Part One: Behind the Swastika

Robert and Chelsey Weber-Smith discuss the surprisingly ancient history of the Swastika, and how it was a part of everyone before the Nazis stole it.

(2 part series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H what trafficking? But no, wait, Sophie, we can't uh,
we can't. We can't open like that, can we?

Speaker 2 (00:08):
No, that's not what are you even attempting to do
right now?

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Well? You know how like you know how like back
in like the sixties, you'd be like if you were
like getting up on the stage, you're gonna be like
a beat poet or somebody be like, what's up children,
like something like that. You know, I was gonna be like,
what's trafficking my children? But that's not a good introduction.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Terrible introduction.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
It's a terrible introduction.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I mean, I like, conceptually, I like that vibe for you,
but yeah, but the execution was not there.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm sorry because you and I are both big, big
into beat poetry.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
That is things that people know about us.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
That is what Yeah classic, yeah, big big beat. Anyway,
this is Behind the Bastards, podcast about the worst people
in all of history, one of whom is me for today? Yeah,
that introduction, And to distract from my incompetence, we have
a wonderful guest today, Chelsea Weber Smith. Chelsea, you are
the host of American Hysteria, a podcast about how fantastical

(00:59):
thing has shaped our culture. You deal with a lot
of stuff like hoaxes and moral panics, which is just
a wonderful premise for a show. How are you doing today, Chelsea.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
I'm doing great. Thank you so much to you both
for having me. I'm really excited.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
That was a really professional introduction.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
I just want to say when I met Chelsea, I
met Melsea in person. It was like a week before
Lauren Lauren. How do we describe Lauren? Lauren?

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Yeah, Lauren is somebody who does a lot of like
pr stuff for us.

Speaker 5 (01:34):
Lauren's like, really the patron saint of podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, Lauren's like yeah, yeah, Lauren's Lauren reached out to
I was like, I want to get Lauren. Lauren deserves
all the credit. I want to get Lauren's proper introduction.
It was like, do you want to have this person
on your podcast? I was like sure. And then a
week later I was at a very strange bar with
our mutual friend Sarah Marshall, and I met Chelsea likes
several jello shots and it was great.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
It was such a good.

Speaker 5 (01:59):
Time, complete like happenstance, not brand.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
You've just seen the Wickerman, which Sarah has been obsessed
with and we all see trafficking.

Speaker 5 (02:08):
Yeah, I love the Wickerman was very cool.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Wait, wait, which one Nicholas Cage the original? Okay, okay, okay, good.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Anoint the They're actually both charming in their own ways.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Things to recommend both well. Chelsea. First off, welcome to
the show. Sorry I introduced it with a child trafficking bit.
More to the point, I want to ask you a
question that I ask all of my friends, all my
family members, kids at the playground near my house. How
do you feel about swastika's?

Speaker 5 (02:44):
I feel bad about them, bad.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Bad about swastika's.

Speaker 4 (02:48):
Okay, I generally don't like seeing them. I don't like
hearing about them being seen anti swastika here, have.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
You ever in the world seen a swastika that was like,
definitely not a Nazi swastika?

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Hmm?

Speaker 4 (03:05):
Do you mean sort of perhaps like an attempt to
shock by a teenager.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
No, I mean that that is also a thing that happens.
But I mean, what do you know about the origins
of the swastika pre oh, okay, Hitler, et cetera.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
I know, I know, sort of the cliche answer of
that it was originally I believe an Indian symbol of
something like good luck.

Speaker 5 (03:31):
Is that true? Is that right?

Speaker 1 (03:33):
It is? It is a Hindu symbol, it's also a
Buddhist symbol. It actually goes back much further than that.
So that's that's what we're talking about today. The working
title of this week's episodes are What's Up with Swastikas?
Because obviously this is behind the Bastards, So we're going
behind the Nazis by talking about the origins of the swastikas,

(03:54):
how it became a symbol for the Nazis. But also
when we're talking about the swastika, we're talking about like
a religious symbol that goes back real far. And so
the fact that it's primarily most people have the same
reaction you have, which is like swasika, that's like the
Nazi thing, which causes problems for people for whom it's
like an old a religious symbol that goes back a
long time. So that's that's what we're going to talk

(04:15):
about this week because there's a lot of history here
that most people are unaware of. So, yeah, are you
ready to learn all about swastika's?

