A History of the Swastika

Neo-Nazis, trying to side-step the ban on displaying the swastika in Germany and elsewhere, will tell the authorities that their icon is nothing to do with the Third Reich.

It's far more ancient than that.

They're Pagans reclaiming a past stretching back into antiquity. They're pulling back into the limelight a symbol found all over the mosaic floors of Imperial Rome, or the decorative pieces of Classical Greece.

They're waving loud and proud iconology from ancient Poland, Armenia and the Celtic nations. It's just a symbol from a Viking comb.

The fact is that they're right. They could just as easily gone for a long and venerable history of the swastika elsewhere. Perhaps as the four stations of the soul in Jainism, after all every one of the Jain temples and holy books have to display it. Maybe instead as the symbol of infinity for Zoroastrians, or prosperity in Buddhism.

Most of all, they could have reached into the millennia old traditions of Hinduism, wherein the swastika is as important as the cross in Christianity. Here it represents the face of God (the Brahman) watching the four directions of the world at once, while doubling as the icon of Purushartha.

But, of course, all of these religions have their heartlands in Asia, where the adherents aren't white Europeans. Not the kind of people embraced by Neo-Nazis.

Nor do those right wing racists get away with their pseudo-Pagan protests. The authorities aren't that stupid, particularly when these swastikas are wielded by people chanting anti-Semitic slogans.

This beautiful icon should still symbolize all that is good, prosperous, creative, lucky and divine. For tens of thousands of years it did. Then September 15th 1935 came along and the swastika was utterly trashed.

The changing of the flag had also incurred a subtle redefining of its meaning, and that related to the Nuremberg Laws being passed that day inside the Reichstag.

It wasn't only the Jews stripped of all rights as citizens that day. It was anyone who was deemed to have non-German blood. Those who were classified as Germanic were declared Reichsbürger, which was specifically stated as having Aryan ancestry.

The swastika flew above them not as the flag of the Nazi Party, but as the icon of the Aryan people. It was then used in this context across countless propaganda pieces, from pamphlets, letter-heads, tapestries on walls, television and film media through to badges of office and/or belonging.

It became the symbol indelibly associated with the Holocaust. Displayed prominently in concentration camps and death camps, as an icon of Aryan supremacy over non-Aryan people.

The swastika was Aryan, and nobody disputes that. What would be faintly amusing - if the reality wasn't so horrific - is what it actually means, compared to what Nazis, past and present, erroneously believe it means.

The swastika was an Aryan symbol. It had come from India, the very cradle of that superior force rampaging through the inferior races and subduing them, before moving to Germany and making sauerkraut.

Yes, I did get a little facetious towards the end there. But it was no more bizarre and completely false than Hitler's own version. Though granted, the swastika did come from India, amongst a whole lot of other places.

In truth, the Aryan people were mostly an invention of the British, as part of the propaganda machine justifying their expansion of the British Empire into India. Real histories - about the return of the Āryāvarta people (Indians too) to India circa 1500 BCE - were rewritten to make them white Europeans. Then loads of crap inserted on top.

Just for the record, the true descendents of the 'Aryan' race are the Gujarati people and their neighbors. Not the British, nor the Germans, nor the Austrians.

As much of Northern India are Hindu people, then 'the Aryan man' really has struggled for victory under the swastika. But only because it's the symbol of the Brahman, Vishnu and the four streams of Purushartha. A peaceable, creative icon of infinity.

And the Aryan people would really like their pseudo-historian detractors to stop trailing said icon through the murk of violent racism now.