Speaker 1: H what wasn't my Sophie, Sophie, I'm just trying. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to recapture that what's boiling my pig Anus's energy?
Speaker 1: That I still like.
Speaker 2: The class what's cracking my peppers? That's still one of
Speaker 2: my favorite ones you've ever done. I know it's been
Speaker 2: four years.
Speaker 1: Again never again, fine, just going to make it more
Speaker 1: and more off putting. You know, you know, what's trafficking
Speaker 1: my children?
Speaker 2: That kind of stuff just going to be a problem us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh well, this is Behind the Bastards podcast Worse
Speaker 1: People tell you all about them? Uh and today getting
Speaker 1: behind really behind the Nazis by getting behind the Swastika
Speaker 1: with Chelsea Weber Smith.
Speaker 3: Oh, this has been so interesting so far, and I
Speaker 3: just have no idea really where it's going. So thanks
Speaker 3: for having me here and taking me on this journey.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here. Chelsea Weber Smith, whose podcast
Speaker 1: American Hysteria is pretty cool and people should check out Chelsea.
Speaker 3: Yes you ready, I'm ready, are ready?
Speaker 1: And then a bunch of like anyway, I don't know
Speaker 1: why I hate that.
Speaker 2: That's who we are now.
Speaker 1: That's like so our uh uh well, I probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: tell that story. But I come across periodically old pieces
Speaker 1: of like Nazi paraphernalia. It's a it's a hazard of
Speaker 1: the job. And there's definitely been a few times when
Speaker 1: I've been like, oh, that would be an interesting like
Speaker 1: that book would be interesting to have because of you know,
Speaker 1: this person who signed it, and then like, no, I
Speaker 1: don't need that in my house. What am I? What
Speaker 1: am I doing? You're you're you're you don't you don't
Speaker 1: want to.
Speaker 3: Have this, Robert, this haunted ass book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this haunted ass Nazi book. I was given through
Speaker 1: someone else, a like family heirloom that was an old
Speaker 1: Hitler youth dagger, and I had no idea what to
Speaker 1: do with it, so I just kind of like put
Speaker 1: it in my trash pile out in the yard and
Speaker 1: it's just slowly decaying, which I think is the right
Speaker 1: thing to do with a Hitler youth dagger.
Speaker 2: Was that the one that was mailed to the corporate office?
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. We get all sorts
Speaker 1: of weird stuff. So in the late nineteen twenties and
Speaker 1: early nineteen thirties you might have heard about this. The
Speaker 1: Nazis rise to power, they solidify their grip on power,
Speaker 1: you know, and while sort of the while the Nazis
Speaker 1: are kind of like moving up in their inevitable kind
Speaker 1: of like path towards taking control of the German government.
Speaker 1: There's all sorts of fighting in the street. You know.
Speaker 1: You got your old timey anti fascists, both kind of
Speaker 1: social democrats and communists, you know, duking it out with
Speaker 1: the Nazis in the streets. And these street fights, these
Speaker 1: big brawls, these murders and assassinations are kind of a
Speaker 1: regular call of fascination in the world media, right, Like,
Speaker 1: they get a lot of attention in the American newspapers
Speaker 1: in particular, and so they start sending over reporters to
Speaker 1: cover all of this unrest in Weimar, Germany. In nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven, an American journalist from Town and Country magazine
Speaker 1: traveled to Austria to report on fighting between local social
Speaker 1: democrats and Nazi aligned fascists. Being a dumb American, this person,
Speaker 1: she did not worry much about the fact that she
Speaker 1: had gone to Austria in nineteen twenty seven with her
Speaker 1: girls club ring which bore a swastika on it.
Speaker 4: So she's gotlub Yeah, she's.
Speaker 1: Like showing up to like embed with the social democrat
Speaker 1: like street fighting gangs, and she's got a swastika ring,
Speaker 1: and like one of these guys has to take her
Speaker 1: aside and be like, I can't be wearing that here,
Speaker 1: Like I know you don't mean it, but you gotta
Speaker 1: take that thing off.
Speaker 3: God, that is amazing.
Speaker 1: That's so funny.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's amazing. Well, history is so rich.
Speaker 1: History is rich. But also there have always been you know,
Speaker 1: as someone who's done conflict reporting, I know a lot
Speaker 1: of great journalists, a lot of people I respect a lot,
Speaker 1: but the majority of journalists who do that kind of
Speaker 1: work are always like shitheads, right, and like it is
Speaker 1: a shitheaded thing to like go to travel to like
Speaker 1: report on the fighting between these Nazis and these other
Speaker 1: groups and not be like should I bring my swastika ring?
Speaker 1: Like maybe I should leave this at You did not
Speaker 1: do that much research.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you didn't possess the very most basic knowledge that
Speaker 3: you would need to report for newspaper off those events.
Speaker 1: It is nineteen twenty seven, you had some time.
Speaker 3: Wow, Yeah, sloppy, sloppy.
Speaker 1: Six years later, in nineteen thirty three, Hitler had been
Speaker 1: made Chancellor of Germany. This obviously supercharged international resistance to
Speaker 1: the regime, and American anti fascists held a rally in
Speaker 1: New York City to protest the newly minted dictator. One
Speaker 1: journalist with The New Yorker showed up to cover the
Speaker 1: event and realized very quickly that his pocket watch, which
Speaker 1: wasngraved with a swastika, might be a bad thing to
Speaker 1: have out on the street with it. Right, Like, really again,
Speaker 1: but it does kind of show I'm making fun of
Speaker 1: these people, and I think they should be. But it
Speaker 1: does show you, like how banal it was seen as,
Speaker 1: where like somebody might show up and be like, oh, fuck,
Speaker 1: I can't have this thing on me. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: this would be a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Starting in the
Speaker 1: early thirties, American use of the swastika began to decline,
Speaker 1: and this was matched throughout much of the Western world.
Speaker 1: For reasons I probably don't need to spend too much
Speaker 1: time on, right, not not surprising that it does start
Speaker 1: to decline in its kind of anadyne usage. In Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: the new regime actually encouraged this at first. The ubiquity
Speaker 1: of the symbol had been good for them right in
Speaker 1: the early years when they're rising to power. It's free
Speaker 1: pr but now they're in power, and the hundreds of
Speaker 1: men have died fighting under the swastikab so it has
Speaker 1: become this kind of holy symbol of sacrifice. And once
Speaker 1: they're in power, the Nazis kind of find it horrifying
Speaker 1: that some company might use it to sell coffee. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three, Joseph Gerbels announced the Law for Protection
Speaker 1: of National Symbols. Quote. If the symbol is used on
Speaker 1: an object or in connection with it, it may only
Speaker 1: be used if the object itself has an interrelation to
Speaker 1: the symbol. The use of symbols for publicity purposes is
Speaker 1: in any case forbidden. So basically this law means you
Speaker 1: can't use a swastika to sell a cigar or whatever,
Speaker 1: right unless it's like you're doing a fundraiser for the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party, then you can probably get away with it.
