You’re just helping prove my point. Of course it isn’t uniquely American. Though I will take the time to stress that of course nationalism isn’t the only force uniting people either.
Yep.
There’s a historic monument here in LA, the Orcutt Ranch house, that features bas-relief swastikas as decorative architectural elements.
It was built in 1926, and the swastika was intended as a reference to Native American traditional use of the symbol as a pictograph.
(The Diné, in particular, call it “whirling logs.” It figures heavily in one night of the nine-night Yei Bi Chei ceremony - the ‘Navajo Nightway Chant.’ That night’s chant tells the tale of the Culture Hero’s journey down the San Juan River on a hollowed-out log, where he encounters spinning whirlpools.)
Removing them would mean defacing the house, which is a historic landmark.
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That is a good tactic for preserving history, until you are confronted with the sort of people who do not care about history or context, and only care about what some symbol means to them, personally.
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Nice. Here are more pics of the place.
http://www.proswastika.org/news.php?extend.249.4
Personally I would like to see the Swastika taken back. It might happen in my life time. Certainly the Navajo and other tribes who traditionally used it should feel free to not feel beholden to the agreements made in the 40s.
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Please don’t take this personally, but fuck that noise. I get panic and anxiety attacks when I see the damn thing without warning, and I know that I’m not alone in that among my people. And us seeing white people to whom it has no invested meaning talking about “reclaiming the Swastika” infuriates us. The fact that the Navajo and other Native tribes understand the pain that that symbol is associated with and voluntarily renounced it and continue to renounce it in order to reduce the pain in the world is something that I respect to the highest order. They didn’t have to do it, and the fact that they did is praiseworthy, not disappointing.
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While I understand that reaction, and we might not be at that point in history yet - but the 2 points I’d like to make are:
- Reclaiming the symbol removes its aura of evil. It ceases to represent what it used to. Just like obsolete swear words that lose their taboo over time. (It never had the meaning in east Asia that it has in the West.)
I completely understand if you disagree and concede that I may be 100% wrong about this.
- With or with out concerted effort, it will happen, one day, because of humanity’s short term memory.
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To be honest, I’m ashamed to say I know almost nothing about Zinn. But having scanned his Wikipedia entry, I think I can tentatively say that my own opinions are not far out of alignment with his.
Boy, you said it. And I am not a particularly well-read nor highly educated individual. I was a Theatre Arts major in college, and never did obtain a degree. When it comes to Manifest Destiny, I never came to the conclusion that most people were necessarily acting in bad faith, but were operating under several powerful and ultimately, to my mind, wrong assumptions: that Native Americans and blacks were not fully human, that there existed a God who fully intended the white man to hold dominion over the entire world, that women were intended to be subservient to men, all that kind of 19th-century horseshit. Though the underlying concepts were, in the end, evil, the people brought up to believe in them were less so; more ignorant and misguided than anything else. And we have the advantage of hindsight, which is still pretty far from 20/20 (since it’s hard, as you say, to appreciate the 19th century American male mindset at the remove of over a century), but reveals a great many of the inherent shortcomings of Manifest Destiny and all the other social ills attendant thereto.
We do indeed. I think any honest and halfway-insightful (and marginally well-informed) person would agree.
I have no doubt about that. Publicly claiming that our forces “would be greeted as liberators” would be an incredibly shortsighted and asinine thing to say in public if one didn’t actually believe it to be true. And I’m not saying there was a shortage of asinine shortsightedness in the Bush Administration; I just happen to believe that they actually believed this one.
I hasten to amend your opinion of my impression. Bush did not create “the monster”, as it were. He let it out of the box, as you say, and I would add that he fed it and encouraged it to grow larger and more virulent… but I don’t think he created it. And I don’t think he intended matters to work out the way they did. I think he was naive and arrogant and clueless and resistant to contrary opinions, but I don’t think he deliberately set out to worsen the situation.
I agree with you there. I am annoyed by those who fall too far on the “my country, right or wrong, love it or leave it” side.
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Good. Then let the people of East Asia build on their existing associations with it in order to “cleanse” it. Western people do not have that association, and yet they are always the ones who are making this noise. Furthermore, Neo-Nazis do still exist, and do still perpetuate that association of that symbol in Western societies. All this attitude does is promote and normalize them. (And swear words were never used as the defining symbol in genocide, so the difference in scale is very much a difference in kind).
You are wrong, and I not only completely disagree with you on this, the fact that you are taking this perspective on that symbol has massively damaged what respect I had for you.
Again, I disagree. It might be because Americans have no sense of history or perspective, but, no. Some segments of humanity may have short-term memory problems, but that does not mean that everyone fails to have a sense of historical perspective. But, then again, I come from the other end of the spectrum, where my people mark on our calendar an attempted genocide in a Persian empire that predated the Roman Empire. Just because you’re in a hurry to forget the lessons of the past doesn’t mean that everyone will do so.
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