Indiana Jones and the Salvation of the Swastika

Here I step into the dark, to wonder at things I don't understand very well. I'm not much at arcana, in fact I tend to reject it all on principle. But occasionally things loom out of the dimness and, like clouds in a Hollywood cloud tank, they seem to form pictures that demand my attention.


It all started with me wondering at the swastika. No one needs me to tell them what the swastika is now - it's easily the most reviled symbol in the world. It's very depiction is illegal in most countries in Europe. Absurdly, even anti-Nazis displaying it with a Ghostbusters circle-with-red-slash were technically breaking the law. That is until Claudia Roth, a Jewish member of the Bundestag, deliberately had herself arrested campaigning for the right of people to denigrate the swastika. Never mind that nazism per se is dead and buried, and appears only to exist in invariably Jewish-led race hate organisations. Nor should we wonder at the subsequent idiocy of these neo-nazis whose main task it seems is to behave like perfectly obnoxious arseholes and leave behind a trail of swastikas so that we might know where to direct our hatred. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First - what is the swastika? Actually, never mind that. What is a symbol?

As I learnt in that piece where I ineptly wondered at pyramids, symbols are a big deal. In the beginning there was the word. This refers to God apparently, who variously was with the word, or was the word. Whether you believe in God or not, the bible has a point in declaring words/symbols significant. Without a series of symbolic representations (at first vocal and later visual) to represent ideas, what would the ideas be? Would there even be any ideas at all? And without these what would we be? How would we differ from other higher order mammals?


Remember Koko the gorilla? She could speak by way of sign-language and had a vocabulary of 2000 words. What if Koko had a similarly capable mate? What if they were taken back to the wilds of Rwanda to have kids? And were then left alone, sure enough. Imagine this as a self-replicating ability - genes and memes hand in hand. With the kids then similarly literate, imagine Charles Darwin smiling as successive mates chose each other based on their ability to express themselves with symbols. That the gorillas would arrive at a point whereby they could remark upon their own cleverness would have to be an inevitability surely.

Never mind fuzzy counterpropositions, I declare that even without our intervention such a result is inevitable: A fist in the palm to express punishment; a skull on a stick to denote a place of bad juju; various colours daubed on a cave wall to indicate places of: hunting, gathering, feast, famine. Given enough time (and evolution has nothing if not insane amounts of time) there is only one end point to this path - a symbol based communication capable of remarking upon itself. Humans as teachers might speed things up but really, to imagine that it wouldn't happen without us says more about us than it does about the gorillas.


One millennia or a thousand, both are a blink of the eye to evolution. And within that, would we be surprised that a creature whose previous mechanism for complying with Darwin's dictums had consisted almost entirely of It's all about me, would rise to heights of self-impressed dizziness? With that as a headspace, might that creature not go on to describe its ability to deal with symbols in terms of awe, indeed to conflate them with their own monkey gods? And might they not describe themselves in such terms, and worship themselves? But do we really need the experiment? Humans, the clever monkeys, have done both of these things. Thus In the beginning was the word and the word was God could happily be described as us being impressed with ourselves. And God knows we are that, ha ha.

Oh dear, have I digressed? The question was: what is a symbol? It seems that it's either a very big deal, the equal of God, or an obvious thing that, given enough time, any monkey could think of. Well, as self-appointed loud mouth of this here clever monkey blog I hereby declare it to be... both. In this real world of nothing-is-real, symbols are a big deal and a load of bullshit. Whatever! We shrug and carry on knowing that some things just 'are'.

"To celebrate twelve consecutive months each dedicated to documentaries depicting the horrors of the Nazi era, SBS television is proud to announce the inauguration of SBS's Decade of Nazi Documentaries. Every night, each week, for 52 weeks a year, for the next ten years, SBS will be screening all 3,650 episodes of the greatest documentary series ever made. Starting tonight with Typefaces of the Nazis: The Hidden War against the Hungarian Ümlaut, all the way through to the final stirring episode Fritz Deutsch: Recognition at Last for the Man who Refused to Catch Nazi Public Transport (VO - 'I walked everywhere, It was terrible'), this series will bring a whole new level of overkill to the most overkilled period of history the world has ever seen."

