Art Reclaims a Lost Symbol From Hate

By Steve Brown

From the April/May 2008 issue of The Sun Runner Magazine

Art is the stored honey of the human soul,
gathered on wings of misery and travail.
– Theodore Dreiser

It is an ancient symbol, dating back to Neolithic times, its name derived from Sanskrit, ironically carrying the conno-tation of good luck, its translation roughly meaning "associated with well-being." It’s name? Swastika.

The swastika has appeared in many cultures and locations, from Iceland to India. I remember stumbling upon a beautiful and well-preserved mosaic on the floor of an ancient ruin on the sacred island of Delos in Greece. Its border was a swastika pattern. The swastika was found on a mosaic in the ruins of Pompeii. It appeared as a symbol at various times in Indo-Aryan, American Indian, Persian, Roman, Celtic, Greek, Hittite, Hopi, Navajo, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Mithraist, and Jainist cultures and faiths. It was found in ancient Troy, though I didn’t see it there, as well as Russia, Denmark, Finland, England, Poland, the Ukraine, Iran, Korea, China, Japan, Lebanon, Iran, and Tibet. It has been used by everything from Boy Scout groups to sports teams, and on clothes, coins, temples, bridges, ballots, stock certificates, historic buildings, carpets—you name it, the swastika has probably been on it at one time or another throughout history.

But starting in the 1920s, the Nazi Party in Germany adopted the formerly auspicious symbol and made it the strident sign of the Nazi’s campaign of evil, hate, and death. The red, white, and black colors of the Nazi banner were taken from the old German imperial flag. It was the Nazi’s Aryan connection, though it is doubtful any of the symbol’s historical Aryan users would ever have endorsed its denigration by Hitler and his überthugs.

Evidently, the Thule-Gesellschaft, or Thule Society, had used the swastika in its symbology, and the Nazis had numerous connections with that organization. By 1935, the Nazi flag with the swastika had become the official flag of the German nation, and the world became intimately acquainted with the formerly auspicious symbol, whose arrival usually heralded a most inauspicious arrival of German troops.

Most of us are acquainted enough with the evils perpetrated upon this sad little world by Hitler and the Nazis that it would be redundant to restate them here. Suffice to say that during the time of the Nazis, the swastika was an emblem that presided over some of the worst examples of mankind’s inhumanity, brutality, and insane genocidal machinations.

It is a sad comment that even today, some people with more hate than brains continue to look to the swastika for the wrong reason. That the Nazis were finally and justly defeated and their evils exposed as the cruel, bent lies they were, only serves as inspiration for these small-minded, violent criminals, whose only philosophy is hating others because they themselves are so sadly pathetic as human beings.

Ramon Mendoza, an artist based here in the hi-desert, created an art installation, The Eagles Beak, for the EarthWorks at Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree, that incorporates the swastika into its design. Mendoza is not someone who would ever consider endorsing a hate group, and he used the double swastika in his work along with other symbols as emblems of ancient cultures, going back to the swastika’s original meaning.

A number of desert residents have condemned Mendoza and the college for displaying these symbols, but I think that is unfair. If someone effectively co-opts a benign and universal symbol for a vile purpose, does it become a part of the history of that symbol that we may learn from, or must that symbol never return to its original meaning? Symbols have been used, and abused, by humanity throughout history, as various peoples have used and abused others.

I think we can acknowledge the Nazi’s misuse of an otherwise innocuous symbol, and we can also acknowledge that Mendoza’s artwork, and other works like it, lend no support to hateful ideologies. Instead, these works remind us of a time before, when the meaning of this symbol was beneficial, not harmful. In these works, those who came long before Hitler’s rampage are connected once again with the present, and history’s story grows longer than World War II.