Speaker 1: H what trafficking? But no, wait, Sophie, we can't uh,
Speaker 1: we can't. We can't open like that, can we?
Speaker 2: No, that's not what are you even attempting to do
Speaker 2: right now?
Speaker 1: Well? You know how like you know how like back
Speaker 1: in like the sixties, you'd be like if you were
Speaker 1: like getting up on the stage, you're gonna be like
Speaker 1: a beat poet or somebody be like, what's up children,
Speaker 1: like something like that. You know, I was gonna be like,
Speaker 1: what's trafficking my children? But that's not a good introduction.
Speaker 2: Terrible introduction.
Speaker 1: It's a terrible introduction.
Speaker 3: I mean, I like, conceptually, I like that vibe for you,
Speaker 3: but yeah, but the execution was not there.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry because you and I are both big, big
Speaker 1: into beat poetry.
Speaker 2: That is things that people know about us.
Speaker 1: That is what Yeah classic, yeah, big big beat. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this is Behind the Bastards, podcast about the worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history, one of whom is me for today? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that introduction, And to distract from my incompetence, we have
Speaker 1: a wonderful guest today, Chelsea Weber Smith. Chelsea, you are
Speaker 1: the host of American Hysteria, a podcast about how fantastical
Speaker 1: thing has shaped our culture. You deal with a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff like hoaxes and moral panics, which is just
Speaker 1: a wonderful premise for a show. How are you doing today, Chelsea.
Speaker 4: I'm doing great. Thank you so much to you both
Speaker 4: for having me. I'm really excited.
Speaker 2: That was a really professional introduction.
Speaker 3: I just want to say when I met Chelsea, I
Speaker 3: met Melsea in person. It was like a week before
Speaker 3: Lauren Lauren. How do we describe Lauren? Lauren?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Lauren is somebody who does a lot of like
Speaker 4: pr stuff for us.
Speaker 5: Lauren's like, really the patron saint of podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Lauren's like yeah, yeah, Lauren's Lauren reached out to
Speaker 3: I was like, I want to get Lauren. Lauren deserves
Speaker 3: all the credit. I want to get Lauren's proper introduction.
Speaker 3: It was like, do you want to have this person
Speaker 3: on your podcast? I was like sure. And then a
Speaker 3: week later I was at a very strange bar with
Speaker 3: our mutual friend Sarah Marshall, and I met Chelsea likes
Speaker 3: several jello shots and it was great.
Speaker 2: It was such a good.
Speaker 5: Time, complete like happenstance, not brand.
Speaker 4: You've just seen the Wickerman, which Sarah has been obsessed
Speaker 4: with and we all see trafficking.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love the Wickerman was very cool.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, which one Nicholas Cage the original? Okay, okay, okay, good.
Speaker 3: Anoint the They're actually both charming in their own ways.
Speaker 1: Things to recommend both well. Chelsea. First off, welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Sorry I introduced it with a child trafficking bit.
Speaker 1: More to the point, I want to ask you a
Speaker 1: question that I ask all of my friends, all my
Speaker 1: family members, kids at the playground near my house. How
Speaker 1: do you feel about swastika's?
Speaker 5: I feel bad about them, bad.
Speaker 1: Bad about swastika's.
Speaker 4: Okay, I generally don't like seeing them. I don't like
Speaker 4: hearing about them being seen anti swastika here, have.
Speaker 1: You ever in the world seen a swastika that was like,
Speaker 1: definitely not a Nazi swastika?
Speaker 2: Hmm?
Speaker 4: Do you mean sort of perhaps like an attempt to
Speaker 4: shock by a teenager.
Speaker 1: No, I mean that that is also a thing that happens.
Speaker 1: But I mean, what do you know about the origins
Speaker 1: of the swastika pre oh, okay, Hitler, et cetera.
Speaker 4: I know, I know, sort of the cliche answer of
Speaker 4: that it was originally I believe an Indian symbol of
Speaker 4: something like good luck.
Speaker 5: Is that true? Is that right?
Speaker 1: It is? It is a Hindu symbol, it's also a
Speaker 1: Buddhist symbol. It actually goes back much further than that.
Speaker 1: So that's that's what we're talking about today. The working
Speaker 1: title of this week's episodes are What's Up with Swastikas?
Speaker 1: Because obviously this is behind the Bastards, So we're going
Speaker 1: behind the Nazis by talking about the origins of the swastikas,
Speaker 1: how it became a symbol for the Nazis. But also
Speaker 1: when we're talking about the swastika, we're talking about like
Speaker 1: a religious symbol that goes back real far. And so
Speaker 1: the fact that it's primarily most people have the same
Speaker 1: reaction you have, which is like swasika, that's like the
Speaker 1: Nazi thing, which causes problems for people for whom it's
Speaker 1: like an old a religious symbol that goes back a
Speaker 1: long time. So that's that's what we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about this week because there's a lot of history here
Speaker 1: that most people are unaware of. So, yeah, are you
Speaker 1: ready to learn all about swastika's?
Speaker 5: I have never been more ready in my life.
Speaker 1: That's good.
Speaker 5: I'm buckled in.
Speaker 1: It would be probably kind of problematic if you had
Speaker 1: been just shamp it at the bit and learn about swastika.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 1: That's why I read a book.
Speaker 5: You know, I do read books about World War Two
Speaker 5: a lot.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah. The big idea, like.
Speaker 4: It's kind of this kind of history, and it's so
Speaker 4: important to know the origins of things, because you can't
Speaker 4: understand the thing unless you understand the thing it came
Speaker 4: out of.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's let's go back in time. Everyone
Speaker 1: can imagine your your particular favorite time machine noise, and
Speaker 1: we're we're going back way back to the mid nineteen thirties. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's a rough period for all Homo sapiens. Hitler has
Speaker 1: just risen to power in Germany. He started the process
Speaker 1: of crushing his enemies, which obviously includes everyone in the
Speaker 1: country who is of Jewish ancestry. He introduces the Nuremberg
Speaker 1: Laws and I think nineteen thirty five, which bring international
Speaker 1: attention to a growing stream of outrages that are going
Speaker 1: to culminate in the Holocaust. And while all this is
Speaker 1: happening over in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the congregants of
Speaker 1: the Adath emmanual synagogue watch in stultified horror is Hitler's
Speaker 1: bigotry empowers anti Semites across the globe like many Ds
Speaker 1: for a Jews, they raise money to help their relatives
Speaker 1: immigrate from Europe. They write furious letters to newspapers ignoring
Speaker 1: Hitler's crimes. And you know, they worry more than anything else, right,
Speaker 1: which is understandable. You know, how much further will this
Speaker 1: hate spread? Are they safe even in New Jersey? And
Speaker 1: while they're coping with all this, which is a lot
Speaker 1: to have on your mind, your conscience, one of their
Speaker 1: congregants notices something during a service, which is that in
Speaker 1: the vestibule of their synagogue there's a mosaic, a beautiful
Speaker 1: handmade mosaic that features dozens and dozens and dozens of swastikas.
Speaker 1: Now this is obviously a problem, right, you don't want
Speaker 1: to have that in your synagogue in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and after a quick discussion, they decide to pave the
Speaker 1: swastikas out. Fast forward about one hundred years, you know,
Speaker 1: you have World War Two, all that that horrible stuff happens.
Speaker 1: You know, the rebuilding process occurs afterwards, you know, life
Speaker 1: goes on, and on December fifth, twenty twenty one, for
Speaker 1: the first time in like ninety years or so, the
Speaker 1: Adath Emmanual Synagogue finds itself again with a swastika near
Speaker 1: the vestibule. Now this one had been applied by a
Speaker 1: sticker wielded by some unknown Nazi who adds in writing
Speaker 1: the message we are everywhere. Now that's a chilling, horrifying,
Speaker 1: depressing story. But in between those two incidents, the the
Speaker 1: swastikas that had been placed inside the vestibule of the
Speaker 1: synagogue long before the rise of Hitler, and the swastika
Speaker 1: added there in the twenty twenties by a Nazi. In
Speaker 1: between those two incidents is a really fascinating and strange story,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're going to be talking about today.
Speaker 1: Unlike a lot of you know, the swastika is almost
Speaker 1: certainly the most well known hate symbol in the world.
Speaker 1: But unlike a lot of other particularly famous hate symbols,
Speaker 1: the Confederate flag, for example, the Klansman's hood, the SS
Speaker 1: lightning bolts, the swastika is not in and of itself problematic.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is the swastika was
Speaker 1: not created as a symbol of hate. It was turned
Speaker 1: into one later. And one of the things that you understand,
Speaker 1: like you start to learn when you look into this,
Speaker 1: is that not only is the swastika something that predates
Speaker 1: the Nazis, it may be one of, if not the
Speaker 1: oldest complex symbols created by human beings. Now there's a
Speaker 1: lot of debate about this. Scholarship over the swastika has
Speaker 1: invited vigorous debate for very obvious reasons, over both the
Speaker 1: geographic and the temporal nature of its origins. When it
Speaker 1: comes to the word itself, we do have a lot
Speaker 1: clearer of an origin. We know exactly where the word
Speaker 1: swastika came from, and its origins are Sanskrit, and it
Speaker 1: does mean, as you noted, well being, good luck, and fortune.