In amongst this absurd deluge of detail we are aware that the swastika is an old symbol that existed in those ill-defined times before Nazis walked the Earth. But what did it mean? How old was it? Who used it? Never mind the overkill, it seems that in this instance we are short on details. Rather than me simply regurgitating what I read at wikipedia why don't I just provide a link and you may go read for yourselves. Or you can just read the following summary if you like: The swastika is over seven thousand years old and was as close to ubiquitous as symbols get. It was common coinage in: North and South America, Europe and Asia Minor, the Subcontinent, as well as the entire Orient. Astoundingly, in every place it was in use it was viewed as a symbol of felicity and good luck. The irresistible question is: Was there ever a symbol to match it? Keep in mind that it arose independently on three continents and each with the same meaning. In terms of a biblical conflating of symbols with the supernatural, the swastika is definitely spooky.


And then the Nazis lobbed up and trashed it did they? 25 years versus seven millennia. Wow. A quick calculation and it seems that the swastika was used as a symbol of 'hate' for approximately 0.35% of the time in which it's been in existence. And that, only in a single country amongst the myriad that had previously used it. With that in mind, what degree of diminution should that previous figure undergo now? Would 0.35% of 0.35% be fair? Did somebody say 'overkill' before? Oh that's right, it was me. It seems that in trashing the swastika we've not just thrown the symbolic baby out with the bath water but we've thrown out every infant everywhere, and all on the account of a single tainted bath. It's Herod Does Hygiene, ha ha.

In case anyone is sitting there thinking, 'Yeah but...' we'll make this clear: no other 'evil' symbol has copped this treatment. The Japanese imperial war flag of WWII remains unchanged on their naval vessels, and only ever so slightly changed for their ground forces, and no one gives a shit. Their WWII national anthem Kimigayo (my second favourite after La Marseillaise) remains unaltered. The Italian fasces symbol (which gave fascism its name), if it aroused any recognition at all, would more likely be associated with the Roman Empire than with anything else (and with no great opprobrium either). Not forgetting that even within Germany, Deutschland Uber Alles is still the national anthem. Does anyone get weird about that? Do they arrest people for playing it? Hardly, it just got an audience of however-many-billion-it-was that watched the world cup. Okay, so what the fuck is going on? (*Um... seems it's not quite that simple. See the note in the comments).


I'll admit here that I've sort of answered my own question. Symbols are very powerful. Or to put it another way, very, very, very powerful. But who's responsible for the hate juju belonging to the swastika? The Nazis? They've been dead and buried for over sixty years. Maybe it's those Project Paperclip bastards who run America? Maybe they snapped their fingers and had their Jewish puppets in Hollywood give us movie after movie featuring swastikas ad nauseam so that we might hate the Nazis like... we've never hated... anyone... um, wait... did that idea just disappear up its own arse? A tuppence for Nazis as top dog.

This is simple stuff - Whatever power the swastika possesses in this day and age is due solely to the efforts of the Jewish owned media. Without them stuffing it down our throats all the time it would be right up there with the Japanese war flag. Or to put it another way, consigned to obscurity - just another symbol, one amongst many. Had Jews wanted to defang the swastika as a rallying-point / symbol-of-hatred they could have clicked their fingers and given it the Japanese treatment. But they didn't do that did they? Instead they rubbed our noses in it at every possible opportunity, and here we are with no prospect of it abating any time soon. Madly, the further we leave the Nazis in the past, the more movies we get and the nastier they become. Says Quentin Tarantino, "If I'm going to be a felcher for the Jews, I'm going to be the best damn felcher there ever was!"


I understand that this is all part and parcel of the Jews' need to distract us from their own anti-buddha wickedness and otherwise cast themselves as victims. Thus, the swastika is merely a means to that end. But what if we had it arse about? There's very little about the Jews that isn't false. None of them are Semitic for starters. Which is to say, they're not chosen by God so much as chosen by themselves. Then there's their symbolic miscellanea. Like the star of David! It seems that this doesn't date back to the time of David as you'd expect but to a slightly later time, um... 2700 years later, give or a take (ie. the 18th century). Its two single blink-and-you-miss-it appearances in the 11th century and the 15th century are design accidents - circles, triangles, squares, pentacles and sure, a six pointed star, why not? It's not like there was anything special about it.

