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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

As usual, cultural diversity is abhorrent to the symbol-minded. A shape which has been drawn by humans around the world since prehistory is effectively banned because a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.

I don't see anyone trying to ban crosses or raise a fuss about them, and Christians have historically used it as a symbol while perpetrating many horrifying acts. Nobody is trying to ban the flags of any of the other countries which engaged in slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression, and those are at least reasonably unique. Why should this ancient religious symbol be forever tainted?

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Who says it's forever tainted? World War II was less than 100 years ago, and it was a fairly major event. Still fresh in historical terms.

> A shape which has been drawn by humans around the world since prehistory is effectively banned because a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.

Yep.

Trying to minimize WWII and the holocaust is not a good point to start an argument from.

It would also help if there weren't a resurgence of them to deal with today.

We have ongoing problems with that symbology.

Pretty much cemented my opinion there.

How exactly was I minimizing anything? I even mentioned "slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression", so what did I miss? These bullshit insinuations of antisemitism are garbage, show me what I said that was wrong, show me where I trivialized anything, don't just accuse me of thoughtcrime based on your own kneejerk assumptions.

I didn't accuse you of antisemitism, interesting that you're defending yourself. I just pointed out that Nazi ideology and symbology are a current political concern in the United States today.

"Insinuation" != accusation. It means stuff like "interesting that you're defending yourself."

You did accuse me of minimizing the Holocaust, and still have not responded about what exactly you found to be objectionable. That in itself is basically an accusation of antisemitism.

> small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.

Try again. A genocidal regime that conquered western europe by force, almost succeeded in overthrowing world democracy and caused the deaths of tens of millions.

Isn't that a lot of European civilization going west and east? We don't taint all of Europe although they were responsible for some pretty bad things. I mean the Belgians did horrible things in the Congo. Churchill starved West Bengal causing a famine that killed 4m people. From a non-European point of view Hitler was bad but so were other European colonizers as well.

> and caused the deaths of tens of millions

40-50 million in the war itself to be precise, but that doesn't account for all the millions of people who died in years directly after the war as a consequence of hunger, diseases, revenges, crime, political fights and persecution caused by the new division of powers... especially in Eastern Europe and Germany itself.

The Nazi party only had ~10% of the German population as it's membership at it's peak and gained power through nondemocratic means. They did a lot of nasty things, including slavery, genocide, and colonial oppression, as I mentioned earlier. Which part do you disagree with?

Approximately 14 million German soldiers served in WW2. And many non-party members co-opted or looked the other way. They may not have been formally registered as members of the NSDAP, but they're generally counted with the bad guys.

They gained power through democratic means, the emergency powers that made Hitler a dictator were in the constitution. They only ran out in 1939.

Yes there are instances where it wasn't above board but by and large Hitler gained his power democratically and/or within the constitution.

So I would say Hitler and Germany is a lesson in how not to set up a democracy. It basically enabled his rise to power.

> So I would say Hitler and Germany is a lesson in how not to set up a democracy. It basically enabled his rise to power.

And indeed, constitutions and electoral systems took these lessons into account afterwards. Nowadays it is hard to win an election with 1/3 of the vote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1932_German_federal_e...

Hitler managed to get a 66% supermajority to change the constitution. The enabling act had 444/647 vote. It's actually much, much worse than people realize. They got 68% voting in favor of becoming dictatorship. Wikipedia enabling act.

The overcame supermajority obstacles. Pretending they didn't represent the majority is detached from history. Nazism resonated deeply in Germany. He truly got most Germans willing to follow him enthusiastically.

I don't think they're minimizing what the Nazis did, just pointing out that the symbol has been completely highjacked by one narrow use of the symbol.

I think you mean "many democracies in the world" rather than "world democracy" -- which has quite a distinct meaning.

Indeed, thank you.

Your examples are extremely powerful religions and countries, rhat's why any movement to curtail their symbols is a non-starter. If the Nazis had won, it would be the same with their symbols.

...the Nazis were hardly a "small group of people".

1939 Germany had about 80 million inhabitants. By far not all Germans were Nazis, but then not all Nazis were Germans, so let's just use that as a first approximation. At the same time, India had about 320 million inhabitants, or four times as many.

Maybe calling Nazis a small group is a bit far, but they were definitely a minority of swastika users even at the time.

% of total population in 1930s Germany that were ardent Nazis vs. the rest of the world’s population shows that it was a small group of people.

Three hundred years from now, no one will care about said symbols anyhow.

When’s the last time we see people be superstitious or negative towards a worse person like Ghengis Khan? He’s part of popular culture; projecting into the future, as depressing as it sounds, so will Hitler be.

> a small group of people decided to use it while they did a bunch of nasty stuff.

It sounds like you might not understand the vast scale of the Holocaust, and that it affected every Jewish person in Europe. It sounds like you might not realize what also happened to the Polish Christians (and other Slavic peoples) under the Germans - which was another attempted genocide by itself.

We spent 1000 years in Poland, and our entire culture was totally destroyed in just a few years. 90% of the Jewish people in Europe were murdered. In many places, no Jews remain at all.

https://vanishedworld.blog/exhibition/

I didn't say they only did a small amount of bad things, I said "a bunch of". What exactly are you disputing here?

I think the point was that the number of nazis is small compared to all of the people in the world from the beginning of time until who have used the symbol.

That doesn't take away from the horrors that the nazi's did.

> Why should this ancient religious symbol be forever tainted?

Vae victis. This symbol has become a non symbol because the history was rewritten.

> history was rewritten

Hundreds of millions of people still use it regularly in India, it's everywhere. It's pretty innocuous. Unless you stop them from doing so somehow, history is not rewritten. Attempts to colonize ancient symbols will not succeed.

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