Speaker 1: For the Nazis, the swastika then had come full circle
Speaker 1: from a symbol that they co opted to mainstream their
Speaker 1: image to a sacred object restricted from commercial use unless
Speaker 1: that commercial use was Nazi in origin. This created problems
Speaker 1: for a number of people, particularly people outside of Nazi
Speaker 1: Germany and Some of those people were Canadians who lived
Speaker 1: in the quaint northern Ontario town of Swastika, named after Yeah,
Speaker 1: just picking up the news one morning, like you know,
Speaker 1: you're living out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe you
Speaker 1: don't check in for a while, and then like you
Speaker 1: see that like Hitler's taking power in Germany and you
Speaker 1: look at the banner behind him, like, oh, fuck God,
Speaker 1: this is going to be a problem for us. Swastikers
Speaker 1: now Swastika Ontario woo. Swastika Ontario was named after the
Speaker 1: Swastika gold mines staked in nineteen oh seven. The town
Speaker 1: name was inspired by the Sanskrit symbol, not the other thing.
Speaker 1: Several mines soon came to dot the boomtown, and all
Speaker 1: of them were kind of Swastika themed. There was the
Speaker 1: Swastika mine. There was also the Lucky Cross mine. In
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, as the war breaks out, members of Swastika
Speaker 1: or citizens of Swastika started to feel preture to change
Speaker 1: the town name. There are a couple of articles at
Speaker 1: the time where like people in town are like, we're
Speaker 1: not changing the name. They don't get to take it
Speaker 1: from us, Like this has been our name longer than
Speaker 1: they've been using it, you know. But eventually the provincial
Speaker 1: government overrules them and they send like I don't know,
Speaker 1: mounties or whatever to take the swastika sign outside of
Speaker 1: town and replace it with one that says Winston.
Speaker 3: Winston doesn't have the same ring to it.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no. Yeah.
Speaker 2: People should have owned like an NFL team with that energy.
Speaker 1: Although it does make me think what if Hitler had
Speaker 1: adopted as a symbol just a man named Winston or
Speaker 1: maybe a carton of Winston cigarettes. You know, it is different.
Speaker 1: World War Two. Yeah, a lot of Americans and Camels
Speaker 1: writing to Nurember or to a fucking Normandy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they changed the town. The provincial government tries to change
Speaker 1: the town name to Winston, and the Swastikas are so
Speaker 1: adamant that, like, we're not going to change our town name.
Speaker 1: They tear down the Winston sign and they put up
Speaker 1: their own news sign for Swastika, telling reporters still with Hitler,
Speaker 1: we came up with our name first.
Speaker 3: Hey, I appreciate the dedication.
Speaker 4: You know, this is where things g Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know they're not wrong, right, like because it's not
Speaker 4: their fault, you know.
Speaker 3: Like that might not be the right hill to die on.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. This is not the hill I would pick
Speaker 1: to die on. Just my little town in Ontario has
Speaker 1: the name, but it makes me think. So, Like, the
Speaker 1: first big piece of like conflict reporting I did was
Speaker 1: after the Botoclon massacre in two thousand and fifteen, when
Speaker 1: Isis murdered dozens and dozens of people in France at
Speaker 1: that like mass shooting type deal. I did this article
Speaker 1: where I went through like eight or nine hundred pages
Speaker 1: of like Isis propaganda and like wrote this thing about
Speaker 1: their weird magazine. But like I remember, I spent like
Speaker 1: two or three days just kind of like stuck in
Speaker 1: my little office writing this thing, and then I go
Speaker 1: out to like do laundry at the laundromat near my house,
Speaker 1: which was the Isis laundromat. So I just remember like
Speaker 1: looking up at it and being like, that's probably gonna
Speaker 1: be a problem for you guys.
Speaker 3: Man in the similar vein, we have a dry cleaner
Speaker 3: that is just called Q cute.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's not on you.
Speaker 3: But I know if we did it first, they haven't
Speaker 3: changed it.
Speaker 1: There is another funny story about this of Swastika Mountain
Speaker 1: in southern Oregon. Uh Now, Oregon has a famously bad
Speaker 1: Nazi problem, so you might assume probably a dark.
Speaker 3: History mountain is a combination of words.
Speaker 1: Swastika Mountain in Oregon. Yeah, in Oregon. But no, it
Speaker 1: was it was again, it predates the use of that.
Speaker 1: It was just somebody, some guy decided call it Swastika Mountain.
Speaker 1: It got renamed like a couple of years ago. It
Speaker 1: was not all that law ago that that the state
Speaker 1: was like, you probably shouldn't.
Speaker 3: Have this, Like what year are we talking? Like a
Speaker 3: couple of.
Speaker 1: Years ago, Like not all that long ago that mountain
Speaker 1: got renamed northwesterners. It wasn't a big it's not like
Speaker 1: a major mountain, right, It's not like hood. It's not
Speaker 1: one of your money mountains, you know. I also, I
Speaker 1: can remember there's this farmhouse I used to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time in pretty old farmhouse outside of about
Speaker 1: an hour and a half outside of Reading, in the
Speaker 1: middle of fucking nowhere, north central California, that the original
Speaker 1: owner had burnt into the wooden roof all of the
Speaker 1: different cattle brands from different ranches in the area, and
Speaker 1: one of them is a fucking swastika, and it was
Speaker 1: one of knowing the area. Like I actually knew a
Speaker 1: guy who had been in the Hitler youth as a
Speaker 1: kid out there, although he was not a Nazi anymore.
Speaker 1: You know, the warned when he was fourteen. It's not
Speaker 1: really on him, but like seeing that and being like
Speaker 1: just knowing the history. This could just be a thing
Speaker 1: that people had way back in the day before the Nazis,
Speaker 1: or it could be a Nazi ranch like rural California,
Speaker 1: equally likely.
Speaker 2: I looked it up. It's August twenty twenty two, the
Speaker 2: Open Geographic Nemes Board confirmed that it would no longer
Speaker 2: be called swastikamountains.
Speaker 1: We did it, guys, We did it, guys.
Speaker 3: They almost died on that hill.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, God bless Oregon. Finally, Yeah, making progress. Everybody
Speaker 1: really got that knocked out before the election.
Speaker 3: But that's like, it's so fascinating that you can look
Speaker 3: at that now and actually truly not know. I mean,
Speaker 3: you can honestly know if you have a dividing line
Speaker 3: of time, but with these certain like products, you don't
Speaker 3: have like such a definitive line that happens where you're like,
Speaker 3: this is not Nazi shit, this is Nazi Nazi shit,
Speaker 3: you know, and we can say that without any doubt.
Speaker 3: It's just I had no idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty cool stuff. So the use of the swastika
Speaker 1: as a fashion icon had started to fade, albeit uneven,
Speaker 1: by the end of the nineteen thirties, as this segment
Speaker 1: from a ride up in Slate makes clear. One incident
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six made that clear swastika motif receives
Speaker 1: cold reception. Read a small headline in Women's Wear Daily
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six, buttons crusted with swastika shown by
Speaker 1: one couture house stirred up some comment among an audience
Speaker 1: of New York buyers. The editors wrote, no sales of
Speaker 1: this particular model are reported. Although no reason for this
Speaker 1: chile response was given, it might be due to the
Speaker 1: fact that many important New York department stores were owned
Speaker 1: or founded by Jews, including b Altman, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman,
Speaker 1: Sax Fifth Avenue, and Macy's. Although the Women's Wear Daily
Speaker 1: article left the designer of these buttons anonymous, Vogue also
Speaker 1: reported on a fashion show featuring swastika buttons, identifying the
Speaker 1: designer as Marcel rochas a well known French courtier. Unlike
Speaker 1: Women's wear daily, Vogue found the use of the swastika
Speaker 1: to be amusing rather than disturbing.
