it's just like heartbreaking, it's really heartbreaking, very sack.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I do have there might be a darker reason, and I'm sure a number of things played into the decision that they made. The darker part of my mind says, well, maybe they were concerned they see what is gearing up, and they think, like, well, if we go to war, you know, this is forties is before the US is

in the war. But like if the United States goes to war with the Germans, it might be dangerous for us to like have this on shit, right, Like we might fucking we might people, This might call some of our people to get targeted, right. That may have also been a factor. I don't that's certainly not like a thing that they write out here. I do think it was probably more just like a solidarity and also like, yeah, just an acknowledgment of the I mean a lot of

Navajo people, a lot of Hope people. You know, a lot of Apache people are going to wind up fighting against the Nazis too, So yeah, it's anyway, it's a remarkable moment and kind of I think worth acknowledging. So we all know the next part of the story, right, you got your World War two, the Nazis, you know, you're doing some stuff, and then America, without anyone else's help, wins the war, right you know, that's I think everyone's

familiar with the gist of the story. So during the war years, it becomes dangerous to be associated with the

Nazis and the swastika. Laura Ingalls, a pilot and a Nazi sympathizer, is put on trial in nineteen forty two and her swastika bracelet is brought up as evidence of for fascist leadings Ingles claims it was just an Indian symbol for good luck, but she is convicted of failing to register as an enemy agent, although her swastika bracelet apparently didn't factor into this, but it does get brought up in the trial. The war ends, the swastika gets

falls and as a political symbol. You know, it becomes profoundly toxic, particularly after knowledge of the Holocaust becomes more widespread. This leads to its disappearance from like, you know, anodyne normal products that like a person would want to have in their house. But it does not lead to its disappearance from popular products. It just causes a change in the kind of products that it shows up on. Stephen

Heller writes quote. It was used increasingly on paperback book covers for spy and mystery yarns, and on covers for men's pulp adventure magazines. Even today, the most common sanctioned mainstream use of the mark is on jackets for fiction and nonfiction books with World War Two themes. In the late forties and fifties, the male public's fascination with things Nazi was disturbingly fetishistic, and to an extent it still is. Yet publishers knew what they were doing. From a marketing standpoint.

The swastika was such an identifiable icon, a magnet, so to speak, that a browser could perceive content without ever reading the title. It is indeed ironic that the swastika has evolved from benevolent sign to sinister national emblem to a veritable point of purchase display in only a few generations. And he provides a really interesting example of this that Svie's going to show you from the men's magazine World of Men.

Speaker 3

We got the Girls, We got the Men.

Speaker 1

So you've got this big two thirds of it is this illustration of like a Nazi He's sticking his bayonet into a woman's a very blonde, white woman's breast. There's a big swastika very visible on his bicep. There's another swastika on this train behind him that's full of Nazi soldiers. There's a woman behind her who's got like a strapless shirt on that's like she looks like she's being taken

into custody or something like that by these Nazis. And then the title of uh the the apparent story that these pictures are for is lust slaves of Hitler's Walsap butcher.

Speaker 2

Oh god, wow, the mistress demands soft flesh.

Speaker 3

I was gonna say, that's one of the other big stories.

Speaker 1

There's a lot of great stories in this episode. Now, Chelsea, I'm not a word cop, but I will say you never need to use the phrase lust slaves. That's never a necessary term. There's no need to ever use the phrase lust slave.

Speaker 3

No, it should really be retired from Yeah.

Speaker 2

How to master today is sex Starved Woman?

Speaker 1

Yeah? It's another article in World.

Speaker 2

You were with a Bayonet Avenue call Girl.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, revealed sin capers have turned on co Ed's Man World of Men. Yeah, because bloody horror.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Uh what an incredible magazine now the cover shows Yeah, so it's great stuff. Now, when I saw this incredible magazine, absolute work of historical art, I knew I had a sacred duty to try and find a copy, and unfortunately I couldn't. But the Internet archive does have a collection of men's magazines from the fifties and sixties, and I will promise you all we'll do a whole episode going through some of these in the future because they look incredible.

Here's one cover that I just want to talk about. It has nothing to do with Nazis, but it's glorious. Chelsea, look at this, Sofie.

Speaker 3

Let's see it.