Speaker 1: That is like the meaning of the word swastika. And
Speaker 1: in fact, the first recorded instance of the word swastika
Speaker 1: predates the first recorded instance of the symbol swastika in
Speaker 1: the Mdus Valley, right so in you know, India, that
Speaker 1: kind of region. The word swastika seems to predate the
Speaker 1: actual use of the symbol. This is again, whenever you're
Speaker 1: talking about stuff that's old, the dates are kind of fluid.
Speaker 1: But best sort of assumption is that like around the
Speaker 1: fourth millennium BCE is when the swastika first shows up
Speaker 1: in the Indus Valley, right, So that's pretty old, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like this.
Speaker 3: I don't know, Chelsea, I feel like this is not
Speaker 3: something like if you hearing it's one of the old
Speaker 3: symbols ever created by human beings.
Speaker 2: Was not something I knew.
Speaker 5: No, no, I did not expect that at all.
Speaker 4: I've been reading a lot of books lately about kind
Speaker 4: of the origins of the conception of God, which includes
Speaker 4: like so much religious symbolism, and this feels like right
Speaker 4: right in my interests right now, and I'm so excited
Speaker 4: about this, And we'll talk.
Speaker 1: A little bit later about why. But there there were
Speaker 1: starting kind of the eighteen hundreds, which is when scholarship
Speaker 1: around the swastika and kind of the modern recognized sense
Speaker 1: of the word really starts, there was a belief among
Speaker 1: some anthropologists that it was probably the oldest complex symbol,
Speaker 1: the oldest symbol that's not just a simple shape, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you see the sun, you draw a circle
Speaker 1: or whatever, but like the oldest complex shape. There's no
Speaker 1: way to prove that right, that's an absolutely unprovable just
Speaker 1: because of the age of everything involved here. But there's
Speaker 1: not really anything that's like a clearer like like bet
Speaker 1: for the oldest symbol. By the way, we're talking about
Speaker 1: like this within the context of the swastika arising in
Speaker 1: the fourth millennium BCE in the Indus Valley. It goes
Speaker 1: back way further than that now for a long time.
Speaker 1: And most people, if you ask, most people who are
Speaker 1: kind of casually familiar, they say, oh, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a symbol in India right well before the Nazis picked
Speaker 1: it up. That is not the oldest recorded instance of
Speaker 1: the use of the swastika. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: now from an article in the BBC. If you want
Speaker 1: to see just how deeply rooted the swastika pattern is
Speaker 1: in Europe, a good place to start is Kiev, where
Speaker 1: the National Museum of the History of Ukraine has an
Speaker 1: impressive range of exhibits. Among the museum's most highly prized
Speaker 1: treasures is a small ivory figurine of a female bird
Speaker 1: made from the tusk of a mammoth. It was found
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh eight at the Paleolithic settlement of Mizine
Speaker 1: near the Russian border. On the torso of the bird
Speaker 1: is engraved an intricate meander pattern of joined up swastikas.
Speaker 1: It is the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world
Speaker 1: and has been radiocarbon dated to an astonishing fifth teen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Whoa, So we were making swastikas way
Speaker 1: before we had cities, right Like, there's yeah, like, this
Speaker 1: is an ancient, ancient symbol. It was found with a
Speaker 1: bunch of phallic a bunch of dicks, right like, it
Speaker 1: was found with a bunch of dicks, because it's a
Speaker 1: fertility symbol. You know, you see that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: all over the world. Now, I think people might expect
Speaker 1: us to given the present war in Ukraine and the
Speaker 1: fact that both Ukraine and Russia have serious problems with
Speaker 1: far right neo Nazi combat organizations, you might expect us
Speaker 1: to go into that here, but it's not really relevant.
Speaker 1: We're talking fifteen thousand years ago, so one way or
Speaker 1: the other, it has nothing to do with the present
Speaker 1: issues with the far right in that part of the world. Again,
Speaker 1: this is it like predates the First City by like
Speaker 1: five thousand years and despite the shocking age of the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian swastik is. This does not mean that they originate,
Speaker 1: that the symbol itself was first used near Kiev or
Speaker 1: any you know, anywhere in that region, Because there's a
Speaker 1: fascinating theory, and I was completely unaware of this until
Speaker 1: I started doing my research as to where the swastika
Speaker 1: came from. Now, again, when scholarship around the swastika starts
Speaker 1: in kind of the eighteen hundreds, one of the assumptions
Speaker 1: is that, and this is going to play into the
Speaker 1: Nazis later, it has to have started at a single place.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: The idea that these anthropologists have is the swastika is
Speaker 1: so complicated, such a complex symbol, it can't have arisen
Speaker 1: in multiple places simultaneously.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It must have been originated by us at one place
Speaker 1: and then carried over to the rest of the world. Now,
Speaker 1: this happens to gel with a lot of theories at
Speaker 1: the time about like this kind of Atlantis super civilization
Speaker 1: that's seed in culture and whatnot. This is probably not
Speaker 1: the case. The swastika probably arose independently in a number
Speaker 1: of parts of the world, and the kind of best
Speaker 1: explanation as to how came in nineteen sixty five from
Speaker 1: a paleontologist named Valentina Bibikova, who was looking at this
Speaker 1: Ukrainian piece of art with swastikas in it, depositive that
Speaker 1: a probable origin for the symbol itself is the actual
Speaker 1: structure of mammoth ivory, because when you cut mammoth ivory
Speaker 1: into cross sections, there's a naturally occurring pattern within the
Speaker 1: ivory that looks kind of like a swastika. And that
Speaker 1: could explain very easily why there's variations of the same
Speaker 1: symbol all over the world. It was people hunting that
Speaker 1: and other kind of animals with ivory that might make
Speaker 1: a similar pattern in the cross sections.
Speaker 5: Wow, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, I have no idea about this, isn't.
Speaker 4: That I was thinking of like a collective consciousness, like
Speaker 4: if we were a little bit far out into like
Speaker 4: a Youngian universe like these some sort of primordial symbol
Speaker 4: being expressed in different places. But what you said sounds
Speaker 4: a little bit more polive.
Speaker 1: Bunch of a bunch of ladies and dudes fucking around
Speaker 1: with bones for a.
Speaker 4: Long time, being like this represents the bones, which represents
Speaker 4: the animal which I want to eat.
Speaker 1: So it's everything And again you got to think about
Speaker 1: like what sort of options people have for entertainment at
Speaker 1: the time. We often say this, but Bone were the
Speaker 1: original podcast. Oh yeah, you know it is no yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just a fact. Yeah, this brings me to our sponsors
Speaker 1: for this week, Bone Box. Just a lot of Honestly,
Speaker 1: it's just a bunch of illegal livery. You will get
Speaker 1: in a lot of trouble if that's catch you ordering.
Speaker 3: I believe I believe the month first Barbie was carved
Speaker 3: out of mammoth bone.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Speaker 4: We just did a whole episode on Barbie and yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: By Greta Gerwick. She actually goes back about fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: years too. People don't know this.
Speaker 5: She's actually a mortal. Yeah, yes, she continues to prove it.
Speaker 3: And for those keeping track, it did take us only
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes to make a Barbie reference.
Speaker 2: You're welcome, that's right.
Speaker 5: Right, we know what the people want.
Speaker 1: The origin of all human culture, So yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's really interesting. Rather than kind of have being transferred
Speaker 1: all obviously, cultural exchange happens too. People take their swastikas
Speaker 1: and they conquer or move to other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: and that spreads it as well. It's not just one thing,
Speaker 1: but it's very likely that multiple different parts of the
Speaker 1: world kind of arrive at the swastika independently. One noteworthy
Speaker 1: example of the use of the symbol comes from the
Speaker 1: Akan people of Ghana, who used it in their gold
Speaker 1: weights at around fourteen hundred a d. You can find
Speaker 1: some photos of these online and they look like Nazi gold, right,
Speaker 1: Like look that you would guess that's probably like some
Speaker 1: stolen Nazi gold, But these predate the Nazis by you know,
Speaker 1: five hundred something years. Fascinating, right, so fascinating, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is kind of we'll be talking about this.
Speaker 1: But it also the fact that when you see this
Speaker 1: you immediately are like, oh, that's some stolen Nazi gold
Speaker 1: does point to how potent the symbol remains as a
Speaker 1: symbol of evil too, just like because of you know,
Speaker 1: dem Nazis. But yeah, So in eighteen ninety four, a
Speaker 1: historian named Thomas Wilson wrote one of the it might
Speaker 1: have been the first modern histories of the swastika, attempting
Speaker 1: to use kind of modern historiography and scientific method to
Speaker 1: determine where it came from. And it was Thomas Wilson,
Speaker 1: who first made the claim that the swastika was quote
Speaker 1: probably the first symbol made with definite intention in human history.