Speaker 2: Now eslately telling me it wasn't co Kerschanel.
Speaker 1: There's a pretty I mean, like Coco. There's a pretty
Speaker 1: good chance that Vogue had no problem at the swastika
Speaker 1: because the people running it were pretty fucking racist and
Speaker 1: kind of fans of the Nazis. They, along with many
Speaker 1: other publications, were cautiously positive about Hitler in the lead
Speaker 1: up to the war years. That same year, they ran
Speaker 1: a spread showing the home decors of Hitler in his
Speaker 1: mountain hideaway, including a prominent swastika cushion on his couch.
Speaker 1: Slat says that this was an example of them humanizing
Speaker 1: Hitler and trying to reinforce the domestic feel of the symbol.
Speaker 1: They did also include a profile on British Prime Minister
Speaker 1: Anthony Eden's house at the same time, so I don't know.
Speaker 1: The article goes on. As late as nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: Good Housekeeping recommended creating a swastika out of cashews as
Speaker 1: a cliver cake decoration. I know that's what I'm doing
Speaker 1: my next birthday. Cashw swastika. Baby, Wow, you got a
Speaker 1: nut allergy. That's a double problem right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I wonder if your local grocery store would
Speaker 3: go ahead and pop one in frosting.
Speaker 2: Oh, just going there, try, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Just going through my thirty seven issues of a Good
Speaker 1: Housekeeping and uh yeah, they recommended this. Can you do
Speaker 1: this cave for me?
Speaker 3: This is what I want.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen forty, the Boy Scouts finally decided they'd
Speaker 1: had enough of the hook cross. At that year's jamboree
Speaker 1: in Santiago, Chile, a vote was taken to abandon the
Speaker 1: swastika due to the fact that Boy Scouts and Scout
Speaker 1: leaders had been heckled and pelted with shit while marching
Speaker 1: through streets with swastikas on their uniform And again, hard
Speaker 1: to blame anyone in nineteen forty for seeing a bunch
Speaker 1: of dudes in military style uniforms with white swastika. Isn't
Speaker 1: going I'm gonna throw some stuff at those kids.
Speaker 3: It's two late boys. You gotta give up the symbol.
Speaker 1: Might have to fuck up a Boy Scout over this.
Speaker 1: The Boy Scout order of the white swastika was, of course,
Speaker 1: never sacred, and neither was really the town name of Swastika, Ontario.
Speaker 1: But all of this does create a very serious problem
Speaker 1: for the Navajo, the Papago, the Pa and the Hope people,
Speaker 1: all of whom had used the swastika or the the
Speaker 1: whirling log in various works of religious significance since time immemorial. Right,
Speaker 1: this is a religious symbol for them. It is not
Speaker 1: as simple as just oh, this weird decoration or name
Speaker 1: that we used is problematic. Now we got to change it,
Speaker 1: right Like, this is a thing that is a part
Speaker 1: of religious observances, you know. But after the Nazi invasion
Speaker 1: of France, representatives from each of these tribes, the Navajo,
Speaker 1: the Papago, the Apache, and the Hope sign a proclamation
Speaker 1: on the whirling log symbol because the above ornament, which
Speaker 1: has been a symbol of friendship among our forefathers for
Speaker 1: many centuries, has been desecrated recently by another nation of peoples. Therefore,
Speaker 1: it is resolved that henceforth, from this date and forevermore,
Speaker 1: our tribes renounced the use of the emblem commonly known
Speaker 1: today as the swastika on our blankets, baskets, art objects,
Speaker 1: sand paintings, and clothing. Now I want you to really
Speaker 1: think about that, right, because they've done nothing wrong and
Speaker 1: the Whirling Log has done nothing wrong. They are choosing
Speaker 1: to give up a sacred symbol because of something a
Speaker 1: completely different group of people across the world have done
Speaker 1: with a version of that symbol as an act of
Speaker 1: solidarity with their victims. And I want to be clear,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying like this is the right thing or
Speaker 1: not doing this would have been the wrong thing, because
Speaker 1: I don't think it would have been wrong if they'd said, look,
Speaker 1: this is our religious symbol. We're not going to change
Speaker 1: it just because of these assholes, right, I think that
Speaker 1: would have been fine too. I'm just saying that's a
Speaker 1: really noteworthy decision to matter, especially prior to Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: I think that's like it is, like you said, it
Speaker 3: seems like an act of solidarity. We can't exactly know
Speaker 3: what was going through their heads or their conversations, but
Speaker 3: it does. I mean, what else could it be except
Speaker 3: like we can no longer abide this, even if it's
Speaker 3: like a huge important story in our culture. It's like,
Speaker 3: what's more important is no longer allowing this symbol to
Speaker 3: have a power that we don't consent to, Right, it's like,
Speaker 3: no matter what. Now, I think it's it's obvious that this,
Speaker 3: this horrible superpower has basically usurped the use of this
Speaker 3: and it's just not going to Yeah, you know, it
Speaker 3: just can no longer mean what it means to outsiders.
Speaker 3: And maybe that would have been fine if it were
Speaker 3: just like an internally used symbol, but yeah, what, it's
Speaker 3: just like heartbreaking, it's really heartbreaking, very sack.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do have there might be a darker reason,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure a number of things played into the
Speaker 1: decision that they made. The darker part of my mind says, well,
Speaker 1: maybe they were concerned they see what is gearing up,
Speaker 1: and they think, like, well, if we go to war,
Speaker 1: you know, this is forties is before the US is
Speaker 1: in the war. But like if the United States goes
Speaker 1: to war with the Germans, it might be dangerous for
Speaker 1: us to like have this on shit, right, Like we
Speaker 1: might fucking we might people, This might call some of
Speaker 1: our people to get targeted, right. That may have also
Speaker 1: been a factor. I don't that's certainly not like a
Speaker 1: thing that they write out here. I do think it
Speaker 1: was probably more just like a solidarity and also like, yeah,
Speaker 1: just an acknowledgment of the I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: Navajo people, a lot of Hope people. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of Apache people are going to wind up fighting
Speaker 1: against the Nazis too, So yeah, it's anyway, it's a
Speaker 1: remarkable moment and kind of I think worth acknowledging. So
Speaker 1: we all know the next part of the story, right,
Speaker 1: you got your World War two, the Nazis, you know,
Speaker 1: you're doing some stuff, and then America, without anyone else's help,
Speaker 1: wins the war, right you know, that's I think everyone's
Speaker 1: familiar with the gist of the story. So during the
Speaker 1: war years, it becomes dangerous to be associated with the
Speaker 1: Nazis and the swastika. Laura Ingalls, a pilot and a
Speaker 1: Nazi sympathizer, is put on trial in nineteen forty two
Speaker 1: and her swastika bracelet is brought up as evidence of
Speaker 1: for fascist leadings Ingles claims it was just an Indian
Speaker 1: symbol for good luck, but she is convicted of failing
Speaker 1: to register as an enemy agent, although her swastika bracelet
Speaker 1: apparently didn't factor into this, but it does get brought
Speaker 1: up in the trial. The war ends, the swastika gets
Speaker 1: falls and as a political symbol. You know, it becomes
Speaker 1: profoundly toxic, particularly after knowledge of the Holocaust becomes more widespread.
