On one hand, symbols with sufficiently strong emotional pull can last a very long time. Hell, the fasces itself was a representation of magisterial authority from the earliest days of Rome until the 19 fucking 20s. That’s some ~2500 years of symbolic endurance. Who’s to say, especially with how widely used the swastika is in the West as indicative of fascism and tyranny, that the swastika won’t endure in the same way?
On the other hand, the swastika, despite widespread Western cultural influence even outside of the West, still enjoys significant usage outside of the West. It may just take time for the swastika to return first as an ‘outside’ symbol, and then be reclaimed fully in the West as an ancient and common symbol of human societies, as it once was.
Or maybe we’ll all be ash in a smoking husk of a planet. The future is unknowable, and all that jazz.
Outside of western countries, you can still see it in reasonably common use even today as a religious symbol. So the first step to reclaiming it is to not automatically denounce anybody you see carrying the symbol (though it’s probably questionable if you’re a snow-white guy)
While I’m sympathetic to the impulse, I can’t avoid feeling that the design space for symbols is so vast that there is no particular need to reclaim things, and the better path forward is to focus on creating new a context and new symbols. History cannot be undone, only recontextualised.
You think we will ever be able to reclaim this symbol from Nazism? A couple centuries, perhaps?
On one hand, symbols with sufficiently strong emotional pull can last a very long time. Hell, the fasces itself was a representation of magisterial authority from the earliest days of Rome until the 19 fucking 20s. That’s some ~2500 years of symbolic endurance. Who’s to say, especially with how widely used the swastika is in the West as indicative of fascism and tyranny, that the swastika won’t endure in the same way?
On the other hand, the swastika, despite widespread Western cultural influence even outside of the West, still enjoys significant usage outside of the West. It may just take time for the swastika to return first as an ‘outside’ symbol, and then be reclaimed fully in the West as an ancient and common symbol of human societies, as it once was.
Or maybe we’ll all be ash in a smoking husk of a planet. The future is unknowable, and all that jazz.
Outside of western countries, you can still see it in reasonably common use even today as a religious symbol. So the first step to reclaiming it is to not automatically denounce anybody you see carrying the symbol (though it’s probably questionable if you’re a snow-white guy)
While I’m sympathetic to the impulse, I can’t avoid feeling that the design space for symbols is so vast that there is no particular need to reclaim things, and the better path forward is to focus on creating new a context and new symbols. History cannot be undone, only recontextualised.