Speaker 1: By this, he means not just a representative image, but
Speaker 1: one that was passed from person to person, tribe to tribe,
Speaker 1: and traveled intentionally with meaning intact across cultures. There is
Speaker 1: no way of proving this, and it seems like Wilson,
Speaker 1: it's probably fair to say now he was coming on
Speaker 1: a little strong, but it's not too much to say
Speaker 1: that the swastika would have been one of the first
Speaker 1: symbols to spread around the world. And there is some
Speaker 1: mystery as to why. While these symbols presence in Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe, and North Africa can be explained via the
Speaker 1: known and documented patterns of trade, really kind of the
Speaker 1: only way to just like it's also been found as
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about all over the Americas. And
Speaker 1: this is why I started by talking about that piece
Speaker 1: of mammoth ivory, because this is really the only explanation,
Speaker 1: right like there was not people were not like walking
Speaker 1: from Kiev to or the location of modern day Kiev
Speaker 1: to North America fifteen thousand years ago. From what we
Speaker 1: can tell people indigenous people in the Americas who were
Speaker 1: here much longer than that, we're using swastika's much further
Speaker 1: back than that. Whenever you talk about kind of the
Speaker 1: timing here, you know that's a complicated and very politically,
Speaker 1: shall we say, dicey story. But we do know that
Speaker 1: swastikas were in use. And I'm going to stop calling
Speaker 1: them swastikas in a second, because the people of the
Speaker 1: Americas didn't call them that, But we're in use, particularly
Speaker 1: in what is now the Americans southwest and West coast,
Speaker 1: for a very long time. The Navajo people who have
Speaker 1: for a considerable period of time inhabited a large portion
Speaker 1: of modern Arizona, New Mexico southern California, have been using
Speaker 1: the swastika since kind of the prehistoric period, and they
Speaker 1: called it, and what we'll be calling it when we
Speaker 1: refer to their use of it, is the whirling log.
Speaker 1: Right that is the name of the symbol, not just
Speaker 1: for the Navajo, but for a number of other tribes
Speaker 1: kind of in that part of the Americas, and it
Speaker 1: is it is representative. It's called the whirling log because
Speaker 1: it's representative of a specific story. And without getting into
Speaker 1: too much detail about spiritual beliefs that are outside of
Speaker 1: my depth. It's one of these tales where like you've
Speaker 1: got a heroic character who is forced on a dangerous journey.
Speaker 1: He receives the aid of gods, gods and spirits and
Speaker 1: he kind of learns mystic lessons along the way, right,
Speaker 1: and the whirling log is representative of this story. The
Speaker 1: Navajo are not the only indigenous people of the Americas
Speaker 1: to use variants of the whirling log, but they're probably
Speaker 1: the most well documented ancient American users. We don't know
Speaker 1: how long the symbol has been in use over here
Speaker 1: because the primary way in which they used it was
Speaker 1: for these kind of sand drawings as part of religious rituals.
Speaker 1: So it was in a way that most of the
Speaker 1: time when it was used, it was not kind of
Speaker 1: being preserved long term.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: They weren't carving it into huge edifices. They were using
Speaker 1: it for these kind of rituals in which it was
Speaker 1: not meant to last, right, And it was his story
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 4: Was it like a way to give a narrative, like
Speaker 4: that narrative that you just kind of told of a
Speaker 4: hero's journey, Do you.
Speaker 1: Know, I think it was it was representative of a
Speaker 1: specific story that had religious significance for them, and it
Speaker 1: was also like that kind of it was used in
Speaker 1: a in a series of rituals that they carried out.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the extent of I don't want to
Speaker 1: like get too deep into the ways. I don't want
Speaker 1: to be a culture that I, you know, is not
Speaker 1: very far outside of my wheeledhouse. But it was. It
Speaker 1: was used widely, and it was used widely in a
Speaker 1: fashion that, like most of the uses, would not have
Speaker 1: been preserved for long periods of time, because that was
Speaker 1: not the point of using the symbol. So I want
Speaker 1: to quote from an article in the Collector's Guide of
Speaker 1: New Mexico talking about some of the historiography on the
Speaker 1: use of the whirling log. In his book The Swastika
Speaker 1: Symbol in Navajo Textiles, Dennis J. Anger cites Thomas Wilson's
Speaker 1: research in the eighteen nineties that the earliest evidence of
Speaker 1: the swastika in America was found in excavations in Tennessee
Speaker 1: and Ohio. That the swastika found its way to the
Speaker 1: Western hemisphere in prehistoric times cannot be doubted. Anger quotes
Speaker 1: Wilson's writing one of the specimens shows its antiquity and
Speaker 1: its manufacture by the Aborigines, untainted by contact with the whites.
Speaker 1: That's obviously eighteen nineties language here. But it does originate it.
Speaker 1: You find it in a number of parts of North America.
Speaker 1: I believe there's evidence of it in South America Iyo, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Ohio and Tennessee. It was a big brass swastika that
Speaker 1: was found like underground as part of an excavation. And
Speaker 1: you know, so again, this goes back quite as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, like the likeliest I think the
Speaker 1: likeliest assumption is that it was created, it was developed
Speaker 1: or whatever independently by people in the Americas, right, which
Speaker 1: happens with a bunch of stuff, right kind of Famously,
Speaker 1: the bow and arrow is developed independently by a number
Speaker 1: of different cultures. You know this, There's no reason why
Speaker 1: the swastika wouldn't. It's not more complex than a bow
Speaker 1: and arrow, for sure. But yeah, so I have a.
Speaker 4: Question really quick, So does that mean there was some
Speaker 4: sort of like ivory situation happening here.
Speaker 5: I'm not like very privy to your early animals.
Speaker 1: You know, there are mammoths in the Americas, so it
Speaker 1: may have been that it may have just been somebody
Speaker 1: perhaps perhaps somebody too who was like, you know, utilizing
Speaker 1: substances as part of a religious ritual, who noticed that,
Speaker 1: like or who kind of saw maybe it was like
Speaker 1: the way the clouds were moving around the sun or
Speaker 1: something that maybe like a spindle whirl, you know. Who
Speaker 1: knows where it came, like how it first got used,
Speaker 1: because it's its earliest documented use kind of is outside
Speaker 1: of the whirling log use that the Navajo are using
Speaker 1: in the southeast part of the continent, because we're talking
Speaker 1: about like Tennessee, Ohio. So we probably will never know
Speaker 1: specifically who had it first in the Americas, but maybe
Speaker 1: even it might have originated in a couple of different
Speaker 1: cultures in the Americas independently. You know, there's no reason
Speaker 1: why that wouldn't have been the case. Now, that book
Speaker 1: I just cited from the swastika symbol in Navajo textiles
Speaker 1: was written in the eighteen nineties, because the swastika happened
Speaker 1: to be a very big topic at just that point
Speaker 1: in time. And this does bring us back to the Nazis.
Speaker 1: It all starts with a very what I would call
Speaker 1: a stupid genius, a guy named Heinrich Schleimann, and Heinrich
Speaker 1: Schleiman is the man who's going to find the ruins
Speaker 1: of Troy, and he's really bad at it. He does
Speaker 1: succeed in finding the ruins of Troy, but he's like
Speaker 1: the worst guy to find the ruins of Troy, such
Speaker 1: an idiot. So Schleman's an interesting character. Thato was born
Speaker 1: December twenty sixth, eighteen twenty two in a town that
Speaker 1: I'm not going to try to pronounce. It's in Germany.
Speaker 1: It's one of those German towns with just a mess
Speaker 1: of a name. He's the fifth of nine chow and
Speaker 1: his dad is a dirt poor pastor. And when Heinrich
Speaker 1: is seven, he becomes fascinated with the myth of the
Speaker 1: Trojan War. Now, at that point in time and kind
Speaker 1: of the mid to late eighteen hundreds, when he's going
Speaker 1: to school and whatnot, the Trojan War is seen as
Speaker 1: probably an apocryphal story. Most serious scholars at least don't
Speaker 1: believe that it's a literal story about a literal war
Speaker 1: for Troy. It's kind of more of a mythological tale.
Speaker 1: But he falls in love with this story, and he
Speaker 1: certainly doesn't assume that it's a myth. Like many poor
Speaker 1: kids of his era, he was sent by his father
Speaker 1: to go live and work with a relative. You hear
Speaker 1: this kind of story a lot. We've covered a lot
Speaker 1: of Germans on this show, interestingly enough, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them have a similar background where it's like, we're
Speaker 1: kind of poor my dad's you know, his dad sent
Speaker 1: him off to live with his uncle or whatever, and
Speaker 1: when he's nine, he enrolls in a school where he
Speaker 1: lives away from his family for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: He was a lonely kid. One of the few constants
Speaker 1: in his early life which was difficult was his obsession
Speaker 1: with Greek and Roman mythology. His dad encourages this at first,
Speaker 1: but starts to get worried about it kind of later
Speaker 1: on because Heinrich just doesn't give it up. But then
Speaker 1: his father gets accused of embezzling church funds, which puts
Speaker 1: an end to Heinrich's education and forces him to apprentice
Speaker 1: as a grocer. He would later claim that his love
Speaker 1: of Homer really blossomed while he was walking home from
Speaker 1: work one day and he comes across this drunk guy
Speaker 1: in the street who's just kind of reciting parts of
Speaker 1: the odyssey. I don't know why that hit him so hard,
Speaker 1: but it did. And Schleimann spent the next few years
Speaker 1: going through something of an odyssey himself. He lost his
Speaker 1: job after he started coughing up blood randomly one day.
Speaker 1: This is the eighteen hundreds, and yeah, the thing you do,
Speaker 1: and what do you do when you start coughing up
Speaker 1: blood randomly? You get a job as a cabin boy
Speaker 1: on a boat, so that way they can at least
Speaker 1: throw your body overboard when you die. Right, But he
Speaker 1: doesn't die. Even though the boat he's on crashes in
Speaker 1: a storm, he survives and makes it to age twenty two,
Speaker 1: which point he gets a gig for an import export firm.
