Comments on With Reference To Nothing

If it wasn't for the fucking Nazis, swastikas would be cool.

You can buy keychains and crap with swastikas on them in certain parts of Asia. I know the symbol has a long history, but still pretty fucking weird to my sensibilities.

Although, didn't the Nazi symbol face the other way 'round?

The Hitler picture doesn't surprise me at all. Remember that Britain was the colonial master of India during WWII, and many Indians saw Germany as a potential ally, particularly since he voiced such admiration for the Aryans.

The Nazi Swastika, as does the Asian & European swastikas face the right. The North and South American Native swastikas face left.

Gandhi was a big admirer of Hitler; he even wrote him a famous letter encouraging him in his Aryan-purity adventure.

Both the Hindu and the Nazi swastikas have been used facing either direction. There's no secret meaning.

Happy Yuri's Night!

Even though that Hindi "Thriller" video has been on the internets almost as long as today's petrified Alanis "humps" parody, it represents the kind of rich digital treasure I crave to keep the biryani in my step.

Thanks fnarf. Now I have to put Ghandi on my "total dick" list.

Quote (to the British people in 1940): "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

Fnarf, got any links to support your claims about Gandhi admiring Hitler? A Google search didn't turn up anything.

He did suggest, in the 1930s before the full horrors of Nazism were widely understood, that non-violence was the way for Jews (and later Czechs) to resist Hitler. He wrote two letters to Hitler--one in 1939 (a few months before the start of WWII), and the second in 1940 (early in the war before the war reaches catclysmic proportions)--addressed to "my friend," but his letters were aimed at persuading Hitler to turn to peaceful methods and prevent the "[reduction] of humanity to a savage state." In the second letter he explicitly opposed the idea of German aid to oppose British imperialism.

These letters read as hopelessly naive to anyone but the most committed pacifist, but they don't read as admiration.

In later years, Gandhi suggested that if any war was ever just, it was the war against Hitler.

@8, Gandhi wasn't supporting Hitler's invasions, he was trying to hold fast to the idea of non-violence in a situation where the application of the idea was (in my view and the view of most) absurd. That makes him foolishly idealistic, not a dick.

I don't know what Fnarf is talking about with the "Aryan purity" nonsense. I can find only two letters that Gandhi ever wrote to Hitler, and they're the ones I link to above. The second link is missing the very beginning of the letter, but that can be found elsewhere with a Google search. Neither "Aryan" nor "purity" appear in either letter. In the second letter, Gandhi tells Hitler "many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity...your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland, and the swallowing of Denmark...we cannot possibly wish success to your arms." That's hardly what I'd call admiration, though a lot of his obsequious language elsewhere in the letter is shameful.

Gandhi was deeply flawed, but it's completely off-base to try to turn him into an admirer of Hitler.

A few months back Baseline (Brit design/fontography magazine) did a piece on the man who's design of the swastika the Nazi's (and most since then) used... can't remember his name - he's an amazing minimalist designer.

In a letter written by his wife after his death, she told of his discust over the appropriation of his design. Though from the sound of it, he was as pissed off as much for Nazi attrocities as he was that he was never paid for the design.

"I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed?" - Mahatma Gandhi, May 1940

From: http://politicalcompass.org/iconochasms

sorry the closest i could find was this quiz form, but political compass is really reputable

The afformentioned quiz also has this quote from Winston Churchill

in reference to WWI "If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations?" Winston Churchill, in his Great Contemporaries, 1937

Ok. I'll accept foolishly idealistic rather than calling him a dick. But I don't think laying down and dying rather than fight for your life is an admiral quality. Kid of like telling a woman to "just lay back and let the guy rape you. You'll be the better person for it."

GOLIMAR!!!

The swastikas in the photos are the same as the nazi swastika; however, the ancient Tibetan and Hindu Sun Wheel swastika faces left like the North and South American Indian swastika mentioned above. The Sun Wheel swastika predates the European swastika by thousands of years and it is a symbol of light and balance and sacredness -- the polar opposite of the popularized nazi swastika, which has come to represent darkness, destruction and death. I wonder which swastika the artists in the photos thought they were using...