Speaker 5 (04:26):
I have never been more ready in my life.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
That's good.

Speaker 5 (04:28):
I'm buckled in.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
It would be probably kind of problematic if you had
been just shamp it at the bit and learn about swastika.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
I was.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
That's why I read a book.

Speaker 5 (04:39):
You know, I do read books about World War Two
a lot.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
So yeah, yeah, yeah. The big idea, like.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
It's kind of this kind of history, and it's so
important to know the origins of things, because you can't
understand the thing unless you understand the thing it came
out of.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
All right, well, let's let's go back in time. Everyone
can imagine your your particular favorite time machine noise, and
we're we're going back way back to the mid nineteen thirties. Okay,
it's a rough period for all Homo sapiens. Hitler has
just risen to power in Germany. He started the process
of crushing his enemies, which obviously includes everyone in the

(05:16):
country who is of Jewish ancestry. He introduces the Nuremberg
Laws and I think nineteen thirty five, which bring international
attention to a growing stream of outrages that are going
to culminate in the Holocaust. And while all this is
happening over in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the congregants of
the Adath emmanual synagogue watch in stultified horror is Hitler's

(05:36):
bigotry empowers anti Semites across the globe like many Ds
for a Jews, they raise money to help their relatives
immigrate from Europe. They write furious letters to newspapers ignoring
Hitler's crimes. And you know, they worry more than anything else, right,
which is understandable. You know, how much further will this
hate spread? Are they safe even in New Jersey? And

(05:57):
while they're coping with all this, which is a lot
to have on your mind, your conscience, one of their
congregants notices something during a service, which is that in
the vestibule of their synagogue there's a mosaic, a beautiful
handmade mosaic that features dozens and dozens and dozens of swastikas.
Now this is obviously a problem, right, you don't want

(06:19):
to have that in your synagogue in the nineteen thirties,
and after a quick discussion, they decide to pave the
swastikas out. Fast forward about one hundred years, you know,
you have World War Two, all that that horrible stuff happens.
You know, the rebuilding process occurs afterwards, you know, life
goes on, and on December fifth, twenty twenty one, for
the first time in like ninety years or so, the

(06:41):
Adath Emmanual Synagogue finds itself again with a swastika near
the vestibule. Now this one had been applied by a
sticker wielded by some unknown Nazi who adds in writing
the message we are everywhere. Now that's a chilling, horrifying,
depressing story. But in between those two incidents, the the
swastikas that had been placed inside the vestibule of the

(07:04):
synagogue long before the rise of Hitler, and the swastika
added there in the twenty twenties by a Nazi. In
between those two incidents is a really fascinating and strange story,
and that's what we're going to be talking about today.
Unlike a lot of you know, the swastika is almost
certainly the most well known hate symbol in the world.
But unlike a lot of other particularly famous hate symbols,

(07:25):
the Confederate flag, for example, the Klansman's hood, the SS
lightning bolts, the swastika is not in and of itself problematic.
And what I mean by that is the swastika was
not created as a symbol of hate. It was turned
into one later. And one of the things that you understand,
like you start to learn when you look into this,

(07:45):
is that not only is the swastika something that predates
the Nazis, it may be one of, if not the
oldest complex symbols created by human beings. Now there's a
lot of debate about this. Scholarship over the swastika has
invited vigorous debate for very obvious reasons, over both the
geographic and the temporal nature of its origins. When it

(08:05):
comes to the word itself, we do have a lot
clearer of an origin. We know exactly where the word
swastika came from, and its origins are Sanskrit, and it
does mean, as you noted, well being, good luck, and fortune.
That is like the meaning of the word swastika. And
in fact, the first recorded instance of the word swastika
predates the first recorded instance of the symbol swastika in

(08:27):
the Mdus Valley, right so in you know, India, that
kind of region. The word swastika seems to predate the
actual use of the symbol. This is again, whenever you're
talking about stuff that's old, the dates are kind of fluid.
But best sort of assumption is that like around the
fourth millennium BCE is when the swastika first shows up

(08:49):
in the Indus Valley, right, So that's pretty old, you know.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yeah, I feel like this.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
I don't know, Chelsea, I feel like this is not
something like if you hearing it's one of the old
symbols ever created by human beings.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Was not something I knew.

