Talk:Swastika

Direction of movement, Vinča & modern use

"The investigators put forth the hypothesis that the swastika moved westward from the Indian subcontinent to Finland, Scandinavia, the Scottish Highlands and other parts of Europe."

This is backwards to the apparent dates of the inscriptions found e.g. it appears in Ukraine ~10,000bce, then Hungary/Romania/Bulgaria/Serbia ~3,000 to 6,000bce, then Iran ~5,000bce, then the Indian subcontinent ~3,000bce, indicating it was moving Eastward. The introduction of the article also suggests appropriation of the symbol from the East, despite the archaeological evidence suggesting the opposite.

The article should probably discuss the Vinča archeological finds more in the prehistory section. It's worth noting that archaeological surveys unearthed Vinča symbols around the end of the 1800s and start of the last century. It was in use as a flag emblem by the National Christian Union party, led by Alexandru Cuza, in Romania, in 1922. 14 years prior, Vinča archaeological finds had been made in Serbia. Evidence suggesting that it was selected as an emblem as a result of its presence in the archeological finds can be found in the article pertaining to Cuza himself; e.g. Cuza mentions the Swastika and "signs were found on our soil", an apparent reference to the Vinča archaeological finds. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.0.56.5016:40, 1 May 2024 (talk)

Appropriation

" Nazi Party who appropriated it from Asian cultures". Considering that there are Germanic examples dating back to the 3rd century, I would say that this statement is incorrect. Neither group appropriated the symbol from the other. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:19, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

The counterargument here would be that Hitler--and, I think it fair to say, Nazis more broadly--associated the symbol with their concept of an "Aryan" background of the Germanic race. Though you are of course quite correct that the Swastika is found the world over, I would argue that the Nazis' particular usage is an appropriation from the Sanskrit tradition. Reasonable minds may differ, however. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 14:28, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Equally, they appropriated it from the European tradition by repurposing it as a militaristic symbol.

No single word can really capture such a complicated question: right now, appropriation is the closest we can get. It is certainly better than to say nothing at all and so pretend that there is no issue. But fell free to propose an alternative. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 14:52, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Actually, I think "saying nothing" is the better choice. "The swastika (卐 or 卍) is an ancient religious and cultural symbol, predominantly found in various Eurasian cultures, as well as some African and American ones. In the western world it is more widely recognized as a symbol of the German Nazi Party. The swastika never stopped being used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It generally takes the form of a cross, the arms of which are of equal length and perpendicular to the adjacent arms, each bent midway at a right angle." I don't see what "issue" you are referring to. This symbol means one thing in one context and something else in another. That is a simple fact, not an "issue". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:43, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Your approach would make sense to me if the Nazis had picked the symbol at random, or if they liked the way it looked, or some such. But there was more to it than that. Hitler himself couched the choice in the context of nonsense 'Aryan' history. To say it is just another use of a widespread symbol strikes me as a less desirable choice. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:01, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

And that Aryan history linkage was based on the fact that it was in both regions. He didn't bring a solely Indic symbol into use in Germany, he linked German and Indic symbols. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 21:01, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Lots of good sources use the term "appropriation", for instance Steven Heller in The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? (2010) and Malcolm Quinn in The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol (2005). Appropriation is the right stance here, despite the existence of the relatively less known Germanic symbol. Binksternet (talk) 19:57, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. "He didn't bring a solely Indic symbol into use in Germany, he linked German and Indic symbols." DeCausa (talk) 22:30, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

This doesn't make sense to me. The actual promotion of the swastika as an Aryan symbol can be traced through the original sources that promoted it. For example, This article on Émile-Louis Burnouf says "Burnouf was consulted by Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) over his discovery of swastika motifs in the ruins of Troy. Burnouf claimed that swastika originated as a stylised depiction of a fire-altar seen from above, and was thus the essential symbol of the Aryan race. The popularisation of this idea in the twentieth century was mainly responsible for the adoption of the swastika in the West as an Aryan symbol."