Speaker 2

I'm sorry, chelsee Oh.

Speaker 1

Teen Sororities, Schools for Free Love, Passion and Orgies exposed suburban sex cults, how they operate Exclusive Beware the World of Lust Without Love and it's like a picture of a shake and there is a Nazi. Actually the swastika is not fully visible, but there's like a shake and a Nazi tying a woman in a red dress to a palm tree, and she actually has pawns for the reds shafts of steel.

Speaker 3

There's also a real picture of a woman on this one up there.

Speaker 1

There is a real picture of a woman. She looks like she is topless. I'm guessing these are kind of playboy Yeah, yeah, she looks great.

Speaker 3

She looks great.

Speaker 1

Helpless brides of the lash in Satan's hell.

Speaker 3

That's what I want. I want all that satanic panic content, all that early sex cult panic. Yeah.

Speaker 1

Look, these are there's problematic aspects of this, but I think we can all agree the people who wrote these titles used the English language in a way that is unique and beautiful. Hey everyone, Robert here, As you've noticed, my audio just took the dive in quality. That is because my zoom recorder died forever, irrevocably while we were recording this episode, and I did not notice it because I was lost in the heat of the moment. Which is also a pretty good song by the band Asia anyway,

I I don't know why my zoom died. Perhaps it was the crypto fascists, you know, trying to stop this episode from airing. Perhaps it was the Reds using the crypto fascists as cover in order to stop my investigation into their lust slave cartel. We'll never know, but I do apologize. My audio for the rest of this episode will be the Zoom safety audio we used and is a slightly lower quality.

Speaker 3

Yes, they definitely knew how to get attention. Are you following with Jack Chick?

Speaker 1

Oh? God, yes, absolutely, we just did.

Speaker 3

We just did a three parter on Jack Chick, The King the Gohast.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

It just reminds me a little bit, you know, totally different like motivations, but very similar pulpy, you know, extreme content.

Speaker 1

Jack Chick is actually the primary sponsor of this podcast. So we're worried about going to hell because you've been reading men's magazines from the nineteen fifties. You are to come on and help you out right after this. Ah, we're back, boy, My soul fields cleansed. Oh I'm not even thinking about helpless Brides of the Lash and Satan's Hell anymore, Chelsea.

Speaker 3

No, I've got a new Lord and Savior.

Speaker 1

A new Lord and Savior.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I could look at these magazines for hours and we will soon, don't worry, folks.

Speaker 3

I hope.

Speaker 1

So while the use of the swastika in Western nations was confined to bad guys and entertainment media for decades, elsewhere in the world it did have occasional resurgences. And this brings us back to India. Now India again, it's both pretty distant from Nazi aggression. The Nazis aren't really a threat in the subcontinent, and it's also a place

where swastikas are a very popular religious symbol. One of the weird things I spent months living in Northeast India, primarily Delhi, and one of the things that was always really I mean, at first, at least there's a week two it was weird and then it became kind of normal. It is like right in the front of like many houses, there's just a swastika. Now it's not the same, like it's reversed. There's usually like a series of dots and stuff around it. But it's a very common decoration on

the front of houses. Now, the fact that the swastika in you know, Hindu culture particularly has a history that has nothing to do with the Nazis. Also has coexisted the fact that there is a very complex modern history of the Nazis in India and their relation to particular like Hindu nationalists political parties. Because the Nazis fought against the British Empire, a good number of Hindu nationalists were

willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is compounded with the fact that popular Nazis spiritual philosopher Saviitri Devi lived in India much of her life organized with a lot of people who will be the political precursors to the party that is the party of the Prime Minister of India in Gramodi, who is very far right and kind of even beyond this, the Nazis send researchers to parts of the subcontinent with a group called the Onanairb which is like a it is the group

doing a lot of like this occult research and stuff and sort of the pre war Nazi era to kind of investigate the origin point of the Aryans in India. Right, So there's a lot of reasons why there's this kind of like complex history of the Nazis within India.

Speaker 3

Well, and Hiller really admired India. Yeah, you're like EuroAsia sort of.

