Swastika

The swastika is not a historical curiosity in the traditions that use it. It is drawn this morning, in wet vermilion or in rice flour, on thresholds and doorframes across India, on the covers of new account books at Diwali, on wedding invitations, on the tailgates of trucks, on the first page of a school exercise book and on temple walls. It marks the opening of an auspicious undertaking. The Sanskrit name is svastika, built from su, well, and asti, it is, with the sense of conducive to well-being, and the word is old enough to be discussed by Panini.

In Jainism it is the emblem of Suparshvanatha, the seventh Tirthankara, and its four arms are read as the four states into which a soul may be born: heavenly, human, animal and hellish. It is drawn in loose rice before an image as part of ordinary temple observance, and it stands at the centre of the Jain emblem itself.

In Buddhism it marks the footprints and the heart of the Buddha and appears in several enumerations of auspicious signs. In Japan it is the manji, and it is the standard cartographic symbol for a Buddhist temple; when the national mapping agency proposed dropping it from maps prepared for foreign visitors ahead of the 2020 Olympics, the objection was strong enough that it was retained for domestic use. In Tibet it occurs in both facings, and the left-facing yungdrung is the central emblem of Bon.

The figure is older and wider than any of these traditions. It appears on Neolithic pottery, on seals from the Indus Valley cities of the third millennium BCE, on Greek meander borders, in Roman mosaic, on Anglo-Saxon and Norse metalwork, on Baltic and Slavic textiles, in Ethiopian church decoration, and in the weaving, basketry and silverwork of several nations of the American Southwest. Most of these occurrences have nothing to do with each other. It is a shape that people who draw with straight lines arrive at independently, which is why it is everywhere.

None of that is the reason it is difficult to write about.

The German National Socialist party adopted the sign as its emblem in 1920. Hitler describes the design in Mein Kampf and claims the final arrangement as his own: a black hooked cross on a white disc on a red field. The form is specific. It is rotated forty-five degrees so that it stands on a point rather than square, its arms bend clockwise, and in most party usage the whole figure is tilted. The German word for it is Hakenkreuz, hooked cross. That is the term German law and German usage employ, and it is not the word swastika.

What made the sign available to the party was not Asia but nineteenth-century European scholarship. Heinrich Schliemann found the figure in quantity at Hissarlik, the mound he identified as Troy, in the 1870s, and connected it to Indian occurrences and to the emerging idea of a common Aryan homeland for the speakers of the Indo-European languages. The linguistic hypothesis was real scholarship. Its conversion into a racial theory was not, and the sign travelled with the theory into German volkisch nationalism, where antisemitic organisations were already using it two decades before 1920. Bernard Mees set out this route in detail in The Science of the Swastika. The party did not take the sign from Hinduism. It took it from philologists who had taken a theory.

From 1935 it was the national flag of Germany. It was carried on the uniforms, aircraft, banners and camp gates of the state that murdered six million Jews and millions of others, and it was the sign under which that was done. This is not one meaning among several to be weighed against the rest. It is what the sign means to a great many people who will not be argued out of the association and should not be asked to be.

The legal consequences are direct. Section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations, with exemptions for art, scholarship, teaching and reporting. Austria has a comparable prohibition, and so in various forms do Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Brazil. In several of these jurisdictions display is prosecuted.

One consequence fell on people who had nothing to do with any of it. On 28 February 1940, at Tucson, representatives of the Navajo, Hopi, Apache and Tohono O'odham signed a proclamation renouncing the whirling log motif in their blankets, baskets, sandpaintings and clothing, on the stated ground that a symbol of friendship among their forefathers had been desecrated by another nation of peoples. Weavers gave up a design their families had used for generations. Some Native artists have taken it up again in the last decade, and the decision is argued over among them.

Since the 1990s Hindu, Buddhist and Jain organisations in Europe, North America and Australia have pressed a single point: that legislation and journalism should call the Nazi emblem the Hakenkreuz or the hooked cross, and reserve swastika for the sign that a billion people still use. The argument is not that the Nazi use should be softened or set aside. It is that using one word for both hands the appropriators a permanent victory over a sign they did not originate and do not use.

The dispute has produced concrete outcomes. When Germany proposed an EU-wide ban on Nazi symbols during its Council presidency in 2007, the Hindu Forum of Britain campaigned against the drafting on exactly this ground, and the proposal was dropped. In Canada, Bill C-229 of 2022 proposed prohibiting the display and sale of listed hate symbols and named the swastika among them; the Coalition of Hindus of North America, Canadian Hindus for Harmony, Vishwa Jain Sangathan Canada and others filed submissions to the justice committee arguing that the naming criminalised a sacred sign, and the bill's sponsor undertook to substitute hooked cross. Buddhist, Hindu and Jain organisations in Canada subsequently endorsed a ban on Nazi symbols framed in those terms, which is the shape the settlement has generally taken: the ban is supported, the naming is contested. The distinction has since become reasonably common in Canadian and North American legislative drafting and remains rare in the press.

Two objections are put to the campaign and both deserve stating. The first is that a symbol means what its viewer takes it to mean, so that a swastika sprayed on a synagogue is not made less threatening by the sprayer's intentions or by anybody's etymology. That is correct, and no serious advocate of the distinction disputes it. The second is that some of the campaigning has come from Hindu nationalist organisations pursuing a wider political programme, which is also true, and which does not settle whether the underlying point is right.

What can be said without difficulty is this. The sign is in continuous religious use, by more people than it was ever used against. It was taken up by a party that gave it a different form and called it by a different name in its own language. Both of those are facts, they are true at the same time, and an account that suppresses either one is a worse account than an account that carries both.