Symbols

The other day, a distant cousin and her daughter came to visit my parents’ farm, and my grandpa was there telling stories about our/their ancestors. He’d brought some old pictures, and one of them had portrait photos of the pupils in a one-room schoolhouse in 1908. Among them were my great grandfather and his two brothers. I was looking at the pictures up close, and was shocked to see that one of my grandpa’s uncles had a swastika-shaped pin on the knot of his tie. At first, I was appalled–I’ve never heard much of anything about my great grandfather’s siblings, but I feel like a Nazi in the family would have been something I’d have heard about. Then I remembered that the pictures were from 1908–definitely before Hitler’s rise to power. So then I was curious. I’d never really known where the swastika symbol came from, or that it existed before the Nazis started using it. Naturally, Googled it.

Mukti Jain Campion wrote in a BBC News Magazine article on 23 October, 2014 that the swastika “…goes back thousands of years and has been used as a symbol of good fortune in almost every culture in the world.” This article, entitled How the world loved the swastika – until Hitler stole it, quotes Steven Heller’s book, The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? saying, “Coca-Cola used it. Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. The Boy Scouts adopted it and the Girls’ Club of America called their magazine Swastika. They would even send out swastika badges to their young readers as a prize for selling copies of the magazine.” Later in the article, it talks about how the “…Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th Century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans. This idea was seized upon by anti-Semitic nationalist groups who appropriated the swastika as an Aryan symbol to boost a sense of ancient lineage for the Germanic people.”

So, basically, Hitler and his cronies took a symbol that had a lot of positive associations and turned it into something that stood for hate. I don’t really want to delve into any more Hitler history, so I’ll leave it at that. The point is, for a moment I’d thought that there had been a teenage Nazi in my family tree, but it turns out he was probably just a kid hoping for some good luck.

I guess there’s not much of a story in this post, but it is a reminder that snap judgments are often inaccurate. And that having some basic, factual, historical knowledge can be helpful. So research things, friends. Learn actual facts. Be informed.