And then there's the Zohar, heart of the Kabbalah, written by Shimon bar Yochai in the 2nd century (whispered into his ear by the prophet Elijah no less), and discovered in the 13th century Spain by one Moses de Leon. Eh? What's that Widow de Leon? She confessed that her husband himself was the author of the work. She had asked him several times why he had chosen to credit his own work to another, and he had always answered that doctrines put into the mouth of the miracle-working Shimon bar Yochai would be a rich source of profit. The devil you say! Pah! Doesn't matter! Chosen by God / Designed by Committee - it's all good. Jews are whatever works. If a thing furthers them in their course to becoming god-kings uber alles, it gets dropped into the metaphoric DNA and declared that it was always thus.


Oh dear, I've wandered again. Back to the mad what-if wondering: What if everything we've been told was bullshit? What if the swastika wasn't the means to an end but the end in itself? What if the point of the exercise was to crush the most singular and potent symbol of good the world has ever seen? And further, to reanimate it as a golem of death to serve its death cult masters? It's pretty far-fetched isn't it? And do we get the Steve Martin photo? "He's shooting at these cans! He hates cans!"

But symbols are very, very powerful and this one has had insane amounts of juice pumped into it to make it what it is today. Wonder again at Claudia Roth: she got herself arrested solely for the right of people to piss on the swastika, and only the swastika. Shake your head at the errant madness of that. Hell, shake your head at a people so obsessed with the number 6 that they had two holocausts both with six million victims. Then think of all those Jews who were sprung faking attacks on themselves / denigrating the swastika. No mistake they were doing one of those two things. Keep in mind they never write 'Jew Scum' on their faces, stomachs, doors, cars, tombstones, synagogues etc. It's always a swastika. Drop-ins may feel free to point to the occasional scrawling of the words 'red herring' here and there, and I'll gleefully point them at Agatha Christie.


Okay, so her works are fiction and perhaps that's what this should have been too - Indiana Jones and the Salvation of the Swastika. Starring as villain the only man ever to be born with the name of Hitler( ! ). With a cast of thousands featuring the most virulent Jew haters ever to be bankrolled by the Rothschilds. In this adventure Indy realises that the appearances of division are false and that the two hate-filled camps are actually a single entity: the Death Cult of the Anti-Buddhas! Their evil mission: to smash the world's most potent and democratic symbol of goodness and turn it into a harbinger of fear and hate ushering in a new world order of brutality, slavery, suffering, and death.

Cue the stirring music as the camera pulls back to reveal a back-lit Harrison Ford standing triumphant over the filthy racists. Drawls Ford, "You death cult scum, you're all the same. Now your bullshit charade is over. Auf wiedersehen anti-buddhas." The audiences cheer as the struck-from-the-same-mould Nazis and AshkeNazis cop their comeuppance: to run melancholy mad, awake to the horror of their own perversity. We then cut to a golden sun breaking through the clouds and follow the camera as it pans across to reveal monks, priests, and holy men from every nation on earth. We follow their gaze to see Indiana Jones standing in front of them as he restores the swastika seal to the ancient shrine. After Indy clasps his hands together and offers a silent prayer the crowd erupts, mobbing Indy and raising him to their shoulders.

Is that a what if? Ha, more like an as if, ha ha. Truth is, the latest reanimation of the Indiana Jones corpse was done for two broad memetic purposes: to awaken us all to the fact that Russians are 'it' again; and to pile in on the idea of unfriendly alien overlords (with a tip of the hat to the coming end-of-the-world destructo-palooza). We have been warned!

But to hell with the Crystal Skull. It's a figment of Hollywood's imagination as this is of mine. But one thing is true - between them, the two arms of the death cult turned the spookiest, most powerful symbol for good that ever existed into the world's most powerful symbol of hate. And that took some doing. It wasn't easy, with some very heavy juju going into the mix.


"Oh the humanity! Won't somebody save that poor swastika?" Sheesh! What's a feller to do? Me, I have no heavy juju. I just have a weeny blog with a couple hundred hits a day. But! I'm going to do my best. Here, I reclaim the happy little symbol for all those uncountable people across the millennia who used it entirely without malice and solely in a spirit of felicity. That uncorrupted swastika stood for a simple hope for a better future - no rancour, no superiority, and harm wished upon none. Given such selflessness it's no wonder it became the symbol of the Buddha stamped on every Japanese map.

I'm perfectly uninterested in what the twin pro and anti arms of the death cult have to say on the subject. No buts, I've heard it all before and I reject the message in its entirety. Here I embrace the simpleton ideal of one for all and all for one, albeit with all meaning all. Now, all stand for the anthem, Selflessness Uber Alles, ha ha ha.