Opinion: And that barracks down the road looks like a hammer and sickle

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

No one seems to be protesting the U.S. Navy’s decision to spend $600,000 to remodel a configuration of barracks outside San Diego that looks — from the air and on Google Earth — like a swastika. Maybe that’s because the story hasn’t reached Tajikistan, which dusted off the ancient symbol last year as part of the Year of Aryan Civilization.

Aryan, as in Indo-European (the proto-language spoken in Europe and Western Asia from which English is distantly derived), not Aryan as in Hitler’s imaginary Master Race. Hitler, believing that the original Aryans were blond, blue-eyed types, was responsible for the negative connotations that still bedevil the term “Aryan.” (That didn’t stop the Shah of Iran from describing himself as ‘Light of the Aryans.’)

It may be possible to rehabilitate “Aryan” (at least in linguistics). But rebranding the swastika is a Mission: Impossible, except maybe in Dushanbe. Never mind that the symbol’s origins are innocuous. You don’t have to be a semiotician to see how the symbol has merged with what it symbolized at a particular point in history. It’s impossible to look at a swastika and not be repelled.

Yet pre-Hitler the swastika was not simply a cultural symbol; it was the trademark of a popular brand of beer. In the early 1970s, some college friends and I toured the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. At the gateway to the brewery stood two carved elephants with saddle blankets bearing swastikas. Our elderly guide complained about how the Nazis “took this beautiful symbol and ruined it.” Hardly the worst of their sins.

Our guide’s spirit lives on in quixotic efforts by some Hindus to strip the swastika of its relatively recent Nazi associations. But, as Radio Free Europe noted in what may be understatement of the millenium: “It is hard to rid the swastika of its negative associations.”