Speaker 5 (09:06):
No, no, I did not expect that at all.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
I've been reading a lot of books lately about kind
of the origins of the conception of God, which includes
like so much religious symbolism, and this feels like right
right in my interests right now, and I'm so excited
about this, And we'll talk.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
A little bit later about why. But there there were
starting kind of the eighteen hundreds, which is when scholarship
around the swastika and kind of the modern recognized sense
of the word really starts, there was a belief among
some anthropologists that it was probably the oldest complex symbol,
the oldest symbol that's not just a simple shape, right,
you know, you see the sun, you draw a circle
or whatever, but like the oldest complex shape. There's no

(09:46):
way to prove that right, that's an absolutely unprovable just
because of the age of everything involved here. But there's
not really anything that's like a clearer like like bet
for the oldest symbol. By the way, we're talking about
like this within the context of the swastika arising in
the fourth millennium BCE in the Indus Valley. It goes

(10:09):
back way further than that now for a long time.
And most people, if you ask, most people who are
kind of casually familiar, they say, oh, yeah, it was
a symbol in India right well before the Nazis picked
it up. That is not the oldest recorded instance of
the use of the swastika. And I'm going to quote
now from an article in the BBC. If you want
to see just how deeply rooted the swastika pattern is

(10:31):
in Europe, a good place to start is Kiev, where
the National Museum of the History of Ukraine has an
impressive range of exhibits. Among the museum's most highly prized
treasures is a small ivory figurine of a female bird
made from the tusk of a mammoth. It was found
in nineteen oh eight at the Paleolithic settlement of Mizine
near the Russian border. On the torso of the bird
is engraved an intricate meander pattern of joined up swastikas.

(10:54):
It is the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world
and has been radiocarbon dated to an astonishing fifth teen
thousand years ago. Whoa, So we were making swastikas way
before we had cities, right Like, there's yeah, like, this
is an ancient, ancient symbol. It was found with a
bunch of phallic a bunch of dicks, right like, it

(11:15):
was found with a bunch of dicks, because it's a
fertility symbol. You know, you see that kind of stuff
all over the world. Now, I think people might expect
us to given the present war in Ukraine and the
fact that both Ukraine and Russia have serious problems with
far right neo Nazi combat organizations, you might expect us
to go into that here, but it's not really relevant.
We're talking fifteen thousand years ago, so one way or

(11:35):
the other, it has nothing to do with the present
issues with the far right in that part of the world. Again,
this is it like predates the First City by like
five thousand years and despite the shocking age of the
Ukrainian swastik is. This does not mean that they originate,
that the symbol itself was first used near Kiev or

(11:55):
any you know, anywhere in that region, Because there's a
fascinating theory, and I was completely unaware of this until
I started doing my research as to where the swastika
came from. Now, again, when scholarship around the swastika starts
in kind of the eighteen hundreds, one of the assumptions
is that, and this is going to play into the
Nazis later, it has to have started at a single place.

Speaker 4 (12:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
The idea that these anthropologists have is the swastika is
so complicated, such a complex symbol, it can't have arisen
in multiple places simultaneously.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
It must have been originated by us at one place
and then carried over to the rest of the world. Now,
this happens to gel with a lot of theories at
the time about like this kind of Atlantis super civilization
that's seed in culture and whatnot. This is probably not
the case. The swastika probably arose independently in a number
of parts of the world, and the kind of best

(12:49):
explanation as to how came in nineteen sixty five from
a paleontologist named Valentina Bibikova, who was looking at this
Ukrainian piece of art with swastikas in it, depositive that
a probable origin for the symbol itself is the actual
structure of mammoth ivory, because when you cut mammoth ivory
into cross sections, there's a naturally occurring pattern within the

(13:13):
ivory that looks kind of like a swastika. And that
could explain very easily why there's variations of the same
symbol all over the world. It was people hunting that
and other kind of animals with ivory that might make
a similar pattern in the cross sections.

