Taking Back the Swastika

The black rectangles in South Park where the swastikas used to be—that always bothered me. We censored the symbol so hard that we basically handed ownership of it to the Nazis permanently. That’s not how you fight them.

The swastika means peace in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions going back thousands of years. Eternity. Endless peace. And then the Nazis grabbed it, and we’ve been so afraid of it ever since that we let them keep it completely. In Germany especially, you can’t show it. Hindu people can’t use their own religion’s symbol openly. We erased it to reject what it became, and instead we just accepted that the Nazis get to own it forever.

The argument for reclaiming it makes sense to me. If we actually let the symbol mean what it meant before and what it still means to Hindus and Buddhists now, then it stops belonging to fascists. They lose it. The poisoning doesn’t go away, but it becomes one chapter in a longer history instead of the whole story. The symbol gets bigger than what they did with it.

Maybe that’s naive. Maybe symbols don’t work like that. But the alternative—just letting them have it forever, erasing it from culture to prove we’re against them—feels like accepting defeat. We’re so afraid of the symbol that we’ve given it complete power. We’re reinforcing their claim on it by refusing to use it any other way.

I think I’d rather take it back. Make it mean what it’s supposed to mean again. Let it be bigger than the worst people who ever used it.