Speaker 1: This leads to its disappearance from like, you know, anodyne
Speaker 1: normal products that like a person would want to have
Speaker 1: in their house. But it does not lead to its
Speaker 1: disappearance from popular products. It just causes a change in
Speaker 1: the kind of products that it shows up on. Stephen
Speaker 1: Heller writes quote. It was used increasingly on paperback book
Speaker 1: covers for spy and mystery yarns, and on covers for
Speaker 1: men's pulp adventure magazines. Even today, the most common sanctioned
Speaker 1: mainstream use of the mark is on jackets for fiction
Speaker 1: and nonfiction books with World War Two themes. In the
Speaker 1: late forties and fifties, the male public's fascination with things
Speaker 1: Nazi was disturbingly fetishistic, and to an extent it still is.
Speaker 1: Yet publishers knew what they were doing. From a marketing standpoint.
Speaker 1: The swastika was such an identifiable icon, a magnet, so
Speaker 1: to speak, that a browser could perceive content without ever
Speaker 1: reading the title. It is indeed ironic that the swastika
Speaker 1: has evolved from benevolent sign to sinister national emblem to
Speaker 1: a veritable point of purchase display in only a few generations.
Speaker 1: And he provides a really interesting example of this that
Speaker 1: Svie's going to show you from the men's magazine World
Speaker 1: of Men.
Speaker 3: We got the Girls, We got the Men.
Speaker 1: So you've got this big two thirds of it is
Speaker 1: this illustration of like a Nazi He's sticking his bayonet
Speaker 1: into a woman's a very blonde, white woman's breast. There's
Speaker 1: a big swastika very visible on his bicep. There's another
Speaker 1: swastika on this train behind him that's full of Nazi soldiers.
Speaker 1: There's a woman behind her who's got like a strapless
Speaker 1: shirt on that's like she looks like she's being taken
Speaker 1: into custody or something like that by these Nazis. And
Speaker 1: then the title of uh the the apparent story that
Speaker 1: these pictures are for is lust slaves of Hitler's Walsap butcher.
Speaker 2: Oh god, wow, the mistress demands soft flesh.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, that's one of the other big stories.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of great stories in this episode. Now, Chelsea,
Speaker 1: I'm not a word cop, but I will say you
Speaker 1: never need to use the phrase lust slaves. That's never
Speaker 1: a necessary term. There's no need to ever use the
Speaker 1: phrase lust slave.
Speaker 3: No, it should really be retired from Yeah.
Speaker 2: How to master today is sex Starved Woman?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It's another article in World.
Speaker 2: You were with a Bayonet Avenue call Girl.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, revealed sin capers have turned on co Ed's
Speaker 1: Man World of Men. Yeah, because bloody horror.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh what an incredible magazine now the cover shows Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's great stuff. Now, when I saw this incredible magazine,
Speaker 1: absolute work of historical art, I knew I had a
Speaker 1: sacred duty to try and find a copy, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: I couldn't. But the Internet archive does have a collection
Speaker 1: of men's magazines from the fifties and sixties, and I
Speaker 1: will promise you all we'll do a whole episode going
Speaker 1: through some of these in the future because they look incredible.
Speaker 1: Here's one cover that I just want to talk about.
Speaker 1: It has nothing to do with Nazis, but it's glorious. Chelsea,
Speaker 1: look at this, Sofie.
Speaker 3: Let's see it.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, chelsee Oh.
Speaker 1: Teen Sororities, Schools for Free Love, Passion and Orgies exposed
Speaker 1: suburban sex cults, how they operate Exclusive Beware the World
Speaker 1: of Lust Without Love and it's like a picture of
Speaker 1: a shake and there is a Nazi. Actually the swastika
Speaker 1: is not fully visible, but there's like a shake and
Speaker 1: a Nazi tying a woman in a red dress to
Speaker 1: a palm tree, and she actually has pawns for the
Speaker 1: reds shafts of steel.
Speaker 3: There's also a real picture of a woman on this
Speaker 3: one up there.
Speaker 1: There is a real picture of a woman. She looks
Speaker 1: like she is topless. I'm guessing these are kind of
Speaker 1: playboy Yeah, yeah, she looks great.
Speaker 3: She looks great.
Speaker 1: Helpless brides of the lash in Satan's hell.
Speaker 3: That's what I want. I want all that satanic panic content,
Speaker 3: all that early sex cult panic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Look, these are there's problematic aspects of this, but I
Speaker 1: think we can all agree the people who wrote these
Speaker 1: titles used the English language in a way that is
Speaker 1: unique and beautiful. Hey everyone, Robert here, As you've noticed,
Speaker 1: my audio just took the dive in quality. That is
Speaker 1: because my zoom recorder died forever, irrevocably while we were
Speaker 1: recording this episode, and I did not notice it because
Speaker 1: I was lost in the heat of the moment. Which
Speaker 1: is also a pretty good song by the band Asia anyway,
Speaker 1: I I don't know why my zoom died. Perhaps it
Speaker 1: was the crypto fascists, you know, trying to stop this
Speaker 1: episode from airing. Perhaps it was the Reds using the
Speaker 1: crypto fascists as cover in order to stop my investigation
Speaker 1: into their lust slave cartel. We'll never know, but I
Speaker 1: do apologize. My audio for the rest of this episode
Speaker 1: will be the Zoom safety audio we used and is
Speaker 1: a slightly lower quality.
Speaker 3: Yes, they definitely knew how to get attention. Are you
Speaker 3: following with Jack Chick?
Speaker 1: Oh? God, yes, absolutely, we just did.
Speaker 3: We just did a three parter on Jack Chick, The
Speaker 3: King the Gohast.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It just reminds me a little bit, you know, totally
Speaker 3: different like motivations, but very similar pulpy, you know, extreme content.
Speaker 1: Jack Chick is actually the primary sponsor of this podcast.
Speaker 1: So we're worried about going to hell because you've been
Speaker 1: reading men's magazines from the nineteen fifties. You are to
Speaker 1: come on and help you out right after this. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, boy, My soul fields cleansed. Oh I'm not
Speaker 1: even thinking about helpless Brides of the Lash and Satan's
Speaker 1: Hell anymore, Chelsea.
Speaker 3: No, I've got a new Lord and Savior.
Speaker 1: A new Lord and Savior.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I could look at these magazines for hours and we
Speaker 1: will soon, don't worry, folks.
Speaker 3: I hope.
Speaker 1: So while the use of the swastika in Western nations
Speaker 1: was confined to bad guys and entertainment media for decades,
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the world it did have occasional resurgences. And
Speaker 1: this brings us back to India. Now India again, it's
Speaker 1: both pretty distant from Nazi aggression. The Nazis aren't really
Speaker 1: a threat in the subcontinent, and it's also a place
Speaker 1: where swastikas are a very popular religious symbol. One of
Speaker 1: the weird things I spent months living in Northeast India,
Speaker 1: primarily Delhi, and one of the things that was always
Speaker 1: really I mean, at first, at least there's a week
Speaker 1: two it was weird and then it became kind of normal.