The existence of misconceptions in secondary sources isn't a justification for perpetuating misconceptions. It promotes a general misunderstanding of the ideology as well. Its core conceit is that the Neolithic swastika was spread across Eurasia by the "master race" that spread the Indo-European languages. So the notion that it was borrowed from Asia seems to be missing the point by a mile.

I get that the appropriation criticism has rhetorical value in depriving the symbol of its contemporary racist associations, but it doesn't serve anyone for the article to promote a misunderstanding of the Nazis' beliefs. Their theory was largely based on the scholarship of the time, and their theorists were quite cozy with the scholars of the time. Anthropological work on the swastika-bearing Indo-European cultures has continued until present. The part of the belief system that's wrong is the notion that these cultures constituted a "master race" that spread its culture by organized warfare. But the claim that they spread their culture, including language, material culture, and iconography, is obviously true. The swastika is present in the archaeological record of many Indo-European-speaking cultures.

Ideally, the article should explain how this anthropology developed, from the study of Neolithic West Eurasian material cultures to the linguistic research of Indo-European languages; how this research was popular among the European upper class, many of whom were antiquarians and amateur archaeologists but untrained in scientific rigor; how they wove loose yarns about anthropology and philology into Late Romantic fantastical narratives about prehistory (e.g. stories about Atlanteans); how some of the scholars involved in this research were scientific racists and/or white supremacists; how they came to influence white nationalism in Central Europe in the early 20th century; and how the Nazi's propagandists recycled academic theories into a white supremacist narrative.

If we can't give a full accounting of this history, the least we could do is to not reproduce a common misconception. Many people believe the urban legend that the swastika was just arbitrarily chosen at random, by Hitler, because he liked the way it looked as a piece of graphic design. This is a pernicious myth because it fails to explain where Hitler's ideas came from. It's helpful to understand that the swastika was already a symbol of white supremacy in the 19th century, long before Hitler adopted it; and that it, like the ideology itself, was based on a pseudoscientific narrative about these glorious ancient ancestors who brought civilization to Eurasia.

That historical context is far more useful than the narrative that Hitler was just flipping through a magazine and picked a symbol at random because it looked cool. It's a cute myth that makes Hitler look dumb, but it fails to explain why this stuff appealed to anyone and fails to place it in its dialectical context. Contemporary neo-Nazism continues to make appeals to the scholarly literature about these ancient steppe ancestors, perhaps even more so in the age of the Internet than ever before, making this all the more relevant.

Anyway, just as a factual matter, since the premise of this narrative was about the origins of Europeans, and since it relied on the Indo-European hypothesis, "appropriation" is the wrong word. The swastika wasn't appropriated from contemporary Asian cultures, it was appropriated from ancient material cultures that were (and generally still are) thought to be ancestral to many Eurasian peoples, including the Germanic peoples. It was also appropriated from Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures that continued to use the swastika after the Indo-Aryan speakers are thought to have split from the other groups.

So, if we can't yet give an adequate summary that places the Nazi swastika in its correct historical context, I have to agree with the proposal that saying nothing is better than saying something false. It objectively was not appropriated from Asian cultures, so we should not say it was. Even if some sources think it's fair to "use this language," that's not consistent with the ordinary meaning of "appropriated." The implication for most people will be that there was no connection between the swastika and white/German nationalism, i.e. that the Germans stole it from Asians. That's the implication I got, which was why I came to the Talk page, expecting I'd find an argument about this.

One can find a source to say anything. We have to exercise discretion and common sense. If we want to use that language, we shouldn't say it in Wikipedia's voice, since it's clearly not an encyclopedic fact. One can argue loosely that what the Nazis did could be called appropriation, but it's not an encyclopedic fact that it definitively was appropriation. Rather, it's an encyclopedic fact that it definitively was believed to be a Neolithic symbol of the Aryans. So, if we want to characterize it as appropriation, we should say that some authors have characterized it as appropriation. Because when we simply say "the Nazis appropriated it from Asians" in Wikipedia's voice, we're suggesting that it's an uncontroversial fact. That's a claim about a particular sequence of events. We shouldn't launder an author's rhetorical point about how something was *effectively* appropriated into an encyclopedic claim that it was uncontroversially, definitively appropriated.