Speaker 1: This is where he's going to actually like shine because
Speaker 1: he has an excellent head for business. He's extremely successful.
Speaker 1: He makes a bunch of money, picks up Dutch in Russian,
Speaker 1: and by the time he's like thirty six years old,
Speaker 1: he's rich and respected. And he decides, I'm going to retire. Right,
Speaker 1: I've already stared death in the face a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of times. I'm not working anymore. I'm going to take
Speaker 1: my money and I am going to roll the dice
Speaker 1: on what's always been my life dream, finding the city
Speaker 1: of Troy and proving that it was real. And I
Speaker 1: know you're wondering, where do the swastikas come in?
Speaker 4: There?
Speaker 1: There are coming. Don't worry.
Speaker 4: This is like such an interesting midlife crisis that's happening here.
Speaker 1: I'll find the truth.
Speaker 3: I do feel like a lot of mindrayth crisis is
Speaker 3: start with well, I read the Odyssey, like I do
Speaker 3: feel like that is that is usually in the.
Speaker 1: Organ you know, the uh Well, nowadays I think the
Speaker 1: equivalent of that is reading American Psycho for for middle
Speaker 1: A businessmen. But back in the day, it was the
Speaker 1: Odyssey the American Psycho of the Old World. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: all remember that moment where Odysseus is talking with the
Speaker 1: other Greeks about his business cards. Okay, So, as I
Speaker 1: noted earlier, there was tremendous debate in the day as
Speaker 1: to whether or not any city such as Troy had
Speaker 1: ever existed. Now, since ancient times, there had been a
Speaker 1: general area in Anatolia, which today is just kind of
Speaker 1: like we call Turkey, but that's like the name for
Speaker 1: the geographical region, and that area called there was a
Speaker 1: part of anatolia called the Troad that had been in
Speaker 1: like ancient times when the Romans are running shit. This
Speaker 1: is where everyone had just like said, Troy had been.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of one of the first, one
Speaker 1: of the first like pieces of nerd culture, right, because
Speaker 1: Western nerd culture really starts with the Ily in the Odyssey. Right,
Speaker 1: So in ancient Roman days, we're talking two thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: rich nerds are like traveling to the Troad to like
Speaker 1: visit the sites that they think the Iliad took place in, right,
Speaker 1: Like they're probably dressing up as like Hector and Achilles,
Speaker 1: you know that. Yeah, Yeah, that's the birth of nerd
Speaker 1: culture right there. Anyway, whatever, there's no evidence. Again, there
Speaker 1: was not hard evidence that the city of Troy had
Speaker 1: been there. It's just the place people had gone to. Schleiman, though,
Speaker 1: was certain that it was real and certain that the Troad,
Speaker 1: somewhere in there was the actual ruins of Troy. Since
Speaker 1: he had money and time, he decided to travel to
Speaker 1: the likeliest spot and dig the fucker up.
Speaker 3: Literally, like that guy to our signo, bro, it happened,
Speaker 3: I was there that guy.
Speaker 5: So did he show up with a shovel. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm talking to team.
Speaker 1: Do we have a tea sho He shows up with boys, right,
Speaker 1: like he hires boys to do the diggings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what he.
Speaker 5: Did back then, Hire a bunch of boys.
Speaker 1: That's yeah. Everyone's talking to day about how we've just
Speaker 1: developed a new semiconductor. We need to return to tradition.
Speaker 1: Just boys and shovels, you know. That was That's what
Speaker 1: what built civilization is groups of boys with shovels, paid
Speaker 1: pennies a day. That's what we need to go back to.
Speaker 1: I just rewatched the Inana Jones movie, so im.
Speaker 2: I was like, what is in your brain right now?
Speaker 1: So he gets his boys and he shows up at
Speaker 1: the Troad and I'm going to quote for what comes
Speaker 1: next from a write up by archaeologists for the British Museum.
Speaker 1: Frank Calvert lived in the Troad, an owned land next
Speaker 1: to the mound of Hissarlik. An amateur but skilled archaeologist,
Speaker 1: he was convinced that this would be a good place
Speaker 1: to dig, so when Shleeman visited in eighteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: with homer in one hand and a spade in the other,
Speaker 1: determined to make his name in archaeology. Calvert found him
Speaker 1: easy to persuade. Now, this is a time when Calvert,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of convinced is Shleman that like he's
Speaker 1: got a spot to dig that he thinks is where
Speaker 1: Troy is. This is a period of time where the
Speaker 1: Ottoman Empire, which governs the area is kind of the
Speaker 1: sick man of Europe, and so it's it's a great
Speaker 1: place to be a rich guy who wants to like
Speaker 1: pay to fuck around. Because normally most countries, if you're like,
Speaker 1: I want to dig up one of your like historical
Speaker 1: landmarks just to see what's under there, they'd be like, well, no,
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to do that. But Shleman is kind
Speaker 1: of just able to bribe his way into things. It's
Speaker 1: a little bit messier of a period of time, and
Speaker 1: shockingly Calvert was right. He picks the right area. He does,
Speaker 1: in fact know where the ruins of Troy are, but
Speaker 1: it's not immediately obvious. They start finding like ruins and
Speaker 1: shit aphemera, but it's not obvious to them because they
Speaker 1: don't really know what they're doing that these are ruins
Speaker 1: of Troy that they found. They're just kind of coming
Speaker 1: across pieces of pottery, old bits of buildings. But in
Speaker 1: Shleiman's mind, Troy is this like wealthy city and everything's
Speaker 1: plated in gold and colorful, and they're just finding like
Speaker 1: old crap because like that's what everything old looks like.
Speaker 1: Unless you really know what you're looking at, it's just
Speaker 1: like junk most of the.
Speaker 2: Time, right, looking for a brad Pitt.
Speaker 1: He was looking for Brad Pitt in there. You know,
Speaker 1: he is expecting something glorious and impressive. And obviously, again
Speaker 1: this is kind of a logical because if you even
Speaker 1: if you take the story in the Iliad as literal, like, well,
Speaker 1: the Greek sacked it, right, they wouldn't have left the
Speaker 1: good shit. It's just gonna be junk that's left behind
Speaker 1: after they kill everybody. So they dig past what they
Speaker 1: think of as the crap. They keep going deeper, and
Speaker 1: they keep going deeper. And I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 1: Smithsonian magazine now, as after his first excavation season failed
Speaker 1: to yield promising results, Schleiman adopted a new tactic, instructing
Speaker 1: his team to dig an enormous forty five foot deep trench.
Speaker 1: His methods a note Jill Rubikalba and Eric H. Klein
Speaker 1: and digging for Troy from Homer to Hissarlik were savage
Speaker 1: and brutal, even by the standards of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: The authors add, he plowed through layers of soil and
Speaker 1: everything in them without proper record keeping, no mapping of finds,
Speaker 1: few descriptions of discoveries. So he finds Troy, but he
Speaker 1: digs past it and destroys most of the ruins of Troy,
Speaker 1: or at least a lot of them, until he finds
Speaker 1: some gold that he decides must have belonged to the
Speaker 1: famous king Priam. Archaeologists will later prove it's way older
Speaker 1: than that. Like, he did find some cool looking gold shit,
Speaker 1: but it is not from fucking Priam, and he he
Speaker 1: obliterates most of the actual traces of historic Troy because
Speaker 1: Schliemann is kind of a we aboo, right, Like he's
Speaker 1: a Homer we aboo right. Anyway, very funny story. How
Speaker 1: this relates back to our premise today is that one
Speaker 1: of the clear discoveries that Heinrich did make was he
Speaker 1: finds a bunch of pottery in this mound, adorned with
Speaker 1: a fascinating symbol, the swastika. Now at this point people
Speaker 1: knew the swastika is in use. Not only are the
Speaker 1: you know, the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest
Speaker 1: using it, but it's in use all over you know,
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia, right. It is a religious symbol for Hindu people,
Speaker 1: it's a religious symbol for Buddhist people. You find it
Speaker 1: all over stuff in China. It's a very common symbol
Speaker 1: in China as well, not just for Buddhists. So this
Speaker 1: is kind of and the reason why this sort of
Speaker 1: electrifies people is that when you're talking about the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, you know, think back to the episodes we've
Speaker 1: done on Helena Blovatsky and stuff. This is the origins
Speaker 1: of the stuff that's going to become Nazi race science
Speaker 1: people are already talking about Aryans. They're talking about this
Speaker 1: kind of mythical precursor civilization that they believe seeded, you know,
Speaker 1: high civilization around the world that presumably to a lot
Speaker 1: of Europeans is like white, right, Like that's a big
Speaker 1: like belief at the time. And we know that like
Speaker 1: these Indo Aryan people that kind of start off in
Speaker 1: the Indus Valley have traveled around like up in through
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia, up through like modern day Russia and into Europe.