Speaker 1: It is like right in the front of like many houses,
Speaker 1: there's just a swastika. Now it's not the same, like
Speaker 1: it's reversed. There's usually like a series of dots and
Speaker 1: stuff around it. But it's a very common decoration on
Speaker 1: the front of houses. Now, the fact that the swastika
Speaker 1: in you know, Hindu culture particularly has a history that
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with the Nazis. Also has coexisted
Speaker 1: the fact that there is a very complex modern history
Speaker 1: of the Nazis in India and their relation to particular
Speaker 1: like Hindu nationalists political parties. Because the Nazis fought against
Speaker 1: the British Empire, a good number of Hindu nationalists were
Speaker 1: willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This
Speaker 1: is compounded with the fact that popular Nazis spiritual philosopher
Speaker 1: Saviitri Devi lived in India much of her life organized
Speaker 1: with a lot of people who will be the political
Speaker 1: precursors to the party that is the party of the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister of India in Gramodi, who is very far
Speaker 1: right and kind of even beyond this, the Nazis send
Speaker 1: researchers to parts of the subcontinent with a group called
Speaker 1: the Onanairb which is like a it is the group
Speaker 1: doing a lot of like this occult research and stuff
Speaker 1: and sort of the pre war Nazi era to kind
Speaker 1: of investigate the origin point of the Aryans in India. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of reasons why there's this kind
Speaker 1: of like complex history of the Nazis within India.
Speaker 3: Well, and Hiller really admired India. Yeah, you're like EuroAsia
Speaker 3: sort of.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a makes sense, a complex history there,
Speaker 1: and it's it's problematic at times. And part of what
Speaker 1: makes it problematic is like, because of distance, there's not
Speaker 1: really this sense of the immediacy of Hitler's crimes for
Speaker 1: a lot of folks in that part of the world,
Speaker 1: and this will cause some complicated problems. In the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, contemporaneous to an American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell,
Speaker 1: an Indian Nazi party formed in New Delhi using the
Speaker 1: German Hagenkroi as It's simple. It promised that if elected
Speaker 1: to power, India would be the strongest power on the planet.
Speaker 1: They failed to get any real support. The Indian Nazi
Speaker 1: Party does not take off, but actual Nazi imagery retains
Speaker 1: a sort of low key popularity in the subcontinent, alongside
Speaker 1: the more traditional religious uses of the swastika, and some
Speaker 1: of this contributed to the rise of a culture of
Speaker 1: admiration for Hitler as a business guru within India. Hitler
Speaker 1: is one of the best known sort of business influencers.
Speaker 1: You might say Wow, this is a more complicated topic
Speaker 1: than we're going to talk about today. But it's because
Speaker 1: of this history, because you can find like management books
Speaker 1: that are like management lessons from Hitler and stuff. If
Speaker 1: you google around as a result of all this, if
Speaker 1: you google around, you'll run into variations of the same story,
Speaker 1: which is that some Indian business own owner who's kind
Speaker 1: of mainly aware of like Hitler and the Nazis, as
Speaker 1: a result of this weird kind of business influencer thing,
Speaker 1: will open a store or a restaurant with very weird
Speaker 1: and specific Nazi branding. It will get covered in a
Speaker 1: news article, a lot of people will get angry, and
Speaker 1: there will nearly always be a follow up interviewing the
Speaker 1: owner of the store, who kind of seems befuddled that
Speaker 1: anyone's pissed about this. Here's one example from a two
Speaker 1: thousand and six New York Times article. Boonite Sablock, twenty
Speaker 1: three years old, in a Novas restaurant tour, says he
Speaker 1: wanted a catchy cafe name to sell his three to
Speaker 1: four dollars plates of Christina Tono pear and ricotta salad
Speaker 1: in panacotta, so he went with Hitler's cross. He put
Speaker 1: a swastika in the logo. He named his restaurant Hitler,
Speaker 1: saying Hitler is a catchy name. Everyone knows Hitler. Man.
Speaker 3: It's again. It's good marketing. I guess it draws eyes.
Speaker 4: I guess I know that it makes money, but it
Speaker 4: does draw eyes. Yeah, I probably don't need to explain
Speaker 4: that the local Jewish community was not thrilled with this.
Speaker 4: Later in the article, Sablock is quoted as saying, I
Speaker 4: never wanted to promote Hitler. I just wanted to promote
Speaker 4: my restaurant.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what that reminds me of is not
Speaker 3: that far from where I live. There is a restaurant
Speaker 3: called the Soup Nazi Kitchen, and you know that's honestly
Speaker 3: a reference to Seinfeld. But it's like, bro, yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe it says Nazi in your name. It's
Speaker 3: so weird.
Speaker 1: Part of why these stories tend to blow up is
Speaker 1: that India has a very large expat population of Israelis
Speaker 1: a lot of young Israeli kids also travel there. In fact,
Speaker 1: when I was living in Delhi, one of my friends
Speaker 1: was this dude who had fled to India so he
Speaker 1: wouldn't get drafted by the IDF. That same year, there
Speaker 1: was a big blow up because a guy in Mumbai
Speaker 1: opened a clothing boutique that was just named Hitler. The
Speaker 1: pictures are pretty wild. It's like a high end mall
Speaker 1: fashion store with a big glowing Hitler logo and there's
Speaker 1: even a swastika and the dot on the eye. And
Speaker 1: the owner of the shop, Rajah Shah, expressed shot that
Speaker 1: people were angry. Telling the AFP, I didn't know how
Speaker 1: much the name would disturb people. It was only when
Speaker 1: the store opened I learned Hitler had killed six million people.
Speaker 3: What I lovedumb huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a real that's a real problem for you.
Speaker 3: Huh wow, it is.
Speaker 1: You know, very similarly, when I wanted to start this podcast,
Speaker 1: the first name that I wanted to launch it, launch
Speaker 1: it under was just Jeffrey Dahmer. Sophie had to inform
Speaker 1: me that there was actually a problematic context with that name.
Speaker 3: And what could that be.
Speaker 1: You know, Sophie actually appreciate is there somebody with that
Speaker 1: name or something?
Speaker 2: Orbert Roberts trying to do a bit here. But he's
Speaker 2: this is literally a factual story. I believe it.
Speaker 1: The Jeffrey Dahmer cast draw some eyes.
Speaker 2: You know, and and and our sales team was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, we do a lot of meal kit services.
Speaker 2: I don't know if well that'll go.
Speaker 3: An American horst. I mean, then we just get Dahmer
Speaker 3: the TV show with.
Speaker 1: I don't support his murders, but I am a big
Speaker 1: fan of the way in which he used different spices.
Speaker 1: You know. Look, you can divorce the man from from
Speaker 1: the art. It should be the end of the bit.
Speaker 3: So let's go.
Speaker 1: This is all very dumb. No one should use Hitler
Speaker 1: as a brand ambassador or try to divorce his management
Speaker 1: secrets from his crimes more than he was a bad manager.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, when for a good reason.
Speaker 3: It's not the boss, bitch. You think it's.
Speaker 1: Not the boss, bitch. You think this is not a
Speaker 1: thing a person should have to say, right. But it's
Speaker 1: when we get back to the US, which has both
Speaker 1: a large Jewish population and a lot of folks who
Speaker 1: are descended from you know, who are who are Indian? Right?
Speaker 1: Who are who are des he? You know, are Hindu
Speaker 1: or a Buddhist. It's when we get here that things
Speaker 1: get very messy because in India again very normal to
Speaker 1: c swastikas. It is not a problem. You know, if
Speaker 1: you've got that as a religious symbol, you know in
Speaker 1: your house, you know, in your clothing and a decoration.