Speaker 5 (13:25):
Wow, that's so cool.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
That's yeah, I have no idea about this, isn't.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
That I was thinking of like a collective consciousness, like
if we were a little bit far out into like
a Youngian universe like these some sort of primordial symbol
being expressed in different places. But what you said sounds
a little bit more polive.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Bunch of a bunch of ladies and dudes fucking around
with bones for a.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
Long time, being like this represents the bones, which represents
the animal which I want to eat.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
So it's everything And again you got to think about
like what sort of options people have for entertainment at
the time. We often say this, but Bone were the
original podcast. Oh yeah, you know it is no yeah, yeah, yeah,
just a fact. Yeah, this brings me to our sponsors
for this week, Bone Box. Just a lot of Honestly,

(14:12):
it's just a bunch of illegal livery. You will get
in a lot of trouble if that's catch you ordering.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
I believe I believe the month first Barbie was carved
out of mammoth bone.

Speaker 5 (14:24):
Yeah, that's absolutely true.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
We just did a whole episode on Barbie and yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
By Greta Gerwick. She actually goes back about fifteen thousand
years too. People don't know this.

Speaker 5 (14:34):
She's actually a mortal. Yeah, yes, she continues to prove it.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
And for those keeping track, it did take us only
fifteen minutes to make a Barbie reference.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
You're welcome, that's right.

Speaker 5 (14:46):
Right, we know what the people want.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
The origin of all human culture, So yeah, I think
that's really interesting. Rather than kind of have being transferred
all obviously, cultural exchange happens too. People take their swastikas
and they conquer or move to other parts of the world,
and that spreads it as well. It's not just one thing,
but it's very likely that multiple different parts of the

(15:09):
world kind of arrive at the swastika independently. One noteworthy
example of the use of the symbol comes from the
Akan people of Ghana, who used it in their gold
weights at around fourteen hundred a d. You can find
some photos of these online and they look like Nazi gold, right,
Like look that you would guess that's probably like some
stolen Nazi gold, But these predate the Nazis by you know,

(15:32):
five hundred something years. Fascinating, right, so fascinating, yeah, yeah,
and it is kind of we'll be talking about this.
But it also the fact that when you see this
you immediately are like, oh, that's some stolen Nazi gold
does point to how potent the symbol remains as a
symbol of evil too, just like because of you know,

(15:52):
dem Nazis. But yeah, So in eighteen ninety four, a
historian named Thomas Wilson wrote one of the it might
have been the first modern histories of the swastika, attempting
to use kind of modern historiography and scientific method to
determine where it came from. And it was Thomas Wilson,
who first made the claim that the swastika was quote

(16:12):
probably the first symbol made with definite intention in human history.
By this, he means not just a representative image, but
one that was passed from person to person, tribe to tribe,
and traveled intentionally with meaning intact across cultures. There is
no way of proving this, and it seems like Wilson,
it's probably fair to say now he was coming on

(16:33):
a little strong, but it's not too much to say
that the swastika would have been one of the first
symbols to spread around the world. And there is some
mystery as to why. While these symbols presence in Southeast Asia,
Eastern Europe, and North Africa can be explained via the
known and documented patterns of trade, really kind of the
only way to just like it's also been found as

(16:54):
we're going to talk about all over the Americas. And
this is why I started by talking about that piece
of mammoth ivory, because this is really the only explanation,
right like there was not people were not like walking
from Kiev to or the location of modern day Kiev
to North America fifteen thousand years ago. From what we
can tell people indigenous people in the Americas who were

(17:16):
here much longer than that, we're using swastika's much further
back than that. Whenever you talk about kind of the
timing here, you know that's a complicated and very politically,
shall we say, dicey story. But we do know that
swastikas were in use. And I'm going to stop calling
them swastikas in a second, because the people of the
Americas didn't call them that, But we're in use, particularly

(17:40):
in what is now the Americans southwest and West coast,
for a very long time. The Navajo people who have
for a considerable period of time inhabited a large portion
of modern Arizona, New Mexico southern California, have been using
the swastika since kind of the prehistoric period, and they
called it, and what we'll be calling it when we
refer to their use of it, is the whirling log.

(18:02):
Right that is the name of the symbol, not just
for the Navajo, but for a number of other tribes
kind of in that part of the Americas, and it
is it is representative. It's called the whirling log because
it's representative of a specific story. And without getting into
too much detail about spiritual beliefs that are outside of
my depth. It's one of these tales where like you've

(18:25):
got a heroic character who is forced on a dangerous journey.
He receives the aid of gods, gods and spirits and
he kind of learns mystic lessons along the way, right,
and the whirling log is representative of this story. The
Navajo are not the only indigenous people of the Americas
to use variants of the whirling log, but they're probably
the most well documented ancient American users. We don't know

(18:48):
how long the symbol has been in use over here
because the primary way in which they used it was
for these kind of sand drawings as part of religious rituals.
So it was in a way that most of the
time when it was used, it was not kind of
being preserved long term.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
They weren't carving it into huge edifices. They were using
it for these kind of rituals in which it was
not meant to last, right, And it was his story
with it.