Speaker 1: And the fact that they find swastikas in these ruins
Speaker 1: of Troy is kind of evidence of this root race,
Speaker 1: this precursor Aryan people. Right, That's how it gets interpreted
Speaker 1: by a lot of folks at the time. Right, this
Speaker 1: is proof of these theories that are starting to gain
Speaker 1: a lot of purchase among chunks of European society. Schleeman
Speaker 1: is fascinated by the swastika, and he continues, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a big deal when he finds what he thinks
Speaker 1: is Troy, that we now know is something else. But
Speaker 1: he keeps doing archaeology around the world, often illegal archaeology,
Speaker 1: generally bad archaeology. But because a lot of people had
Speaker 1: not been digging in the place as he was, he
Speaker 1: also does find a lot of shit. And some of
Speaker 1: the shit he finds is that he keeps finding swastikas
Speaker 1: on stuff. Right. He would later decide that the swastika
Speaker 1: because he finds a bunch of swastikas in like old Jewish,
Speaker 1: like religious icons and like temples and stuff. He decides
Speaker 1: that it's related to the Hebrew letter Tau, which is
Speaker 1: the sign of life and was ritualistically drawn on the
Speaker 1: foreheads of believers, which incidentally is how Charles Manson would
Speaker 1: later explain why he put a swastika on his forehead.
Speaker 1: Now note that I said how Manson explained, not why
Speaker 1: he actually did it. But that is there. Manson is
Speaker 1: where like Manson is reading this kind of stuff decades later, right,
Speaker 1: because it's still relevant and sort of weird fringe occult
Speaker 1: communities and whatnot. Speaking of Charles Manson, why you know,
Speaker 1: who would have been a lot better at running a cult?
Speaker 1: Who's that our sponsors?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah's easily easily, of course. Yeah, in a way, we're
Speaker 1: all in that cult already, and we're back and we're
Speaker 1: talking about our wonderful sponsors who something something helter skelter whatever.
Speaker 1: Let's continue with the episode. Schleiman's findings of the swastika
Speaker 1: are read attentively by growing communities of Aryan nerds, these
Speaker 1: kind of proto Nazis, and anthropologist Gwendolin Lake will later write, quote,
Speaker 1: when Heinrich Schleiman discovered swastika like decorations on pottery fragments
Speaker 1: and all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as
Speaker 1: evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants
Speaker 1: of the site had been Aryan all along. The link
Speaker 1: between the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was
Speaker 1: impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings
Speaker 1: and associations onto a universal symbol which hint served as
Speaker 1: a distinguishing boundary marker between non Aryan, or rather non
Speaker 1: German and German identity. So this is going to take off,
Speaker 1: particularly among the Germans right, which are just starting to
Speaker 1: be a thing. You know, he's in Troy eighteen sixty eight.
Speaker 1: Germany gets invented two years later, right, Maybe I don't know,
Speaker 1: we could have just done Belgium too, and probably saved
Speaker 1: ourselves a lot of trouble. But you know, whatever would
Speaker 1: have been nice would have been nice. So the growing
Speaker 1: swastika craze among European intellectual weirdos and Americans who are
Speaker 1: themselves weird fanboys of European intellectual weirdos leads us right
Speaker 1: back to the Navajo. Now, up until the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: the swastika or the whirling log in this context was
Speaker 1: used only in religious ceremonies by at least by by
Speaker 1: the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest, primarily like
Speaker 1: sand paintings. But there's these two Americans who start opening
Speaker 1: like Caucasian Americans who start opening trading posts in Navajo Territory.
Speaker 1: And these guys names are Lorenzo Hubble and JB. Moore,
Speaker 1: And they're aware of the swastika craze that's sweeping across
Speaker 1: Europe as a result of Schleiman's work, and they start
Speaker 1: they become aware of the fact that the whirling log
Speaker 1: is in use throughout the Southwest. Now, another thing that's
Speaker 1: happening at this time is that the quote unquote West,
Speaker 1: you know, in that sort of conception of life like
Speaker 1: the Wild West whatever, which is obviously flawed at inaccurate
Speaker 1: historical conception, but it is a popular conception in the
Speaker 1: minds of a lot of Americans, particularly in the East Coast,
Speaker 1: has ignited a craze for all things Native American. Right,
Speaker 1: both Americans and the coasts are kind of obsessing over
Speaker 1: generally inaccurate stories and pieces of you iconography, items that
Speaker 1: had been owned or made by Native Americans. And this
Speaker 1: is also a huge deal over in Europe.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: A lot of this is centered around these kind of
Speaker 1: noble savage depictions of indigenous peoples in fiction like the
Speaker 1: books of Carl May, which inspire Hitler to a significant degree,
Speaker 1: and to hubbl and more, the fact that all this
Speaker 1: is happening at the same time represents a clear opportunity
Speaker 1: for profit. Right.
Speaker 4: Oh, and also that's when the wild West shows are happening,
Speaker 4: right exactly, Yes, Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so all of this is kind of happening at
Speaker 1: the same time. And Hubblan Moore notice this. They want
Speaker 1: to take advantage in sell art that's being made by
Speaker 1: by Navajo, particularly by Navajo silversmiths, and silversmithing is like
Speaker 1: a really significant thing. I mean, it has a lot
Speaker 1: to do with the survival of the Navajo people. There's
Speaker 1: a very good book about this called The Counterfeiters of
Speaker 1: Bosque Redondo. Fascinating book, really interesting piece of history about
Speaker 1: how effectively the Navajo averted a genocide that was, you know,
Speaker 1: being carried out by the United States. Really interesting story.
Speaker 1: But anyway, there's a lot of like really good silver
Speaker 1: products being made and there's tremendous demand for them, particularly
Speaker 1: over in the cities of the East Coast and in Europe,
Speaker 1: and win Hubble and Moore, see that the swastika is,
Speaker 1: you know, or in this case, the whirling log is
Speaker 1: a simple in use here. They're like, you guys, got
Speaker 1: to start putting that on some of this silver stuff
Speaker 1: and some of this other artwork that you're putting out,
Speaker 1: because that shit'll sell. People love the like white people
Speaker 1: love swastikas, right now, you got to start making this
Speaker 1: on stuff, right and so yeah, and again a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff that's been made is being made by
Speaker 1: folks in the area, like Pueblo people, but it all
Speaker 1: kind of gets marketed as like you know, a specific
Speaker 1: you know, these are you know, Navajo relics and whatnot
Speaker 1: that we're selling to you in New York or whatever.
Speaker 1: And the two most popular motifs in the artwork that's
Speaker 1: being taken from the south West and sold over in
Speaker 1: the cities of the East coasts are Indian heads and swastikas.
Speaker 1: Those are the two like things that that white people
Speaker 1: want to buy when they're buying this stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no idea, Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 1: Klein, who has written a book on Navajo spoons Silver
Speaker 1: Spoons to be published by the Museum of New Mexico
Speaker 1: Press or that was published by the Museum of New Mexico.
Speaker 1: Press noted that the first spoon that she had located
Speaker 1: with both a swastika and an engraved date coincided with
Speaker 1: the opening of the Saint Louis Exposition in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 1: The item was years made years earlier, probably in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, but like like that's where it was sold,
Speaker 1: so probably it was made and then it got stamped
Speaker 1: with a date later on so it could be sold
Speaker 1: at this big expo where there's a ton of tourists, right,
Speaker 1: presumably Europeans who are coming over to the Americas for
Speaker 1: this World's Fair, and they want to buy something that's
Speaker 1: like native American, right, because that's a craze over in Europe,
Speaker 1: and the people selling this stuff know that, like, well,
Speaker 1: Europeans love them some swastikas, they're all they can't shut
Speaker 1: up about it. So let's get some of that shit
Speaker 1: out and let's put it on the fucking table.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So these two guys that I was talking about start
Speaker 1: a commercial spoon company manufacturing quote unquote Navajo spoons as
Speaker 1: mementos of the fair. These are just generally mass produced
Speaker 1: spoons that have absolutely nothing to do with indigenous people,
Speaker 1: but like they're lying, you know. In nineteen oh six,
Speaker 1: More starts offering swastika spoons in his catalog, and by
Speaker 1: the time the spoon craze dies out, and around nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: as Klan writes, quote, you had so many stamps and
Speaker 1: dies with swastikas that the symbol appears on bracelets, sides
Speaker 1: of rings, ash trays, salt sellers. Any silver stamped item
Speaker 1: was fair game for the swastika camp. And again this
Speaker 1: is the like yeah, uh uh yeah, that's so, that's
Speaker 1: that's kind of how the swastika becomes a big popular
Speaker 1: thing in the Americas as like an actual uh chashki, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's how it's this sacred symbol that's used in
Speaker 1: religious observances. And then Americans are like, see what's happening
Speaker 1: with Schleimann, see this kind of craze over Native American products,
Speaker 1: and are like, well, let's just fucking take this shit
Speaker 1: and sell it at world's fairs and stuff. What's capitalize
Speaker 1: on this baby, you know, that's what we fucking do.
Speaker 4: And so those like Americans were already kind of soaked
Speaker 4: in this symbol. I guess everywhere like a w A
Speaker 4: dummy JD bracelets.