Speaker 1

You know, there's a makes sense, a complex history there, and it's it's problematic at times. And part of what makes it problematic is like, because of distance, there's not really this sense of the immediacy of Hitler's crimes for a lot of folks in that part of the world, and this will cause some complicated problems. In the late nineteen sixties, contemporaneous to an American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, an Indian Nazi party formed in New Delhi using the

German Hagenkroi as It's simple. It promised that if elected to power, India would be the strongest power on the planet. They failed to get any real support. The Indian Nazi Party does not take off, but actual Nazi imagery retains a sort of low key popularity in the subcontinent, alongside the more traditional religious uses of the swastika, and some of this contributed to the rise of a culture of

admiration for Hitler as a business guru within India. Hitler is one of the best known sort of business influencers. You might say Wow, this is a more complicated topic than we're going to talk about today. But it's because of this history, because you can find like management books

that are like management lessons from Hitler and stuff. If you google around as a result of all this, if you google around, you'll run into variations of the same story, which is that some Indian business own owner who's kind of mainly aware of like Hitler and the Nazis, as a result of this weird kind of business influencer thing, will open a store or a restaurant with very weird

and specific Nazi branding. It will get covered in a news article, a lot of people will get angry, and there will nearly always be a follow up interviewing the owner of the store, who kind of seems befuddled that anyone's pissed about this. Here's one example from a two thousand and six New York Times article. Boonite Sablock, twenty three years old, in a Novas restaurant tour, says he wanted a catchy cafe name to sell his three to four dollars plates of Christina Tono pear and ricotta salad

in panacotta, so he went with Hitler's cross. He put a swastika in the logo. He named his restaurant Hitler, saying Hitler is a catchy name. Everyone knows Hitler. Man.

Speaker 3

It's again. It's good marketing. I guess it draws eyes.

Speaker 4

I guess I know that it makes money, but it does draw eyes. Yeah, I probably don't need to explain that the local Jewish community was not thrilled with this. Later in the article, Sablock is quoted as saying, I never wanted to promote Hitler. I just wanted to promote my restaurant.

Speaker 3

Well, you know what that reminds me of is not that far from where I live. There is a restaurant called the Soup Nazi Kitchen, and you know that's honestly a reference to Seinfeld. But it's like, bro, yeah, I don't know, maybe it says Nazi in your name. It's so weird.

Speaker 1

Part of why these stories tend to blow up is that India has a very large expat population of Israelis a lot of young Israeli kids also travel there. In fact, when I was living in Delhi, one of my friends was this dude who had fled to India so he wouldn't get drafted by the IDF. That same year, there was a big blow up because a guy in Mumbai opened a clothing boutique that was just named Hitler. The

pictures are pretty wild. It's like a high end mall fashion store with a big glowing Hitler logo and there's even a swastika and the dot on the eye. And the owner of the shop, Rajah Shah, expressed shot that people were angry. Telling the AFP, I didn't know how much the name would disturb people. It was only when the store opened I learned Hitler had killed six million people.

Speaker 3

What I lovedumb huh.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's a real that's a real problem for you.

Speaker 3

Huh wow, it is.

Speaker 1

You know, very similarly, when I wanted to start this podcast, the first name that I wanted to launch it, launch it under was just Jeffrey Dahmer. Sophie had to inform me that there was actually a problematic context with that name.

Speaker 3

And what could that be.

Speaker 1

You know, Sophie actually appreciate is there somebody with that name or something?

Speaker 2

Orbert Roberts trying to do a bit here. But he's this is literally a factual story. I believe it.

Speaker 1

The Jeffrey Dahmer cast draw some eyes.

Speaker 2

You know, and and and our sales team was like, oh, I don't know, we do a lot of meal kit services. I don't know if well that'll go.

Speaker 3

An American horst. I mean, then we just get Dahmer the TV show with.

Speaker 1

I don't support his murders, but I am a big fan of the way in which he used different spices. You know. Look, you can divorce the man from from the art. It should be the end of the bit.

Speaker 3

So let's go.

Speaker 1

This is all very dumb. No one should use Hitler as a brand ambassador or try to divorce his management secrets from his crimes more than he was a bad manager. I was going to say, when for a good reason.

Speaker 3

It's not the boss, bitch. You think it's.