As for the meaning of the symbol, no one actually knows what the symbol meant to the ancient cultures that used it. Use of the swastika long predates the Vedic religion, for example. It's present in many European specimens of proto-writing. We don't know what it signified, if anything at all. The fact that the Nazis used a symbol to signify one thing, that other cultures had long used to signify other things, does not indicate appropriation.

It's also not relevant that the Nazis began using the symbol after a long period of disuse in Europe. The same can be said about lots of Neo-Pagan symbols, for example. And the swastika disappears and reappears in the archaeological record of all sorts of places, just like other glyphs and styles. We don't say Neoclassical architecture is "appropriated" just because Europeans did not have a continuous tradition of Classical architecture. There's a gap in the use of Classical architecture, to be sure, but we all accept that it was revived, not appropriated. If the Nazis had not used it as a symbol of white supremacy and tried to conquer the world and all that, no one would argue with characterizing it as a "revival" of an ancient symbol. What bothers us about the Nazis' use of the symbol isn't that they didn't have a continuous tradition of using the swastika going back 5000 years, it's that they used the symbol to glorify an evil empire.

Changing the meaning to associate it with a white supremacist empire shouldn't really have any bearing on this. We don't even know what the swastika meant (if anything) to the Germans' ancestors in the first place. But even if we knew that information with certainty, symbols are allowed to develop new meanings over time. That's completely normal. The Nazis did the same thing with Futhark runes. They had various folk etymologies about their meanings, which are thought to be incorrect, but the meaning of the runes is beside the point. The Nazis' incorrect understanding of the ancient meanings of these symbols is good information worth including in an encyclopedia, but it doesn't have anything to do with whether the symbols were appropriated. 2600:8802:170A:7100:5C15:42F5:C5B1:1EC (talk) 13:08, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Here's what I would suggest:

In the Western world, it is more widely recognized as a symbol of the German Nazi Party, who adopted it in imitation of the ancient Indo-European peoples from the Eurasian Steppe. The use of the swastika to represent Aryanism began in the late 19th century and continues in the 21st century with its use by neo-Nazis around the world.

This would be more consistent with the rest of the article. See Swastika#19th century for a discussion of the early, pre-Nazi use of the swastika to represent the Aryan race. Also, Swastika#Use in Nazism (1920–1945) mentions that use of the swastika in German nationalism predated the Nazis. And see Swastika#Prehistory for a discussion of the ancient use of the swastika by the Indo-European peoples the Nazis considered their ancestors. There's a lot more to be said about this matter, but I think it's good enough for the lede.

Whereas the claim that the Nazis appropriated it from Asians is never cited nor defended in the rest of the article. Although we know the Nazis were aware of contemporary use in India, nowhere does this article say that. So, there's not even an indication in the article of how that appropriation might have happened.

Instead, the article says "High-ranking Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg noted that the Indo-Aryan peoples were both a model to be imitated and a warning of the dangers of the spiritual and racial "confusion" that, he believed, arose from the proximity of races." And to be clear, where it says Indo-Aryan peoples, they were talking about Indo-European peoples as a whole. Actually, they typically just used the term "Aryan," but contemporary articles transpose the modern term "Indo-Aryan peoples" to make it clear that they were referring to the anthropological cultures whose descendants produced the Rigveda and the Avestan, rather than their modern ideal of Aryans (i.e. German citizens). 2600:8802:170A:7100:5C15:42F5:C5B1:1EC (talk) 13:32, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

References

The Swastika was not appropriated from Asian cultures

The Swastika (Hakenkreuz) has a deep European history, and it is misleading to claim it was appropriated from outside of Europe. Hitler's own sketches for the NSDAP logo labelled it the "cross of the Teutons". 114.77.179.191 (talk) 07:10, 27 September 2024 (UTC)