Speaker 1: And obviously I don't think no reasonable person would ask
Speaker 1: that a whole culture stop using a religious symbol because
Speaker 1: of some assholes used a similar one. But it's a
Speaker 1: little more complicated in the US, where you've got lots
Speaker 1: of Holocaust survivors and their descendants who are going to
Speaker 1: have a powerful gut reaction to skiing something like that.
Speaker 1: My gut wants to say, Look, the Hindu swastika is
Speaker 1: not the hogen KROI. It shouldn't be. We should be
Speaker 1: able to like talk about this. But like it's also
Speaker 1: not that simple, right, and this is not hope. I
Speaker 1: don't want to come across let's lead into here. Neither
Speaker 1: side's wrong here. I'm not going to come down like
Speaker 1: condemning either group. This is like a really messy problem,
Speaker 1: but it isn't It is interesting to me, and I
Speaker 1: don't think enough people know that this is a a
Speaker 1: thing that is an issue. So there have always been
Speaker 1: a significant chunk of Indian people, of Hindu people, I
Speaker 1: should say, because a lot of Indians are Muslim who
Speaker 1: took umbrage at the thought that most of the world
Speaker 1: had kind of tossed the swastika aside because of the Nazis.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy nine, a Sanskrit scholar P. R. Sarkar
Speaker 1: claimed that it was the symbol of permanent victory and
Speaker 1: that like any symbol, it had positive and negative meanings.
Speaker 1: His argument was that the right hand swastika was the
Speaker 1: symbol of Vishnu, while the left hand, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the one that the Nazis used, was the symbol
Speaker 1: of Kali. Starting in the early nineteen nineties, with the
Speaker 1: fall of the Soviet Union, Russian far right organizations and
Speaker 1: other fascist political groups in the former Warsaw Pact nations
Speaker 1: started to revive the swastika for different reasons. Obviously, for whatever.
Speaker 1: For all of it's, you know, the different things that
Speaker 1: were culturally problematic in the Soviet Union. One thing they're
Speaker 1: good about is you're not allowed to display swastikas in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. Right shouldn't have to explain why. But
Speaker 1: once the Soviet Union falls, it because it had been
Speaker 1: banned for so long, and because the right had been,
Speaker 1: you know, in their eyes, suppressed for so long it
Speaker 1: gets taken up as this symbol for all of these
Speaker 1: different right wing national movements are trying to revive it.
Speaker 1: And Stephen Heller writes here quote the Soviet Union and
Speaker 1: Czarist Russia before it was riddled with anti Semitism. Similarly,
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties, there emerged a virulent strain
Speaker 1: among ultra right wing groups calling for old fashioned pagrams
Speaker 1: and new styled ethnic cleansing. While nestled on the fringe,
Speaker 1: this decidedly organized milane of monarchist, neo fascist and pamat
Speaker 1: are memory organizations openly hawked their ideologies on the street
Speaker 1: until Boris Yeltsen's October nineteen ninety three emergency decrees banned
Speaker 1: opposition media. Polemical newspapers with the titles Russia Arise the
Speaker 1: Russian New Order in People's Business, featuring realistic drawings of
Speaker 1: heroic looking black shirted Russian stormtroopers, scaprists, anti Semitic caricatures
Speaker 1: and portraits of Adolf Hitler himself were unashamedly displayed at
Speaker 1: sidewalk tables throughout Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Various iterations of
Speaker 1: the swastika, sometimes combined with historic Russian folk iconography, were
Speaker 1: also in full view. A visitor to Moscow reported that
Speaker 1: it was impossible to walk a block without running into
Speaker 1: at least one of these displays. And this will feed
Speaker 1: into a lot of the issues that we have in
Speaker 1: Ukraine and in Russia right now with different Nazi organizations.
Speaker 1: Right this is where a lot of that has its
Speaker 1: kind of origin point. And while it is coming back
Speaker 1: into use in Eastern Europe, it is also starting to
Speaker 1: get revived in the eighties and nineties in the United
Speaker 1: States as a symbol for the right now. The swastika
Speaker 1: has this really awkward position in US counterculture since the
Speaker 1: end of the Second World War. The first place, obviously,
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell attempts to bring it back with his
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party, but that's always decidedly fringed. The first
Speaker 1: kind of place where you see it commonly is biker gangs,
Speaker 1: and specifically Hunter Thompson is actually the journalist who did
Speaker 1: some of the first good reporting on this in his
Speaker 1: book Hells Angels. But biker gangs in the post World
Speaker 1: War two era form primarily out of like vets guys
Speaker 1: who had never been able to integrate into post war society,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them had fought Nazis, and they
Speaker 1: had medals and helmets and other booty taken from the Germans,
Speaker 1: some of which had swastikas which they would wear on
Speaker 1: their like motorcycle gear, both to shock and to signal like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm an outsider, I'm on the fringe, but I did
Speaker 1: my time for my country too, So it's.
Speaker 3: Kind of a symbol of valor. At the same time,
Speaker 3: it's a comp let's say, it's a complicated but that
Speaker 3: was part of the intention at least was like not
Speaker 3: like I am a Nazi, but I fought Nazis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, part of the intentions some of them are Nazis.
Speaker 1: And then we're getting to that, so that, yeah, this
Speaker 1: means that a number of the first proto punk types,
Speaker 1: because a lot of punk culture in the United States
Speaker 1: says come out of these biker yeah war swastikas and
Speaker 1: stall helms because they had fought Nazis. But also a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys are violently anti communists, and so
Speaker 1: it becomes complicated. Another group that wears the swastika commonly
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties are surf bums, right, Like surf
Speaker 1: bums have a lot of different swastik could get a
Speaker 1: lot of early surfing equipment shops have swastikas or variations
Speaker 1: of Nazi iconography in their logos. It is not uncommon
Speaker 1: in the sixties, and a lot of this kind of
Speaker 1: translates to some of the first punks in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: some of whom are Nazis and some of whom are
Speaker 1: just trying to like trigger people.
Speaker 3: Like transgressive behavior.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the book Subculture the Meaning of Style, author Dick
Speaker 1: Hebridge relates that one female punk explained to him, punk's
Speaker 1: just like to be hated for sure.
Speaker 3: Sure, it's the quickest way to get hated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's all these weird like
Speaker 1: surf brands and early skating brands that will use pieces
Speaker 1: of Nazi iconography and will claim they don't have far
Speaker 1: right sympathies. Some of them do and like become part
Speaker 1: of you know, kind and some of them don't and
Speaker 1: are just kind of being edge lords. You know, we
Speaker 1: didn't have that term at the time. But all of
Speaker 1: this is mixed, and the people who are just kind
Speaker 1: of being edge lords, do it's fair to criticize provide
Speaker 1: cover to the actual straight up Nazis, you know, they
Speaker 1: provide sort of space for this to get accepted among
Speaker 1: people that allows some recruitment. This is all happening alongside
Speaker 1: a surge in the late eighties early nineties and actual
Speaker 1: Nazi organizing and the establishment of groups like White Aryan
Speaker 1: Resistance who ape aspects of a punk aesthetic, you might
Speaker 1: say pseudo ironic use of the swastika gives cover two
Speaker 1: real Nazis. Now, all of this makes the issue of
Speaker 1: Hindu people, of Buddhists, of Native Americans in the United
Speaker 1: States and elsewhere in the West trying to reclaim the
Speaker 1: swastika very complicated, right because you do you get people
Speaker 1: who are you know, Hindu or Buddhists being like, I
Speaker 1: should be able to utilize this symbol that is a
Speaker 1: religious symbol for me, that's a cultural symbol that I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, as a kid, and you have you do
Speaker 1: have you know, members of different indigenous tribes who'd use
Speaker 1: the swastika, some whom are saying like, well, maybe we
Speaker 1: should be able to go back to it. Now. It
Speaker 1: has been like nearly andred years like, we feel like
Speaker 1: we did our bit here and this is complex. I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from a twenty twenty two ap News
Speaker 1: article here. It sort of sets up the stakes, she telled.