Speaker 1

Not the boss, bitch. You think this is not a thing a person should have to say, right. But it's when we get back to the US, which has both a large Jewish population and a lot of folks who are descended from you know, who are who are Indian? Right? Who are who are des he? You know, are Hindu or a Buddhist. It's when we get here that things get very messy because in India again very normal to

c swastikas. It is not a problem. You know, if you've got that as a religious symbol, you know in your house, you know, in your clothing and a decoration. And obviously I don't think no reasonable person would ask that a whole culture stop using a religious symbol because of some assholes used a similar one. But it's a little more complicated in the US, where you've got lots of Holocaust survivors and their descendants who are going to have a powerful gut reaction to skiing something like that.

My gut wants to say, Look, the Hindu swastika is not the hogen KROI. It shouldn't be. We should be able to like talk about this. But like it's also not that simple, right, and this is not hope. I don't want to come across let's lead into here. Neither side's wrong here. I'm not going to come down like condemning either group. This is like a really messy problem, but it isn't It is interesting to me, and I don't think enough people know that this is a a

thing that is an issue. So there have always been a significant chunk of Indian people, of Hindu people, I should say, because a lot of Indians are Muslim who took umbrage at the thought that most of the world had kind of tossed the swastika aside because of the Nazis. In nineteen seventy nine, a Sanskrit scholar P. R. Sarkar claimed that it was the symbol of permanent victory and that like any symbol, it had positive and negative meanings.

His argument was that the right hand swastika was the symbol of Vishnu, while the left hand, which is kind of the one that the Nazis used, was the symbol of Kali. Starting in the early nineteen nineties, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian far right organizations and other fascist political groups in the former Warsaw Pact nations started to revive the swastika for different reasons. Obviously, for whatever. For all of it's, you know, the different things that

were culturally problematic in the Soviet Union. One thing they're good about is you're not allowed to display swastikas in the Soviet Union. Right shouldn't have to explain why. But once the Soviet Union falls, it because it had been banned for so long, and because the right had been, you know, in their eyes, suppressed for so long it gets taken up as this symbol for all of these different right wing national movements are trying to revive it.

And Stephen Heller writes here quote the Soviet Union and Czarist Russia before it was riddled with anti Semitism. Similarly, in the early nineteen nineties, there emerged a virulent strain among ultra right wing groups calling for old fashioned pagrams

and new styled ethnic cleansing. While nestled on the fringe, this decidedly organized milane of monarchist, neo fascist and pamat are memory organizations openly hawked their ideologies on the street until Boris Yeltsen's October nineteen ninety three emergency decrees banned

opposition media. Polemical newspapers with the titles Russia Arise the Russian New Order in People's Business, featuring realistic drawings of heroic looking black shirted Russian stormtroopers, scaprists, anti Semitic caricatures and portraits of Adolf Hitler himself were unashamedly displayed at sidewalk tables throughout Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Various iterations of the swastika, sometimes combined with historic Russian folk iconography, were

also in full view. A visitor to Moscow reported that it was impossible to walk a block without running into at least one of these displays. And this will feed into a lot of the issues that we have in Ukraine and in Russia right now with different Nazi organizations. Right this is where a lot of that has its kind of origin point. And while it is coming back into use in Eastern Europe, it is also starting to get revived in the eighties and nineties in the United

States as a symbol for the right now. The swastika has this really awkward position in US counterculture since the end of the Second World War. The first place, obviously, George Lincoln Rockwell attempts to bring it back with his American Nazi Party, but that's always decidedly fringed. The first kind of place where you see it commonly is biker gangs, and specifically Hunter Thompson is actually the journalist who did some of the first good reporting on this in his

book Hells Angels. But biker gangs in the post World War two era form primarily out of like vets guys who had never been able to integrate into post war society, and a lot of them had fought Nazis, and they had medals and helmets and other booty taken from the Germans, some of which had swastikas which they would wear on their like motorcycle gear, both to shock and to signal like, yeah, I'm an outsider, I'm on the fringe, but I did my time for my country too, So it's.