Speaker 4 (19:12):
Was it like a way to give a narrative, like
that narrative that you just kind of told of a
hero's journey, Do you.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Know, I think it was it was representative of a
specific story that had religious significance for them, and it
was also like that kind of it was used in
a in a series of rituals that they carried out.
That's kind of the extent of I don't want to
like get too deep into the ways. I don't want
to be a culture that I, you know, is not
very far outside of my wheeledhouse. But it was. It

(19:39):
was used widely, and it was used widely in a
fashion that, like most of the uses, would not have
been preserved for long periods of time, because that was
not the point of using the symbol. So I want
to quote from an article in the Collector's Guide of
New Mexico talking about some of the historiography on the
use of the whirling log. In his book The Swastika

(20:00):
Symbol in Navajo Textiles, Dennis J. Anger cites Thomas Wilson's
research in the eighteen nineties that the earliest evidence of
the swastika in America was found in excavations in Tennessee
and Ohio. That the swastika found its way to the
Western hemisphere in prehistoric times cannot be doubted. Anger quotes
Wilson's writing one of the specimens shows its antiquity and
its manufacture by the Aborigines, untainted by contact with the whites.

(20:24):
That's obviously eighteen nineties language here. But it does originate it.
You find it in a number of parts of North America.
I believe there's evidence of it in South America Iyo, Yeah,
Ohio and Tennessee. It was a big brass swastika that
was found like underground as part of an excavation. And

(20:45):
you know, so again, this goes back quite as far
as we can tell, like the likeliest I think the
likeliest assumption is that it was created, it was developed
or whatever independently by people in the Americas, right, which
happens with a bunch of stuff, right kind of Famously,
the bow and arrow is developed independently by a number
of different cultures. You know this, There's no reason why

(21:06):
the swastika wouldn't. It's not more complex than a bow
and arrow, for sure. But yeah, so I have a.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Question really quick, So does that mean there was some
sort of like ivory situation happening here.

Speaker 5 (21:17):
I'm not like very privy to your early animals.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
You know, there are mammoths in the Americas, so it
may have been that it may have just been somebody
perhaps perhaps somebody too who was like, you know, utilizing
substances as part of a religious ritual, who noticed that,
like or who kind of saw maybe it was like
the way the clouds were moving around the sun or
something that maybe like a spindle whirl, you know. Who
knows where it came, like how it first got used,

(21:43):
because it's its earliest documented use kind of is outside
of the whirling log use that the Navajo are using
in the southeast part of the continent, because we're talking
about like Tennessee, Ohio. So we probably will never know
specifically who had it first in the Americas, but maybe
even it might have originated in a couple of different

(22:05):
cultures in the Americas independently. You know, there's no reason
why that wouldn't have been the case. Now, that book
I just cited from the swastika symbol in Navajo textiles
was written in the eighteen nineties, because the swastika happened
to be a very big topic at just that point
in time. And this does bring us back to the Nazis.

(22:27):
It all starts with a very what I would call
a stupid genius, a guy named Heinrich Schleimann, and Heinrich
Schleiman is the man who's going to find the ruins
of Troy, and he's really bad at it. He does
succeed in finding the ruins of Troy, but he's like
the worst guy to find the ruins of Troy, such
an idiot. So Schleman's an interesting character. Thato was born

(22:48):
December twenty sixth, eighteen twenty two in a town that
I'm not going to try to pronounce. It's in Germany.
It's one of those German towns with just a mess
of a name. He's the fifth of nine chow and
his dad is a dirt poor pastor. And when Heinrich
is seven, he becomes fascinated with the myth of the
Trojan War. Now, at that point in time and kind

(23:09):
of the mid to late eighteen hundreds, when he's going
to school and whatnot, the Trojan War is seen as
probably an apocryphal story. Most serious scholars at least don't
believe that it's a literal story about a literal war
for Troy. It's kind of more of a mythological tale.
But he falls in love with this story, and he