Speaker 1: Well, that is actually exactly how ubiquitous it becomes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is the growth of the swastika obsession in
Speaker 1: the United States. And again, the actual symbol as it's
Speaker 1: being used by Indigenous Americans or at least you know,
Speaker 1: the group that it's being claimed to be made from,
Speaker 1: is the whirling log But I'm saying swasti swastika because
Speaker 1: that is what Americans are calling it, and they're specifically
Speaker 1: thinking about the quote unquote aryan swastikas that Schleiman has found.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So, in Europe, obviously the anti Semitic rite, which is
Speaker 1: a growing power, is using the swastika and adopting it
Speaker 1: as kind of a symbol, but it's still not exclusive
Speaker 1: to it there. And in the United States it becomes
Speaker 1: very quickly divorced from any real meaning at all beyond
Speaker 1: good luck or general good vibes. Through the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: it starts to become one of the most ubiquitous symbols
Speaker 1: from marketing and product logos in the country. If I
Speaker 1: could compare the swastika in the Americas in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds to any modern symbol. It would probably be
Speaker 1: the peace sign like it is used. Think about like
Speaker 1: a peace sign on a can of Arizona iced t
Speaker 1: That's how they use the swastika in this period of time.
Speaker 1: And again, some Americans, particularly in the cities, would be
Speaker 1: familiar with it as an aryan symbol. Many of the
Speaker 1: would have seen it in purported Indian artwork, you know,
Speaker 1: spoons and the like. But they also wouldn't have looked
Speaker 1: askance at seeing a swastika printed on the label of
Speaker 1: a cigar, which happened regularly, or on a color for
Speaker 1: a ad for Coca Cola, who used the swastika freely
Speaker 1: in both print ads and decorative chatch games. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this actually, this causes a problem last year because there's
Speaker 1: this guy in Chattanooga with a metal detector who's just
Speaker 1: kind of like walking around the woods or whatever, and
Speaker 1: he finds an old metal swastika with a Coca Cola
Speaker 1: logo on it. Wow, advertising bottles for just five cents.
Speaker 1: And Sophie's going to show you this this Coca gar I.
Speaker 2: Like can't speak what.
Speaker 4: It's a bottle opener too.
Speaker 5: Hook on there to models.
Speaker 4: That is so wild, And of course I imagine that
Speaker 4: people did not know the full context of this item
Speaker 4: when it was put onto the internet.
Speaker 3: If this wasn't equated to Nazis, what a very cool
Speaker 3: looking thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, well yeah, I mean again, it's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine if the Nazis hadn't come along and used it.
Speaker 1: But like, there's an alternate reality in which there's just
Speaker 1: swastikas all over the place. People are like fucking Jim Bros.
Speaker 1: Are getting tattooed with them and not as a Nazi thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this does explain the ending of mad men like
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Carlsburg used it on their beer bottles, and
Speaker 1: the Boy Scouts take it up as one of their symbols.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote now from a book by
Speaker 1: a guy named Stephen Heller, who writes an excellent, excellent
Speaker 1: history book about the swastika's origin.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 1: The Boy Scouts established an Order of the White Swastika
Speaker 1: in Portsmouth, Ohio, Camp Russell, New York, and Saint Joseph, Missouri.
Speaker 1: Over the course of twelve weekends, Scouts completed twelve different skills.
Speaker 1: Boys who fulfilled their tasks received a white Swastika badge.
Speaker 1: I'm going I guess the value of that dropped real precipitously.
Speaker 1: In the mid thirties, Wow, the Girls Club of America
Speaker 1: also took up the symbol, and they named their popular
Speaker 1: magazine the Swastika. That was the Girls Club's official magazine.
Speaker 1: From nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen, Every Girls Club member
Speaker 1: would receive a colorful magazine studded with the future symbol
Speaker 1: of the Third Reich. Members would save for weeks in
Speaker 1: order to be able to afford the club's most coveted
Speaker 1: piece of merch, a diamond covered swastika pin. One add
Speaker 1: cheerfully proclaims what every girl wants her own swastika.
Speaker 5: God.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, these are not fascists. There's nothing problematic about these.
Speaker 1: But you cannot find an issue of the swastika that
Speaker 1: doesn't look like straight up Nazi propaganda, right, and it makes.
Speaker 5: Everything so confusing?
Speaker 4: And what is can we Nazim's because America?
Speaker 1: Can we?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just this thing that you're showing us.
Speaker 1: Robert Chelsea, do you want to take that home?
Speaker 2: You want to try that?
Speaker 5: Because it's okay, choice, okay.
Speaker 4: So in large letters on the top, it says the
Speaker 4: Swastika written and issued. Wait it says written issued and
Speaker 4: read by the Girls Club. On either side of that,
Speaker 4: we have two swastikas, and then below that a glamorous
Speaker 4: girl scout girl club member who's wearing kind of like
Speaker 4: a big bow in her hair, and she's got like
Speaker 4: a handkerchief tied around her neck and she's just kind
Speaker 4: of looking up in a glamorous look.
Speaker 5: And then it says.
Speaker 4: Cheru blike at the same time cheru blike, yeah, definitely
Speaker 4: chero blike. But there's like a little undercurrent of like
Speaker 4: something controversial about her.
Speaker 5: I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4: But then it says junior, seniors, everybody. And then it
Speaker 4: gets really small and I carry it.
Speaker 1: Here's one more month, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Winning a prize in the big.
Speaker 1: Big second contest. I just love that. What every girl
Speaker 1: wants a swastika of her own. Oh incredible, here's ads.
Speaker 1: We're back. So by the time the Girls Club adopts
Speaker 1: the swastika, it is already in use by certain elements
Speaker 1: of the European occultist far right. Now. One of the
Speaker 1: most influential figures here is a guy named Jorg Lonz
Speaker 1: von Liebenfels or Adolph Lands is his real name. He
Speaker 1: calls himself again, whenever you see one of these guys
Speaker 1: who doesn't, who decides to pick up a name with
Speaker 1: a Vaughan in it, they're trying to pretend to be
Speaker 1: German nobility. So Adolph Lands is a Christian gnostic and
Speaker 1: a former member of the Cistercian Order, or at least
Speaker 1: an initiate into the Cistercian Order. I don't think he've
Speaker 1: everfunk comes a full member. In eighteen ninety two, he
Speaker 1: experienced a vision that caused convinced him that there was
Speaker 1: a coming war between Arian and the lesser races of
Speaker 1: the world. So he decides to dedicate his life to
Speaker 1: preparing the ground for such a conflict. In eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: he founds what he calls the Order of the New Templar.
Speaker 1: It focuses on advocating for racial purity and controlled breeding.
Speaker 1: It also pushed what Lands calls an aero Christian doctrine,
Speaker 1: which is in many ways a precursor for Nazism. Now.
Speaker 1: Lands is very much a medievalist, and he is obsessed
Speaker 1: with a somewhat historically questionable view that the Templars of
Speaker 1: the Crusades had been fighting a secret war to wipe
Speaker 1: out evil rather than they were operating like a bank
Speaker 1: basically right, Like that's you know. So he decides he's
Speaker 1: going to revive the order and he runs it from
Speaker 1: Cassel Werfenstein. Yes, if you're a fan of those video games,
Speaker 1: this is the actual origin of all of that shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: castl Werfenstein. So he starts carrying out ceremonies, occult ceremonies
Speaker 1: there dedicated to the Aryans and sort of this like
Speaker 1: coming war with the lesser races, and all of those
Speaker 1: ceremonies are conducted under a new flag that he has
Speaker 1: designed for himself, a red swastika and blue lilies on
Speaker 1: a golden background. In nineteen oh five, he founds a
Speaker 1: magazine Ostara, which is the most racist magazine that you
Speaker 1: can imagine, more or less, and the cover of it,
Speaker 1: the logo is a drawing of a knight wearing robes
Speaker 1: that look a little clanny, and they're bedecked with swastikas. Right,
Speaker 1: just this fucking night couldn't have more swastikas on sass.
Speaker 1: So midway through World War One and like nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: Lonz creates the term ariosophie to describe his new brand
Speaker 1: of Aryan race science. Among other things, he advocates for
Speaker 1: keeping brood mothers in convents for Aryan stud males to impregnate.
Speaker 1: This is more or less the policy that Heinrich Himmler,
Speaker 1: who also later will have a castle where he carries
Speaker 1: out occult rituals, would attempt to follow. For the SS right,
Speaker 1: they have a Libans born program that is very much
Speaker 1: based on lands as ideas I actually read, you might
Speaker 1: find this fascinating, Jelsey. I read a book recently. It's
Speaker 1: called Swastikan Night, and it is a kind of dystopian
Speaker 1: future fiction about a future world where like the Nazis
Speaker 1: and Japan kind of split the world between them, and
Speaker 1: seven hundred years after the victory of the Nazis, they
Speaker 1: have basically wiped out the concept of women as like
Speaker 1: a part of the human race. They're only used for breeding.
Speaker 1: The Nazis are all kind of like, it's kind of
Speaker 1: this almost Greek thing where they like, you know, have
Speaker 1: a lot of these sort of like relationships with each
Speaker 1: other that are It's an odd book. What's interesting about
Speaker 1: it is that it was written in nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 1: by an early feminist, So it's this like treatise because
Speaker 1: her attitude is that the root of like Nazi authoritarianism
Speaker 1: was the domination of women by men, and so it's
Speaker 1: this her kind of meditation on what society men would
Speaker 1: build if they could eliminate women effectively. It's a really
Speaker 1: interesting book. It is probably the book that inspires nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four or Well takes a number of structural elements
Speaker 1: from the book fascinating. The Feminist Press has a version
Speaker 1: of it that they put out with a really good forward.
