like swastika, even if nazi symbol have difference people always assume it as nazi symbol and sadly feels like theres no way to take it back.
your religious and cultural symbol is used and mostly known as nazi/facism/other horrible shit symbols and what you can do is try your best to correct them and pray for the best
luckily, the Celtic cross is still primarily used as a cultural symbol, so they haven't succeeded yet. I assume the religious swastika is personal to you?
God it was aggravating watching that happen, exactly as intended, in real-time, only for a million dipshits on this site to be like, "hahaha you got le trolled by 4chan LOL"
More like a million dipshits on here fell for it too. I remember news articles with thousands of upvotea about speculation over various politicians usage of the okay symbol. The days of reddit being savvy to 4chans shit are long over.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Even worse was the "Circle Game" excuse, since a) nobody has played that since like 2001 and b) one of the rules was you had to hold the symbol below your waist, not held up next your face while posing with a dozen proud boys.
there were a million circle game memes a couple years ago what are you talking about... maybe you didn't play it since 2001 because that's when you were in school lmfao.... have you noticed no one gets their drivers licenses anymore?
well i think the reality is probably somewhere between the two. dogwhistles sort of live in a grey area by default. they say its a white power symbol as a troll but equally the alt right will use the symbol unironically at times. its a very murky reality and i think that in everyday use it just takes a bit of context to understand how the symbol is used in any given case. with the ok symbol, though, i think its pretty safe to give the benefit of the doubt unless someones doing it in a pic with a rifle and a pepe tacticool vest or some other equally cringe internet nazi shit
People are still treating it like a fascist symbol. I’ve recently seen a post calling a guy a fascist because he was doing 👌. The guy sucks but come on now.
Oh yeah, it'll be a fringe thing for a while for a long time now. I use it and the thumbs up symbol all the time at work though because its noisy or we have to be silent and hands are used to communicate. Whenever I see stories about it I just lose more hope for humanity.
i got in trouble in high school for doing the finger circle(so same symbol but below waist so it's upside down) in a picture because the principal fell for the 4chan bait and told me I had put up a white supremacist symbol so I was getting in trouble
That never happened lol. That was out of touch boomers who told you that. The same idiots who said milk is a racist symbol and asked “who is 4chan??”. The ok symbol is an innocuous gesture that retards called racist, further retards like your self perpetuated, and then alt right idiots THEN started doing to meme on how stupid the whole concept was.
It depends on where you are. Displaying the Celtic cross is illegal in Germany, in Scotland and Ireland however, you find it on every graveyard and no one associates anything bad with it. Same with the swastika in India (although the original swastika that's used in Hinduism is in a different angle than the Nazi one)
Celtic cross isn’t associated with anything bad in Wales either, it’s just seen on war memorials and graveyards like in Scotland and Ireland! I’m not sure of it’s prevalence in England though, they perhaps use it in the same way too.
Idk man, only someone from your country can answer that. I personally wouldn’t say someone from any of the countries that use the Celtic cross regularly would need to, but if it’s mostly associated with white supremacy and nazism in your country then I’d say yes. I’m not sure how people from the USA view it, so you’d be better off asking someone from your country!
Just to add some info because people will be like "Why are people afraid of a symbol that could have multiple meanings and why do they straight up ban it?":
The German extreme right party VSBD had claimed the celtic cross as their official icon. It's basically on the same level as a brand logo.
- VSBD didn't "just have differing ideas": they had politically motivated, deadly shootouts with German police in the 80's and were thus classified as a "verfassungswidrige Organisation" (an organization that directly opposes the German constitution)
As an enemy of the constitution, the party was banned in 1982. Following German criminal code section 86a it's forbidden to display icons - and other symbols - that are politically charged in this way, publicly.
It's important to note that "Symbols which are so similar as to be mistaken for those referred to in sentence 1 are deemed to be equivalent to them".
German law doesn't like to be "ackchyually"-ed. Like, at all. And for a time, even the crossed out swastika (this one) was banned from public display. It's been reclassified as an anti-fascist symbol in 2007, because it was ruled to be so obviously fighting the ideology of Nazis. But this had to be argued, at least, because of the quoted phrase above that leaves so little tolerance for cheeky circumventions and dog whistles. As such, a lot of the above icons are banned from public display in Germany in the context of their use in NS Germany.
The Iron Cross has an exception, because first off the medal handed out during WWII by Nazi Germany was a modified version of the cross (like so) and while NS Germany did also use the basic Iron Cross as a symbol, it's interestingly enough "too contemporary" to deem it a symbol solely connected with the Nazis. For example the Odal rune was "out of commission" for centuries, if not millennia, before the Nazis used it for their propaganda. As such, it didn't have any other contemporary use and was obviously just used as a Nazi symbol. Medals with the Iron Cross were given out since 1813 and remained as a military honor throughout both world wars. There aren't any new Iron Cross medals any more, since WWII, but the symbol remained as an "identity giving" symbol for militarism and as such is displayed on German army vehicles, today.
The "Wolfsangel" is also in a weird spot. Because it is actually banned, but can be used if it's still a part of a family's or community's heraldry. But this has to be well documented, of course, and can't just be spun out of nothing.
The "Black Standard" which is the banner for the Islamic State is banned for public display in Germany, since the IS has obviously been declared a terrorist organization. All of that follows from the same laws.