Speaker 1: Dio was shocked when she got a letter from her
Speaker 1: Queen's apartment building's co op board calling her Dwali decoration
Speaker 1: offensive and demanding she take it down. My decoration said
Speaker 1: happy d Wali and had a swastika on it, said Dio,
Speaker 1: a physician who was celebrating the Hindu Festival of Lights.
Speaker 1: Doo believes she and people of other faiths should not
Speaker 1: have to sacrifice or apologize for a sacred symbol simply
Speaker 1: because it has often conflated with its tainted version. To me,
Speaker 1: that's intolerable, he said. And like, yeah, that's a fair point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, Well, now they're fighting against nineties edge lords
Speaker 3: who are like spray painting it at the skate park
Speaker 3: to be like, oh, look at this, like you know.
Speaker 1: This is complex, yeah, very And Among the people who
Speaker 1: had issue with Dio's display for Duali decoration was Shelley Wernick,
Speaker 1: who was the managing director of the Jewish Federation's Holocaust
Speaker 1: Survivor Carowing and she points out that seeing a swastika
Speaker 1: at home or out and about can be re traumatizing
Speaker 1: for elderly survivors, which is also a fair point.
Speaker 3: But yeah, of course seeing that in any.
Speaker 1: Context really mess you up. You know, I nobody's I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not. There's not like any no one's in the
Speaker 1: wrong here, right, I'm not like to take out This
Speaker 1: is complicated. You know what else is complicated? Chelsey?
Speaker 3: What is that?
Speaker 1: The moral dimensions of advertising products and services in order
Speaker 1: to support a podcast?
Speaker 3: You're telling me, huh huh.
Speaker 1: And that's why we're just gonna ignore it. Here's some ads. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back and uh, feeling good, feeling good. So one
Speaker 1: of the people quoted, and that really quite fatating AP
Speaker 1: News article is a New York based Buddhist priest who
Speaker 1: was disturbed when he heard somebody at an inner faith
Speaker 1: conference called the swastika the universal symbol of evil. And
Speaker 1: whatever your stance on the matter is, that simply can't
Speaker 1: be correct, right like this is still there's like a
Speaker 1: billion or more people for whom this is still a
Speaker 1: religious symbol. Hitler doesn't have the power to make that
Speaker 1: a universal symbol of evil, right Like that is I
Speaker 1: think a bad way to phrase it. Widely recognized as
Speaker 1: a symbol of evil is true because a lot of
Speaker 1: people do recognize it this way. You know that anyway
Speaker 1: complicated this Buddhist the Reverend T. K. Nakagaki wrote a
Speaker 1: book in twenty eighteen called the Buddhist Swastika in Hitler's Cross,
Speaker 1: Rescuing a symbol of peace from the forces of hate.
Speaker 1: And one thing that he points out, because he's a
Speaker 1: big advocate of we should call the symbol that is
Speaker 1: sacred to all these different peoples the swastika or you know,
Speaker 1: presumably when you talking about like the Navajo, you would
Speaker 1: use the term the whirling log. But when we refer
Speaker 1: to the Nazi of the symbol, we should call it
Speaker 1: the hagen Kroi. Right. And one thing he points out
Speaker 1: that I was unaware of is that in newspapers across
Speaker 1: the United States the Nazi cross was referred to as
Speaker 1: the hagen Kroi until the early nineteen thirties when they
Speaker 1: use the term swastika. Now I get his point here.
Speaker 1: I don't think that that's like necessarily wrong, but it
Speaker 1: is worth noting that the Nazis call it out a
Speaker 1: swastika a lot of the time too, like it is
Speaker 1: being used by them at that point in time. And
Speaker 1: I to be quite frank, at this point, I don't
Speaker 1: know how you get people to stop in the West
Speaker 1: to associate hagen Kroi with the Nazis, but not swastika,
Speaker 1: like you have an easier time with like whirling LG.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Now there are legitimate harms that all of this causes
Speaker 1: for members of faiths who have done nothing wrong. In California,
Speaker 1: public the display of the swastika has been criminalized. There
Speaker 1: are exceptions for this, including the sacred swastika used by Hindus,
Speaker 1: but it does not called the illegal swastika a Hagenkroi
Speaker 1: and instead uses the term swastika, which could confuse law enforcement,
Speaker 1: might conceivably lead to problems. Even the worry of this
Speaker 1: itself could cause a chilling effect on religious expression. Quote
Speaker 1: Pushpita Prasad, a spokesperson for the Hindu group, called it
Speaker 1: a victory, but said the legislation unfortunately labels both Hitler's
Speaker 1: symbol and the sacred one as swastika's. This is not
Speaker 1: just an esoteric battle, Prissad said, but an issue with
Speaker 1: real life consequences for immigrant communities whose members have resorted
Speaker 1: to self censoring. Vickas Jane, a Cleveland physician, said that
Speaker 1: he and his wife hid images containing the symbol when
Speaker 1: their children's friends visited because they wouldn't know the difference.
Speaker 1: Jane says he stands in solidarity with the Jewish community,
Speaker 1: but is sad that he cannot freely practice his Jane
Speaker 1: faith because of this lack of understanding. He noted that
Speaker 1: the global Jaane symbol has a swastika in it, but
Speaker 1: in the United States, the Jain community has deliberately removed
Speaker 1: the swastika from its seal. Jane wishes that people would
Speaker 1: differentiate between their symbol of thas piece and Hitler's swastika,
Speaker 1: just as they do with the hateful burning cross symbol
Speaker 1: in Christianity's sacred Crucifix, which I think is a really
Speaker 1: good thing.
Speaker 3: That is a really good point.
Speaker 1: Certain uses of the Christian cross are definitely offensive and frightening,
Speaker 1: but we don't say nobody should be wearing a crucifix, right,
Speaker 1: you know. Now, there's also a growing movement in some
Speaker 1: indigenous circles to end the year's long prohibition on their
Speaker 1: use of the swastik or the worling log. The consternation
Speaker 1: over this by some Jewish organizations is understandable, as is
Speaker 1: the desire of people to return to their use of
Speaker 1: the symbol. Again, no one's wrong here. You know, it's complicated,
Speaker 1: And I'm going to continue with a quote from that
Speaker 1: AP article. For the Navajo people, the symbol shaped like
Speaker 1: a swirl represents the universe in life, said Patricia Ann Davis,
Speaker 1: an elder at the choctaw Ina Dina is the term
Speaker 1: for the Navajo people that is actually used by them
Speaker 1: for themselves. It was a spiritual, esoteric symbol that was
Speaker 1: woven into the Navajo rugs until Hitler took something good,
Speaker 1: beautiful and made it twisted, she said. And I think
Speaker 1: again I want to say here, I'm not saying either
Speaker 1: that like Jewish organizations have like a black and white
Speaker 1: necessarily view about this. Again, there's a lot of appreciation
Speaker 1: on both sides about what a complex and thorny problem
Speaker 1: this is. And I don't think anyone's really behaving unreasonably here.