Speaker 1: I devoured it in about an afternoon. Really interesting book,
Speaker 1: Swastika Night. But it's very much based because again, nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven is when this book gets written. One of
Speaker 1: the interesting things about it is that, like in Envisioning
Speaker 1: a Nazi Future, there's no reference to Himmler or the
Speaker 1: SS because in thirty seven he wasn't really as big
Speaker 1: of a figure in the Nazis that like somebody in
Speaker 1: the UK or whatever would have known about. But the
Speaker 1: author of that book is really familiar with Lands and
Speaker 1: with a lot of the stuff Lands is saying about
Speaker 1: his desire to sort of take women out of society
Speaker 1: and make them into brood mares for the anyway, interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: Check out swastika Knight. If you're interested in that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, it's a fascinating piece of history. So LANs
Speaker 1: has his castle, he's doing his proto Nazi rituals, right.
Speaker 1: He's got this magazine Ostara, and he's got this swastika
Speaker 1: flag that's becoming increasingly influential on like this chunk of
Speaker 1: the occult anti Semitic rite. And one of the things
Speaker 1: we know is that Hitler is a frequent enough reader
Speaker 1: of Ostara that kind of during his rise to power,
Speaker 1: he visits Lands to get copies of issues of the
Speaker 1: magazine that he had been missing. Lanza's ideas and his
Speaker 1: use of the swastika were hugely influential in the growing
Speaker 1: far right, which is going to be supercharged when the
Speaker 1: German army collapses in nineteen eighteen. Now, nineteen eighteen is
Speaker 1: coincidentally the year the Girls Club stops using the swastika
Speaker 1: for their magazine. Yeah, this might have had something to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that after the Germany loses you
Speaker 1: start seeing a lot more swastikas on a lot more
Speaker 1: like murderous far right militias. Maybe the Girls Club didn't
Speaker 1: want that press, you know that it might have been
Speaker 1: a fall.
Speaker 4: And it's so interesting because like, I don't know, obviously,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of misconceptions about Americans in the nineteen
Speaker 4: thirties and what we thought about, you know, the white race,
Speaker 4: and sure, and it was very much like our context
Speaker 4: and our ideas were simultaneously inspiring the Nazis.
Speaker 5: We also have.
Speaker 4: This like huge rise of the KKK again, where the
Speaker 4: KKK becomes like kind of heroic. It's a very strange
Speaker 4: time in American history that I think we simplify because
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, the United States versus the Nazis, and
Speaker 4: we're some kind of anti fascist heroes when really we're
Speaker 4: extremely fascist ourselves. And I don't know, it's interesting that
Speaker 4: it went as long as it did. But I'm glad
Speaker 4: the girls decided, you know, this isn't for us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the girls, though, mixed the right call here in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen really really good time to stop using the swastika.
Speaker 4: I mean there were KKK beauty pageants not you know,
Speaker 4: a decade or so before, so they could have gone either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and like not to say that. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: very very interesting period of time. And also the stuff
Speaker 1: we're talking about with how the swastika becomes very wrapped
Speaker 1: up in the minds of Americans with like Native Americans
Speaker 1: is part of like has an impact on Hitler because
Speaker 1: Hitler kind of idolizes Indigenous Americans at the same time
Speaker 1: that he idolizes the US government's use of camps and
Speaker 1: genocidal tactics. In order to take the content he's like,
Speaker 1: it's confused. You can refer back to our Karl May
Speaker 1: episodes for sort of more on that. But yeah. The
Speaker 1: first use documented use by like a far right millet
Speaker 1: militia in Germany using a swastika was in nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: when a specific unit of Freikorps veterans who gunned down
Speaker 1: socialists in the street, like have a bunch of swastikas
Speaker 1: on their shit, Like that's the symbol that they fight under.
Speaker 1: This is after the empire kind of collapses. The use
Speaker 1: of swastika's buy the different right wing militant groups is
Speaker 1: seen as a hopeful sign by the Aryan nerds and
Speaker 1: anti Semitic wizards of the Tula Society, which strongly pushed
Speaker 1: for the use of swastikas among the far right in
Speaker 1: Weimar Germany. The Nazi Party is going to adopt the
Speaker 1: symbol in nineteen twenty, and Hitler probably picks the swastika
Speaker 1: because of Lonz's use of it in his flag, because
Speaker 1: again Hitler's reading Ostara. But there's other stories you'll get
Speaker 1: as to why Hitler picked it that are a little weirder.
Speaker 1: One that you sometimes hear that's almost certainly not true,
Speaker 1: almost like ninety nine percent definitely apocryphal, is that his
Speaker 1: mom had a swastika on her headstone when she was buried,
Speaker 1: and the symbols stuck in Hitler's mind ever since. People
Speaker 1: were because it was kind of a good luck symbol.
Speaker 1: There's definitely people that get like a swastika on their
Speaker 1: gravestone back in the day. It's not like I don't
Speaker 1: think it's impossible. But this is much less credible to
Speaker 1: me than the explanation Stephen Heller gives in his book
Speaker 1: and excerpts from Minkomf devoted to symbolism. He wrote in
Speaker 1: a stupa defyingly formal prose, replete with euphemisms and epithets
Speaker 1: that enforced his own self styled heroism, yet convincingly argued
Speaker 1: the need for a powerful symbol, emblem, logo for his
Speaker 1: nascent party. The lack of such symbols, he wrote, had
Speaker 1: not only disadvantages for the moment, but it was unbearable
Speaker 1: for the future. The disadvantages were above all, that the
Speaker 1: party members lacked every outward sign of their belonging together.
Speaker 1: Well for the future, it was unbearable to lack an
Speaker 1: emblem that had the character of a symbol of the
Speaker 1: movement and that as such could be put up in
Speaker 1: opposition to the international the Communists. Hitler called the first
Speaker 1: time he witnessed a large Communist Party rally, where he
Speaker 1: saw a sea of red on flags, scarves, and flowers
Speaker 1: among the one hundred thousand in attendants, I personally could
Speaker 1: feel and understand how easily a man of the people
Speaker 1: succumbs to the suggestive charms of such a grand and
Speaker 1: massive spectacle. And so that's probably like that's realistically, he's
Speaker 1: looking for a powerful symbol that can be like that
Speaker 1: red flag that people can like you nine under that's
Speaker 1: already iconic, and the swastikas everywhere. People are comfortable with it.
Speaker 1: People like it. It's a striking symbol. The fact that
Speaker 1: it's been around for so long is proof that it's
Speaker 1: just some people are just drawn to swastika's right even today,
Speaker 1: Like the best if you're writing a fucking book that
Speaker 1: it involves in any way the fucking Nazis, right, best
Speaker 1: thing you do is stick a swastika on the cover
Speaker 1: because motherfucker's walking past and the book stopped. Like they'll
Speaker 1: stop at a swastika to look at it, right.
Speaker 5: And they already have good feelings about it at that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, it's like, oh, it's a swastika, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the the pschon, Yeah, it's it's something else.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 1: So the specific version of the swastika that Hitler adopts
Speaker 1: is called the hogen Kroi, which is just a German
Speaker 1: term for hooked cross. Right, uh, it faces the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: Hitler's gonna like flip the swastika around from its most
Speaker 1: common use, but others you can find swastikas that are
Speaker 1: flipped around prior to the Nazis. He's not like the
Speaker 1: only person who ever does this. Where Hitler is unique
Speaker 1: is that he tilts his hogen Kroi forty five degrees
Speaker 1: from horizont And this is the way you're going to
Speaker 1: see it in like the nineteen thirty five national flag
Speaker 1: of Germany, his swastika is usually tilted right. There is
Speaker 1: one more point that kind of argues for the fact
Speaker 1: that Lansa's swastika flag in his magazine Ostara was the
Speaker 1: influence for Hitler, which is that when the Nazis come
Speaker 1: to power, Hitler bans Lonzo's writing, and Heller suggests, quote,
Speaker 1: this is perhaps a way for Hitler to disavow the
Speaker 1: fact that he was influenced by anything other than his
Speaker 1: own immaculate conceptions.
Speaker 4: Uh huh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: Classic Hitler, Yeah, classic Hitler.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: While the symbol at this point started to accrue a
Speaker 1: distinctly more toxic sheene for Europeans Americans than is now,
Speaker 1: didn't give two tugs of a dead rat's tail what
Speaker 1: those creepy foreigners were during over in Europe. The nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties are a banner age for utterly meaningless uses of
Speaker 1: the swastika in any fucking product imaginable. And I think
Speaker 1: my favorite in retrospac funny swastika themed product is probably
Speaker 1: this tube of fresh antiseptic deodorant cream, which also heals
Speaker 1: and suits tender sore feet for just ten cents, little,
Speaker 1: just a little, swastika underneath the picture of this lady
Speaker 1: who smells nice thanks to the cream.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's sort of a creepy man, right, he's.
Speaker 1: Doing it, Joe Biden, Right, he's sniffing her hair, you know,
Speaker 1: because he likes this. He likes Nazi swastika cream so much.
Speaker 3: You can't see his hands in the photo, but you
Speaker 3: know they're not supposed to be a delightful antiseptic deyodor cream.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no.