Speaker 3

Kind of a symbol of valor. At the same time, it's a comp let's say, it's a complicated but that was part of the intention at least was like not like I am a Nazi, but I fought Nazis.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, part of the intentions some of them are Nazis. And then we're getting to that, so that, yeah, this means that a number of the first proto punk types, because a lot of punk culture in the United States says come out of these biker yeah war swastikas and stall helms because they had fought Nazis. But also a lot of these guys are violently anti communists, and so

it becomes complicated. Another group that wears the swastika commonly in the nineteen sixties are surf bums, right, Like surf bums have a lot of different swastik could get a lot of early surfing equipment shops have swastikas or variations of Nazi iconography in their logos. It is not uncommon in the sixties, and a lot of this kind of translates to some of the first punks in the nineteen seventies, some of whom are Nazis and some of whom are just trying to like trigger people.

Speaker 3

Like transgressive behavior.

Speaker 1

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

In the book Subculture the Meaning of Style, author Dick Hebridge relates that one female punk explained to him, punk's just like to be hated for sure.

Speaker 3

Sure, it's the quickest way to get hated.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's all these weird like surf brands and early skating brands that will use pieces of Nazi iconography and will claim they don't have far right sympathies. Some of them do and like become part of you know, kind and some of them don't and are just kind of being edge lords. You know, we

didn't have that term at the time. But all of this is mixed, and the people who are just kind of being edge lords, do it's fair to criticize provide cover to the actual straight up Nazis, you know, they provide sort of space for this to get accepted among

people that allows some recruitment. This is all happening alongside a surge in the late eighties early nineties and actual Nazi organizing and the establishment of groups like White Aryan Resistance who ape aspects of a punk aesthetic, you might say pseudo ironic use of the swastika gives cover two

real Nazis. Now, all of this makes the issue of Hindu people, of Buddhists, of Native Americans in the United States and elsewhere in the West trying to reclaim the swastika very complicated, right because you do you get people who are you know, Hindu or Buddhists being like, I should be able to utilize this symbol that is a religious symbol for me, that's a cultural symbol that I saw, you know, as a kid, and you have you do have you know, members of different indigenous tribes who'd use

the swastika, some whom are saying like, well, maybe we should be able to go back to it. Now. It has been like nearly andred years like, we feel like we did our bit here and this is complex. I'm going to quote from a twenty twenty two ap News article here. It sort of sets up the stakes, she telled. Dio was shocked when she got a letter from her Queen's apartment building's co op board calling her Dwali decoration

offensive and demanding she take it down. My decoration said happy d Wali and had a swastika on it, said Dio, a physician who was celebrating the Hindu Festival of Lights. Doo believes she and people of other faiths should not have to sacrifice or apologize for a sacred symbol simply because it has often conflated with its tainted version. To me, that's intolerable, he said. And like, yeah, that's a fair point.

Speaker 3

Yeah, absolutely, Well, now they're fighting against nineties edge lords who are like spray painting it at the skate park to be like, oh, look at this, like you know.

Speaker 1

This is complex, yeah, very And Among the people who had issue with Dio's display for Duali decoration was Shelley Wernick, who was the managing director of the Jewish Federation's Holocaust Survivor Carowing and she points out that seeing a swastika at home or out and about can be re traumatizing for elderly survivors, which is also a fair point.

Speaker 3

But yeah, of course seeing that in any.

Speaker 1

Context really mess you up. You know, I nobody's I don't. I'm not. There's not like any no one's in the wrong here, right, I'm not like to take out This is complicated. You know what else is complicated? Chelsey?

Speaker 3

What is that?

Speaker 1

The moral dimensions of advertising products and services in order to support a podcast?

Speaker 3

You're telling me, huh huh.

Speaker 1

And that's why we're just gonna ignore it. Here's some ads. Ah, we're back and uh, feeling good, feeling good. So one of the people quoted, and that really quite fatating AP News article is a New York based Buddhist priest who was disturbed when he heard somebody at an inner faith

conference called the swastika the universal symbol of evil. And whatever your stance on the matter is, that simply can't be correct, right like this is still there's like a billion or more people for whom this is still a religious symbol. Hitler doesn't have the power to make that a universal symbol of evil, right Like that is I think a bad way to phrase it. Widely recognized as a symbol of evil is true because a lot of