Speaker 1: Jeff Kellman, a New Hampshire Holocaust historian, often lectures to
Speaker 1: Jewish community organizations about the fundamental differences between the swastika
Speaker 1: and the Hockencroix, and he told the AP he feels
Speaker 1: like his message about the possibility of redeeming the symbol
Speaker 1: has gained recent ground among many Jewish survivors and descendants
Speaker 1: of survivors. Quote, when they learn an Indian girl could
Speaker 1: be named Swastika and she could be harassed in school,
Speaker 1: they understand how they should see these as two separate symbols.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: No one in the Jewish community wants to see Hitler's
Speaker 1: legacy continue to harm people. One of the people quoted
Speaker 1: in that article is gret At Elbagin. She's an eighty
Speaker 1: five year old Holocaust survivor whose grandmother and cousins died
Speaker 1: at Auschway were murdered at Outwards, and she says she
Speaker 1: was surprised to learn about the symbols. Past Elbagin was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen thirty eight, when the Nazis forcibly annexed
Speaker 1: Austrian She went into hiding with relatives in Hungary and
Speaker 1: immigrated to the US in nineteen fifty six and became
Speaker 1: a social worker. This new knowledge about the swastika, Elbergin said,
Speaker 1: feels liberating. She no longer fears a symbol that was
Speaker 1: used to terrorize. Hearing that the swastika is beautiful and
Speaker 1: sacred to so many people is a blessing. She said.
Speaker 1: It's time to let go of the past and look
Speaker 1: into the future. And I'm not saying that that's the
Speaker 1: only way to think about it either. If you're on
Speaker 1: the side of this is like a person who is
Speaker 1: a descendant of Holocaust survivors going like, I don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable with this. That's perfectly reasonable too. This is like, again,
Speaker 1: is very complicated.
Speaker 3: What all this speaks to is like the just the
Speaker 3: incredible power of symbols right to the human race. It's
Speaker 3: just so amazing that this same or like a riff
Speaker 3: on a similar symbol can mean both good luck and
Speaker 3: this huge hero's journey and this powerful religious story. While
Speaker 3: on the other hand, it's a symbol of actual mass
Speaker 3: murder and horror and death, but it's the same symbol.
Speaker 3: It's just the power that we have as humans to
Speaker 3: project onto that whatever we need to or want to
Speaker 3: or believe and accept the symbols that are given to
Speaker 3: us by people in power who have a you know,
Speaker 3: an idea about what the symbol can mean and what
Speaker 3: it can do. It's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot covid on here. So I just
Speaker 1: wanted people to be aware of that, not to take,
Speaker 1: you know, one side or the other or not that
Speaker 1: the sides I presented are the only ways to feel
Speaker 1: about this. This is a tremendously complicated thing to think about,
Speaker 1: but it is worth thinking about. This is something you
Speaker 1: should as just as a person, not even as just
Speaker 1: like somebody's who's Jane. There's somebody who's you know, Navajo,
Speaker 1: somebody who's Jewish that you should be thinking about, but
Speaker 1: just as like a human being, because this is one
Speaker 1: way or the other, regardless of where you land, This
Speaker 1: is everyone symbol. It is universal to the human race
Speaker 1: more or less.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It appears everywhere every place in the world, and it
Speaker 1: always has.
Speaker 3: And it always has everywhere. That is so wild. It
Speaker 3: was in Ohio, it.
Speaker 1: Was Ohio, It's all over It's in China. God, it's everywhere.
Speaker 2: Swastika.
Speaker 1: I'm not over that swastika Oregon. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's so hard because you can't be in solidarity with
Speaker 3: everyone in this situation. I mean, you can try to
Speaker 3: be by just.
Speaker 1: Si solidarity for like, wow, this is messy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'd say that's the best way to have
Speaker 3: solidarity is just to say, like, I actually can't say
Speaker 3: the answer. I can't say that I can respect everyone
Speaker 3: in this situation. He's trying to like make a better
Speaker 3: world through either readopting a symbol or making it disappear.
Speaker 1: It's like, I think it's probably the kind of thing
Speaker 1: where the only real solutions are ad hoc. You know,
Speaker 1: if you've got a situation where members of you know,
Speaker 1: a local Jewish community and you know, sitting down with
Speaker 1: members of like a Jane community or whatever, and they're
Speaker 1: they're talking about how to allow, you know, how to
Speaker 1: have the symbol expressed in its original religious meaning in
Speaker 1: a way that's not going to make people uncomfortable. That's
Speaker 1: fine if you've got you know, somebody wants to display
Speaker 1: Dwally thing in their apartment building, and there's an elderly
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivor and they decide, well, I guess we won't
Speaker 1: put this outside because it might scare this this elderly person,
Speaker 1: and like we don't want to do that. I think
Speaker 1: that's also reasonable. I think if another thing happened, there's
Speaker 1: not I don't have I don't have like a clear
Speaker 1: there's the wrong or the right thing to do here.
Speaker 1: This is just like one of the legacies of you know,
Speaker 1: World War Two, but also just a thing that human
Speaker 1: beings always have to deal with, is the Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know it's complicated, very complicated. Should be aware that it's
Speaker 1: a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I am so happy that this was the topic
Speaker 3: that I got because I just I can't believe I
Speaker 3: didn't know this. I'm absolutely just shocked and awed at
Speaker 3: all of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want a really good book on the subject,
Speaker 1: the swastika symbol Beyond Redemption question Mark by Stephen Heller,
Speaker 1: very readable. Whenever this comes up, whenever there's an issue
Speaker 1: of like somebody displays the swastika for religious reason and
Speaker 1: it causes like a conflict, Stephen usually gets interviewed by
Speaker 1: like the journalists writing about it because he's just like
Speaker 1: the guy who writes about this very good book. I
Speaker 1: do recommend it if you're interested in more detail.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Chelsea, get anything to plug, sure, I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: just you know what, I will specifically plug an episode
Speaker 3: of my podcast American Hysteria called Astrology and the series
Speaker 3: we did because it deals with not only astrologers as
Speaker 3: they existed in the White House and advising for me,
Speaker 3: which is a yes, yep, you know, you know, But
Speaker 3: it also goes into how the Nazis used astrologers as
Speaker 3: like secret agents as well to sort of push propaganda,
Speaker 3: and that just seems like kind of in the same
Speaker 3: vein of this this series here and yeah, American Asterria,
Speaker 3: you can find it anywhere. We study moral panics, urban legends,
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories and how they've affected American history.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, well you can find me right here.
Speaker 1: You can find my novel After the Revolution wherever books
Speaker 1: are sold. Just type After the Revolution into any book thing,
Speaker 1: or again, screech it from the top of your lungs
Speaker 1: while waving some sort of carved war club at the
Speaker 1: guy who runs the Barnes and Noble, you know, or
Speaker 1: Applebee's or sorry yeah, or Applebee's whatever.
Speaker 2: That's the episode Behind the Bastards is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. More from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 2: website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.