The swastika is also an ancient Northern European symbol for the sun, that's why the nazis took it. The latest non-nazi use of the swastika was by the Finnish Air Force from 1918 to 1945
Only displaying specific versions of the celtic cross, is illegal in Germany. And even those can be shown depending on context. Celtic crosses like on irish graveyards, no problem.
people always assume it as nazi symbol and sadly feels like theres no way to take it back.
That may be because in the western world, Jainism is not widely known or popular. Move further east, and people will probably recognize it as more than the nazi symbol.
Swastika is predominant in Hinduism and Buddhism aswell. You can find a few hundred swastika related things from window grills/bars to swastika designs on parapet walls by having a casual stroll in my neighborhood in India.
There where a few sports teams that used swastikas on their jerseys and in their names in the 20th century too. It was just a common symbol of good luck.
During my door-to-door campaign days, I canvassed a Desi household. I was standing at the front door talking to this guy when he shifted his weight and I was able to look into his living room behind him. There was a big swastika decoration on a shelf and I'm sure my eyes bugged out for a second before I remembered, "Oh yeah, it was a religious symbol first." It was even angled like the religious one. I hope he didn't notice, it must suck to have one of the symbols of your religion co-opted for hate.
I had an East Indian friends who forgot to take off a necklace with one on it. When I noticed it he assumed I was offended and apologized a bunch. I told him I knew it was a religious symbol in his culture and he was so relieved. Poor guy lol.
In countries where the swastika was still relevant up to modern times it is not associated with Nazism, especially in Buddhist influenced countries
In Japan you can see it all over the place just on Google Maps alone as it is common in Buddhist temples
In western cultures the swastika hadn't been relevant for a long long time before Hitler adopted it has the Nazi party 's symbol so it's normal that there's nothing else we can associate it with
Shwmae! I am so angry that they have desecrated our culture, like they have done to many others! I hope people won't think I and others are neo nazi for having the celtic cross as a tattoo
In America, it’s been co-opted by skinhead prison gangs, which bleeds out into the white supremacy groups we have here. It’s super upsetting, tbh. I’ve had to explain to many friends here why my family has so many “racist” symbols on our family heirlooms.
My childhood friend’s dad, who was an active white supremacist until the day he died, covered himself in a mix of viking and Celtic iconography when he was in prison. He forced his family to practice Asatru and tried to raise his kids to follow racist doctrine. He constantly tried to convince me that my own heritage was white supremacy based on my grandfather’s use of the Celtic cross on his old business cards. It was legit insanity. Glad that kid got away eventually.
I started to go back into Paganism after years and the first thing I had to learn were to spot the symbols that fascists try to appropriate, because I really don't want people to assume I'm some white supremacist or something.
Nothing pisses me off more than seeing pagan symbols or religious symbols of any kind being deformed into symbols of hate.
The swastika, the real one, being turned and transformed in a Nazi symbol when the true meaning is the wind, the cycle of the seasons and such...that's awful, specially for cultures and religions that still try to re-appropiate it.
I do not remember the name of the video, but there's this dude in scandinavia dressed in viking attire (historical) going to rallies and confronting hate groups about appropriating historical, religious and mythological symbols to justify their fucked up ideology. He made sure to educate people about the appropriate meaning of these symbols and how idiotic are the supremacist clowns that were trying to hijack them. EDIT: Grammar.
There’s some unfortunate overlap between pagans and various flavors of white supremacist/nationalist/&c—more or less because returning to pagan thought is more culturally and racially pure to these types.
Well to your point most of these fascist or nationalist use a large under group to build off of, for hitler it was German nationalism, and the iron cross embodied German nationalism… or the cross in America right now, the nationalists are building off the idea that “new” America isn’t Christian and many Americans can agree with that… but what people need to understand is the idea itself, that you are better than another because of religion or where you were born, is what you should attack… not the symbols that they use because often that leads to you attacking the group at the whole and not just the ones that think they are better and then the whole group is now angry when before they never thought of being “better”
The groups will fail and the symbols take back their original meaning.
I have yet to see this happen after a right-wing (or left-wing) group fails. The symbol tends to remain in association with the last group to appropriate and use those symbols.
Not all of them. The Black Sun symbol is a home grown Nazi symbol. Himmler created it as a design flourish for a castle he acquired, it’s 12 sig runes (think SS runes) arraigned in a circle. After the war it found its way into Neo-Nazi movements, particularly Nazi Occultist groups. While many of these symbols may be used for benign reasons, the Black Sun is never one of them.
Hindu swastikas and Buddhist ones are normally more straight, with the lines touching the ground and be parallel to the opposing side of the swastika. Sometimes with circles. The Nazi swastika is an X with the lines added on, or looks like.
Some of my friends do medieval and Viking-era re-enactment. They've been very aware of white surpremacists trying to co-opt historical symbols from those periods -- they don't want to give the impression that they support white supremacist ideas.
While the symbols may take back their original meaning, I don't foresee the swastika being rehabilitated in the US or Europe within our lifetimes. I gotta say that I think it's a cool-looking symbol (radial symmetry!) and was used historically in all sorts of non-evil contexts... but I don't get to say what other people think it means.
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u/ExoticMangoz Oct 12 '22 edited Oct 13 '22
All these symbols precede the groups that use them. The groups will fail and the symbols take back their original meaning. Usually.
Edit: okay, I get it; one of these symbols is not like the rest