people do recognize it this way. You know that anyway complicated this Buddhist the Reverend T. K. Nakagaki wrote a book in twenty eighteen called the Buddhist Swastika in Hitler's Cross, Rescuing a symbol of peace from the forces of hate. And one thing that he points out, because he's a big advocate of we should call the symbol that is sacred to all these different peoples the swastika or you know, presumably when you talking about like the Navajo, you would

use the term the whirling log. But when we refer to the Nazi of the symbol, we should call it the hagen Kroi. Right. And one thing he points out that I was unaware of is that in newspapers across the United States the Nazi cross was referred to as the hagen Kroi until the early nineteen thirties when they use the term swastika. Now I get his point here. I don't think that that's like necessarily wrong, but it is worth noting that the Nazis call it out a swastika a lot of the time too, like it is

being used by them at that point in time. And I to be quite frank, at this point, I don't know how you get people to stop in the West to associate hagen Kroi with the Nazis, but not swastika, like you have an easier time with like whirling LG.

Speaker 3

Right, Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1

Now there are legitimate harms that all of this causes for members of faiths who have done nothing wrong. In California, public the display of the swastika has been criminalized. There are exceptions for this, including the sacred swastika used by Hindus, but it does not called the illegal swastika a Hagenkroi and instead uses the term swastika, which could confuse law enforcement, might conceivably lead to problems. Even the worry of this

itself could cause a chilling effect on religious expression. Quote Pushpita Prasad, a spokesperson for the Hindu group, called it a victory, but said the legislation unfortunately labels both Hitler's symbol and the sacred one as swastika's. This is not just an esoteric battle, Prissad said, but an issue with real life consequences for immigrant communities whose members have resorted

to self censoring. Vickas Jane, a Cleveland physician, said that he and his wife hid images containing the symbol when their children's friends visited because they wouldn't know the difference. Jane says he stands in solidarity with the Jewish community, but is sad that he cannot freely practice his Jane faith because of this lack of understanding. He noted that the global Jaane symbol has a swastika in it, but in the United States, the Jain community has deliberately removed

the swastika from its seal. Jane wishes that people would differentiate between their symbol of thas piece and Hitler's swastika, just as they do with the hateful burning cross symbol in Christianity's sacred Crucifix, which I think is a really good thing.

Speaker 3

That is a really good point.

Speaker 1

Certain uses of the Christian cross are definitely offensive and frightening, but we don't say nobody should be wearing a crucifix, right, you know. Now, there's also a growing movement in some indigenous circles to end the year's long prohibition on their use of the swastik or the worling log. The consternation over this by some Jewish organizations is understandable, as is the desire of people to return to their use of

the symbol. Again, no one's wrong here. You know, it's complicated, And I'm going to continue with a quote from that AP article. For the Navajo people, the symbol shaped like a swirl represents the universe in life, said Patricia Ann Davis, an elder at the choctaw Ina Dina is the term for the Navajo people that is actually used by them for themselves. It was a spiritual, esoteric symbol that was woven into the Navajo rugs until Hitler took something good,

beautiful and made it twisted, she said. And I think again I want to say here, I'm not saying either that like Jewish organizations have like a black and white necessarily view about this. Again, there's a lot of appreciation on both sides about what a complex and thorny problem this is. And I don't think anyone's really behaving unreasonably here.

Jeff Kellman, a New Hampshire Holocaust historian, often lectures to Jewish community organizations about the fundamental differences between the swastika and the Hockencroix, and he told the AP he feels like his message about the possibility of redeeming the symbol has gained recent ground among many Jewish survivors and descendants

of survivors. Quote, when they learn an Indian girl could be named Swastika and she could be harassed in school, they understand how they should see these as two separate symbols.

Speaker 2

He said.

Speaker 1

No one in the Jewish community wants to see Hitler's legacy continue to harm people. One of the people quoted in that article is gret At Elbagin. She's an eighty five year old Holocaust survivor whose grandmother and cousins died at Auschway were murdered at Outwards, and she says she

was surprised to learn about the symbols. Past Elbagin was born in nineteen thirty eight, when the Nazis forcibly annexed Austrian She went into hiding with relatives in Hungary and immigrated to the US in nineteen fifty six and became a social worker. This new knowledge about the swastika, Elbergin said, feels liberating. She no longer fears a symbol that was used to terrorize. Hearing that the swastika is beautiful and sacred to so many people is a blessing. She said.

