I’m a member of the 1st generation after World War II. My parents were alive and survived the Nazi occupation in Norway, and my father served in the Resistance against them. He never spoke that much about it with me, and I can more than understand the reasons why. After all, there’s a reason behind the phrase ‘War is Hell,’ right?
Sufficed to say, I’ve grown up with a somewhat visceral hatred for all things ‘Nazi,’ from the symbolism to the underlying philosophy that spawns it. Any time I mentioned perhaps putting a swastika or iron cross on something, my mother would give me a stink-eye that could chill water. That only ever happened once. Fine, I was a momma’s boy, OK? Fuck you.
So you can imagine that lately I’ve been watching a lot of this ‘Nazi’ stuff being thrown around on the Internet like so much monkey crap. Words like ‘Nazi,’ ‘Fascist,’ and the like are being applied to people with a sense of levity that, in my opinion, de-values the true gravitas of the accusation. Times were that when that accusation was used, it meant something. Now, this new ignorant generation of compulsive label junkies have added it to their redundant, insignificant arsenal of sexist, racist, misogynist, etc.
I don’t believe Nazis exist anymore. At least not in the context that many on the far left/SJW side would have us believe. To me, that word evokes images of sharply-dressed, goose-stepping soldiers rounding up sub-sections of the human race for transport to a death camp. It’s brown-shirted gangs of thugs pouring out into the streets targeting folks for being gay, Jewish, black, what have you. I don’t see that happening, do you? At least, not on the side of the folks most being accused of being Nazis. Now, look at groups like Antifa, BLM, etc., and there you see the violence most usually associated with the Nazis.
I’m not here to discuss or debate that though. These days debates are little more than sides yelling at each other with no real exchange of information and ideas going on. What I am talking about is this recent attempt by some company to take back the swastika and make it into a symbol of love and tolerance, specifically for the LGBT community.
Historically, the symbol was used in the East as a symbol of good luck, as well as several other positive things. The Nazi’s interpretation of the symbol is a 45-degree rotation of it, and was originally supposed to evoke a sense of nationalistic pride in the German people. Given how spectacularly bad the war went for them, their version of the swastika almost instantly evokes a sense of hatred toward the person/organization that dares to rally to it.
Enter KA Design, a company that’s trying to re-take the true meaning of the swastika by designing shirts that painted the symbol in rainbow colors with words like ‘love’ and ‘zen.’
While I applaud the efforts to try and introduce the ‘true’ meaning of the symbol to the west, it also shows a gross amount of naive arrogance that can only be associated with an uneducated youth bereft of empathy or a sense of history. There are still survivors of that war living today, and descendants that are only one step away from it (myself inlcuded). Trust me, this wound is still way too fresh to even consider something like this. Whoever green-lit this idea is a complete idiot, or a serious hard-core troll. I imagine over the next few weeks we’ll hear more about it.
Nazi Germany took a benign, positive symbol and through their ideology, perverted it into a symbol that strikes a chord of hatred in the deepest core of the west. It may take decades, or even centuries before we on this side of the globe will be willing to see the symbol as anything else. All I know is that it won’t be this generation that makes that change, no matter their intentions.