05-27-2007, 06:50 AM
Salve,
I personally loath the Nazis and everything they stood for. Six members of my family were 'disappeared' from Holland in 1944 - we simply don't know which camp they were murdered in. My mother watched her school being bombed by a German plane, and was shot in the leg when she ran over to help. Many other members of my family were actively involved in fighting the save all of us from this evil.
I seem to have a knack for making German friends. They are some of the most wonderful people I have every had the privilege of knowing, and I can only have the deepest respect for a society that can produce genius's like the Bach family, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler. So any political/social system that can turn such a gifted and enlightened society (don't forget Schiller and Goethe) into a system that created the Nazis should be treated with the fear and hatred that it deserves.
There are many today who eulogise the Nazis and what they stood for, and actively seek to re-instate them into mainstream politics (just look at Le Pen in France, and David Irving here in Britain). While they are marginalised at the moment, don't forget that so were the Nazis for much of the 1920's. Anything which can give them some means of encouragement or support must be opposed, just out of common sense and plain human decency.
Yes, the swastika was hi-jacked by Hitler (I understand that he simply leafed through a book on occult symbols and picked it out), and yes the Romans were not nazis. But, there are too many people who view the swastika from the modern viewpoint and are not prepared to be enlightened by well-meaning Roman re-enactors. Some will see the Roman use of the swastika as an endorsement of their own stupid neo-nazi viewpoint, and other will fear what it represented, and maybe have too much personal pain to want to listen.
The swastika was common throughout the Roman empire, but it was not ubiquitous, there are many other symbols which could be used in its stead without reducing authenticity, and that way you would not offend anyone. Just remember that there are many people alive today who went through the greatest horror in modern western history, we were not there, so we cannot fairly judge their viewpoint.
Symbols have power, that's why people use them, and now the swastika is irrevocably tainted with the evil of the nazi regime. No matter what we say, no matter how much we argue, this is what people will always think, they don’t forget, and that is a good thing. I am willing to surrender the use of a crooked cross as a Roman re-enactor symbol if it will help to ensure that people remember what the nazis did.
The nazis perverted so much to their own ends, music, literature, history, archaeology, science , even philosophy (Nietzsche’s writings, loved by Hitler & Co. were furiously edited after his death by his sister to remove any pro-Jewish sentiments, such as one of his last statements, ‘Today I am going to have the anti-Semites shot’) that it is only right that we should want to cleans them back to their original state. But is it worth reducing the power of the swastika as an anti-nazi symbol simply so that we can wear it as re-enactors? At the moment it has a blatant association with the nazis, and is easily identifiable. That, rather perversely, re-enforces its use as an anti-nazi symbol. I believe that we should not undermine this by confusing the issue. Let us keeps its power as an anti-nazi sign, so that future generations will not forget.
If anyone doubts the furious attempts at historical revisionism that are going around today, read ‘The Holocaust on Trial’ by DD Guttenplan.
Vale,
Celer.
I personally loath the Nazis and everything they stood for. Six members of my family were 'disappeared' from Holland in 1944 - we simply don't know which camp they were murdered in. My mother watched her school being bombed by a German plane, and was shot in the leg when she ran over to help. Many other members of my family were actively involved in fighting the save all of us from this evil.
I seem to have a knack for making German friends. They are some of the most wonderful people I have every had the privilege of knowing, and I can only have the deepest respect for a society that can produce genius's like the Bach family, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler. So any political/social system that can turn such a gifted and enlightened society (don't forget Schiller and Goethe) into a system that created the Nazis should be treated with the fear and hatred that it deserves.
There are many today who eulogise the Nazis and what they stood for, and actively seek to re-instate them into mainstream politics (just look at Le Pen in France, and David Irving here in Britain). While they are marginalised at the moment, don't forget that so were the Nazis for much of the 1920's. Anything which can give them some means of encouragement or support must be opposed, just out of common sense and plain human decency.
Yes, the swastika was hi-jacked by Hitler (I understand that he simply leafed through a book on occult symbols and picked it out), and yes the Romans were not nazis. But, there are too many people who view the swastika from the modern viewpoint and are not prepared to be enlightened by well-meaning Roman re-enactors. Some will see the Roman use of the swastika as an endorsement of their own stupid neo-nazi viewpoint, and other will fear what it represented, and maybe have too much personal pain to want to listen.
The swastika was common throughout the Roman empire, but it was not ubiquitous, there are many other symbols which could be used in its stead without reducing authenticity, and that way you would not offend anyone. Just remember that there are many people alive today who went through the greatest horror in modern western history, we were not there, so we cannot fairly judge their viewpoint.
Symbols have power, that's why people use them, and now the swastika is irrevocably tainted with the evil of the nazi regime. No matter what we say, no matter how much we argue, this is what people will always think, they don’t forget, and that is a good thing. I am willing to surrender the use of a crooked cross as a Roman re-enactor symbol if it will help to ensure that people remember what the nazis did.
The nazis perverted so much to their own ends, music, literature, history, archaeology, science , even philosophy (Nietzsche’s writings, loved by Hitler & Co. were furiously edited after his death by his sister to remove any pro-Jewish sentiments, such as one of his last statements, ‘Today I am going to have the anti-Semites shot’) that it is only right that we should want to cleans them back to their original state. But is it worth reducing the power of the swastika as an anti-nazi symbol simply so that we can wear it as re-enactors? At the moment it has a blatant association with the nazis, and is easily identifiable. That, rather perversely, re-enforces its use as an anti-nazi symbol. I believe that we should not undermine this by confusing the issue. Let us keeps its power as an anti-nazi sign, so that future generations will not forget.
If anyone doubts the furious attempts at historical revisionism that are going around today, read ‘The Holocaust on Trial’ by DD Guttenplan.
Vale,
Celer.
Marcus Antonius Celer/Julian Dendy.