Speaker 4: And there was just so much meaningless shit being pumped
Speaker 4: out in the twenties anyway, because it was like we
Speaker 4: had so much surplus money after the First war. It's
Speaker 4: just a big party, and you know, let's let's party
Speaker 4: with the products we make too, apparently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's I think you have to a lot
Speaker 1: of times when people are talking about why the Nazis
Speaker 1: adopted swastika, they focus a lot like we have on
Speaker 1: lawns and these kind of occult use of it, this
Speaker 1: sort of attitude of its involvement with the arians, And
Speaker 1: that's obviously an important part of the story, but it's
Speaker 1: equally important that the swastika is a benign symbol. It's
Speaker 1: such a benign and safe symbol that you could use
Speaker 1: it to self fucking deodorant, right. Yeah, that is a
Speaker 1: big part of why it's a useful symbol for the Nazis.
Speaker 1: And this kind of comes back to We talk a
Speaker 1: lot on the show when we're talking about fascism. We
Speaker 1: talk a lot about Umberdo Echoes definition of fascism. And
Speaker 1: one of the things Echo notes that is among his
Speaker 1: kind of most salient observations is that fascism. One an
Speaker 1: inherent characteristic of fascism is that it is syncretic. And
Speaker 1: here's how he describes what that means. Syncretism is not only,
Speaker 1: as the dictionary says, the combination of different forms of
Speaker 1: belief or practice, such a combination which tall must tolerate contradictions.
Speaker 1: Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom,
Speaker 1: and wherever they seem to say different or incompatible things,
Speaker 1: it is only because all are eluding allegorically to the
Speaker 1: same primeval truth. If you browse in the shelves that
Speaker 1: in American bookstores are labeled New Age, you can find
Speaker 1: there even Saint Augustine, who as far as I know,
Speaker 1: was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and stone Hinge,
Speaker 1: that is a symbol of her fascism. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that Echoes talking about here is this use
Speaker 1: of pieces of history, of iconography, of mythology that you
Speaker 1: can adopt into a fascist understanding of the world, and
Speaker 1: that acts as kind of a llure to different groups
Speaker 1: of people. Right, you know, you're into stone Hinge, you're
Speaker 1: into Aliens, you're into you know, Saint Augustine. If you
Speaker 1: can find a way to kind of like it's this
Speaker 1: thing QAnon does, right. It absorbs everything sort of into
Speaker 1: itself as part of its ability to spread, and.
Speaker 5: It's creating a full mythology.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, it's like creating that was a big part
Speaker 4: I think of Nazi Germany was taking the Old Germany
Speaker 4: and bringing it back.
Speaker 5: But it wasn't factually the Old Germany.
Speaker 4: And it's just pieces of different folk that made it
Speaker 4: sound badass and heroic and strong. And that's how powerful
Speaker 4: folklore can be, especially if you take bits and pieces
Speaker 4: of it and build your own shit.
Speaker 1: It's like it doesn't have to it doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be logical, it doesn't have to all fit. You can
Speaker 1: take pieces of Norse mythology and Odin worship and you
Speaker 1: can subsume that into your fashions at the same time
Speaker 1: as you're taking bits of Catholicism, right, Yeah, And likewise
Speaker 1: kind of you take the swastika, the symbol that we've
Speaker 1: all always used, that's been everywhere, and you make it
Speaker 1: yours and the kind of good will. And you know
Speaker 1: nowadays obviously that there's no more good will for the swastika.
Speaker 1: That's just sort of inherent in most cultures at least,
Speaker 1: But back in the day, basically everyone felt fine with
Speaker 1: the swastika. So you make that your thing, and it's
Speaker 1: one of the things that can help draw It makes
Speaker 1: you seem come like less scary, it makes you seem
Speaker 1: more approachable. It's just one of the things that helps
Speaker 1: build the appeal of this movement. And yeah, this is
Speaker 1: good stuff, just good, good shit. So beyond this. By
Speaker 1: the time the Nazis draw close to power in the
Speaker 1: early thirties, they had been marching and bleeding and fighting
Speaker 1: under the swastika for a full decade. Some four hundred
Speaker 1: of them have died in sundry assassinations and street fights
Speaker 1: in the Weimar era, and these men, along with the
Speaker 1: dead of the beer Hall Putsch, had become sainted by
Speaker 1: the party and the bloody flags they fought under, bloody
Speaker 1: swastika flags started to gain a religious significance to the
Speaker 1: devoted in Germany. George L. Moss, one of the twentieth
Speaker 1: centuries historians of Nazi Germany and also a survivor of
Speaker 1: the Holocaust himself, later observed it was the strength of
Speaker 1: fascism in general that it realized as other political movements
Speaker 1: and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century, Europe
Speaker 1: had entered a visual age, the age of political symbols
Speaker 1: such as the national flag or national anthem, which as
Speaker 1: instruments of mass politics, in the end proved more effective
Speaker 1: than any didactic speeches. And that's where we're going to
Speaker 1: end today.
Speaker 4: Wow, I am so I'm just so impressed and intrigued
Speaker 4: by this research. And yeah, I just I had no idea,
Speaker 4: and I honestly feel a little shocked at myself for
Speaker 4: not knowing more about this.
Speaker 1: I mean I did most.
Speaker 5: How I not know about that.
Speaker 1: When I when I read that bit about like, well
Speaker 1: maybe it's from like the fucking the way a cross
Speaker 1: section of a fucking mammoth, you know, tusk looks, I
Speaker 1: had to like sit back and go shit, Huh. That
Speaker 1: actually makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I just love the idea that symbols simultaneously
Speaker 4: appear in different cultures like that. I mean, and I
Speaker 4: think there are these explanations that we can have, but
Speaker 4: there's also something possibly built into our DNA that maybe
Speaker 4: we'll never understand about why we're attracted to certain symbols biologically.
Speaker 4: Maybe they represent something that we're recognized on an unconscious level.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's just like the use of red is
Speaker 1: an effective color to use for a lot of different
Speaker 1: things because it gets our attention in the same way
Speaker 1: that like I have a little feeder from my chickens
Speaker 1: where they like there's little red nubs because chickens just
Speaker 1: pecket shit that's red because like blood is red. It's
Speaker 1: the same reason why like if one of them gets injured,
Speaker 1: the other others will like start eating it, right they
Speaker 1: see they see red and they go after it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, we don't quite do that, otherwise hospitals
Speaker 1: would be much scarier places. But we do react a
Speaker 1: certain way when we see that color, and it's effective
Speaker 1: for doing certain.
Speaker 4: And you know what else, yellow is the most effective color,
Speaker 4: and that is why buses are painted yellow because our
Speaker 4: eye perceives it, you know, point zero zero and whatever
Speaker 4: percent faster than any other color, you know. And that's
Speaker 4: so that's always happening on levels that we don't recognize
Speaker 4: or understand. But uh, we're always reacting to the world.
Speaker 4: And I think about that all the time. How we're
Speaker 4: reacting to the world. Uh, on an unconscious is biological,
Speaker 4: animalistic level, And there seems to be I don't know,
Speaker 4: there's something about the swastika that feels like a collective
Speaker 4: consciousness type of symbol.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's definitely like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, as you said, that's kind of like a young
Speaker 1: and sort of attitude towards it. I mean, we do
Speaker 1: have this, and who knows how much of that is
Speaker 1: like because we you and I at a certain level,
Speaker 1: I can read this history. Neither of us can see
Speaker 1: the swastika or think about it without thinking about the Nazis.
Speaker 1: It is impossible for a modern person, at least in
Speaker 1: our culture, less the case maybe you go over in
Speaker 1: India and something where someone's first experience with the symbol
Speaker 1: is going to be wildly different. But you and I
Speaker 1: cannot see a swastika even knowing intellectually this stuff and
Speaker 1: not see it as that right even you know, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's just the way it is. But you know what
Speaker 1: I can see and view objectively is your excellent podcast,
Speaker 1: American Hysteria. Well I can't see it, but I can
Speaker 1: listen to it.
Speaker 4: Yes, do you have?
Speaker 5: Everyone can Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want to do your plugs?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah.
Speaker 4: As you mentioned, we do a show about the fantastical
Speaker 4: thinking of American culture and how that's affected everything from
Speaker 4: you know, even sometimes before colonization, but America as we
Speaker 4: know it breaking down its urban legends, moral panics, conspiracy theories,
Speaker 4: craze as, hoaxes, everything. Anytime that something weird happened in America,
Speaker 4: we're on it and try to explain that thing through
Speaker 4: history and how it changes through the decades and give
Speaker 4: context in that way. Yeah, and you can get it
Speaker 4: anywhere that you find your podcast. We're on Instagram at
Speaker 4: American Hysteria Podcast. And I hope you guys come listen.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, hell yeah, all right, everybody, this has been
Speaker 1: behind the bastards. I have a novel. It's called After
Speaker 1: the Revolution. You type that title into anything where you
Speaker 1: buy a book from It doesn't matter where or scream
Speaker 1: it into the face of the manager of your favorite
Speaker 1: or least favorite bookstore.
Speaker 3: I thought you, for some reason, you were going to
Speaker 3: say Applebee's Scream scream.
Speaker 1: An applebe the Applebee's manager with what's going to happen
Speaker 1: to him? After the revolution. Famously, Mark said, the two
Speaker 1: classes in society are Applebee's managers and everyone else. And
Speaker 1: one day we will liberate ourselves. My brothers, sisters can't.
Speaker 5: Wait to get that bumpersticker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the episode.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
Speaker 3: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.