It's time to let go of the past and look into the future. And I'm not saying that that's the only way to think about it either. If you're on the side of this is like a person who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors going like, I don't feel comfortable with this. That's perfectly reasonable too. This is like, again, is very complicated.

Speaker 3

What all this speaks to is like the just the incredible power of symbols right to the human race. It's just so amazing that this same or like a riff on a similar symbol can mean both good luck and this huge hero's journey and this powerful religious story. While on the other hand, it's a symbol of actual mass murder and horror and death, but it's the same symbol.

It's just the power that we have as humans to project onto that whatever we need to or want to or believe and accept the symbols that are given to us by people in power who have a you know, an idea about what the symbol can mean and what it can do. It's wild.

Speaker 1

Yeah, there's a lot covid on here. So I just wanted people to be aware of that, not to take, you know, one side or the other or not that the sides I presented are the only ways to feel about this. This is a tremendously complicated thing to think about, but it is worth thinking about. This is something you should as just as a person, not even as just

like somebody's who's Jane. There's somebody who's you know, Navajo, somebody who's Jewish that you should be thinking about, but just as like a human being, because this is one way or the other, regardless of where you land, This is everyone symbol. It is universal to the human race more or less.

Speaker 3

Right.

Speaker 1

It appears everywhere every place in the world, and it always has.

Speaker 3

And it always has everywhere. That is so wild. It was in Ohio, it.

Speaker 1

Was Ohio, It's all over It's in China. God, it's everywhere.

Speaker 2

Swastika.

Speaker 1

I'm not over that swastika Oregon. Yeah.

Speaker 3

It's so hard because you can't be in solidarity with everyone in this situation. I mean, you can try to be by just.

Speaker 1

Si solidarity for like, wow, this is messy.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and I'd say that's the best way to have solidarity is just to say, like, I actually can't say the answer. I can't say that I can respect everyone in this situation. He's trying to like make a better world through either readopting a symbol or making it disappear.

Speaker 1

It's like, I think it's probably the kind of thing where the only real solutions are ad hoc. You know, if you've got a situation where members of you know, a local Jewish community and you know, sitting down with members of like a Jane community or whatever, and they're they're talking about how to allow, you know, how to have the symbol expressed in its original religious meaning in

a way that's not going to make people uncomfortable. That's fine if you've got you know, somebody wants to display Dwally thing in their apartment building, and there's an elderly Holocaust survivor and they decide, well, I guess we won't put this outside because it might scare this this elderly person, and like we don't want to do that. I think

that's also reasonable. I think if another thing happened, there's not I don't have I don't have like a clear there's the wrong or the right thing to do here. This is just like one of the legacies of you know, World War Two, but also just a thing that human beings always have to deal with, is the Yeah, I know it's complicated, very complicated. Should be aware that it's a thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3

Absolutely. I am so happy that this was the topic that I got because I just I can't believe I didn't know this. I'm absolutely just shocked and awed at all of this.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if you want a really good book on the subject, the swastika symbol Beyond Redemption question Mark by Stephen Heller, very readable. Whenever this comes up, whenever there's an issue of like somebody displays the swastika for religious reason and it causes like a conflict, Stephen usually gets interviewed by like the journalists writing about it because he's just like the guy who writes about this very good book. I do recommend it if you're interested in more detail.

Speaker 3

Anyway, Chelsea, get anything to plug, sure, I mean, I'm just you know what, I will specifically plug an episode of my podcast American Hysteria called Astrology and the series we did because it deals with not only astrologers as they existed in the White House and advising for me, which is a yes, yep, you know, you know, But it also goes into how the Nazis used astrologers as like secret agents as well to sort of push propaganda, and that just seems like kind of in the same

vein of this this series here and yeah, American Asterria, you can find it anywhere. We study moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories and how they've affected American history.

Speaker 1

Oh yeah, yeah, well you can find me right here. You can find my novel After the Revolution wherever books are sold. Just type After the Revolution into any book thing, or again, screech it from the top of your lungs while waving some sort of carved war club at the guy who runs the Barnes and Noble, you know, or Applebee's or sorry yeah, or Applebee's whatever.

Speaker 2

That's the episode Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. More from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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