(23:29):
certainly doesn't assume that it's a myth. Like many poor
kids of his era, he was sent by his father
to go live and work with a relative. You hear
this kind of story a lot. We've covered a lot
of Germans on this show, interestingly enough, and a lot
of them have a similar background where it's like, we're
kind of poor my dad's you know, his dad sent
him off to live with his uncle or whatever, and

(23:49):
when he's nine, he enrolls in a school where he
lives away from his family for a couple of years.
He was a lonely kid. One of the few constants
in his early life which was difficult was his obsession
with Greek and Roman mythology. His dad encourages this at first,
but starts to get worried about it kind of later
on because Heinrich just doesn't give it up. But then
his father gets accused of embezzling church funds, which puts

(24:12):
an end to Heinrich's education and forces him to apprentice
as a grocer. He would later claim that his love
of Homer really blossomed while he was walking home from
work one day and he comes across this drunk guy
in the street who's just kind of reciting parts of
the odyssey. I don't know why that hit him so hard,
but it did. And Schleimann spent the next few years

(24:33):
going through something of an odyssey himself. He lost his
job after he started coughing up blood randomly one day.
This is the eighteen hundreds, and yeah, the thing you do,
and what do you do when you start coughing up
blood randomly? You get a job as a cabin boy
on a boat, so that way they can at least
throw your body overboard when you die. Right, But he

(24:53):
doesn't die. Even though the boat he's on crashes in
a storm, he survives and makes it to age twenty two,
which point he gets a gig for an import export firm.
This is where he's going to actually like shine because
he has an excellent head for business. He's extremely successful.
He makes a bunch of money, picks up Dutch in Russian,

(25:14):
and by the time he's like thirty six years old,
he's rich and respected. And he decides, I'm going to retire. Right,
I've already stared death in the face a whole bunch
of times. I'm not working anymore. I'm going to take
my money and I am going to roll the dice
on what's always been my life dream, finding the city
of Troy and proving that it was real. And I
know you're wondering, where do the swastikas come in?

Speaker 4 (25:36):
There?

Speaker 1 (25:36):
There are coming. Don't worry.

Speaker 4 (25:38):
This is like such an interesting midlife crisis that's happening here.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
I'll find the truth.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
I do feel like a lot of mindrayth crisis is
start with well, I read the Odyssey, like I do
feel like that is that is usually in the.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Organ you know, the uh Well, nowadays I think the
equivalent of that is reading American Psycho for for middle
A businessmen. But back in the day, it was the
Odyssey the American Psycho of the Old World. Yeah, we
all remember that moment where Odysseus is talking with the
other Greeks about his business cards. Okay, So, as I

(26:19):
noted earlier, there was tremendous debate in the day as
to whether or not any city such as Troy had
ever existed. Now, since ancient times, there had been a
general area in Anatolia, which today is just kind of
like we call Turkey, but that's like the name for
the geographical region, and that area called there was a

(26:39):
part of anatolia called the Troad that had been in
like ancient times when the Romans are running shit. This
is where everyone had just like said, Troy had been.
And this is kind of one of the first, one
of the first like pieces of nerd culture, right, because
Western nerd culture really starts with the Ily in the Odyssey. Right,

(27:01):
So in ancient Roman days, we're talking two thousand years ago,
rich nerds are like traveling to the Troad to like
visit the sites that they think the Iliad took place in, right,
Like they're probably dressing up as like Hector and Achilles,
you know that. Yeah, Yeah, that's the birth of nerd
culture right there. Anyway, whatever, there's no evidence. Again, there

(27:23):
was not hard evidence that the city of Troy had
been there. It's just the place people had gone to. Schleiman, though,
was certain that it was real and certain that the Troad,
somewhere in there was the actual ruins of Troy. Since
he had money and time, he decided to travel to
the likeliest spot and dig the fucker up.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
Literally, like that guy to our signo, bro, it happened,
I was there that guy.

Speaker 5 (27:48):
So did he show up with a shovel. Yeah, yeah,
I'm talking to team.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Do we have a tea sho He shows up with boys, right,
like he hires boys to do the diggings.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, that's what he.

Speaker 5 (27:58):
Did back then, Hire a bunch of boys.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
That's yeah. Everyone's talking to day about how we've just
developed a new semiconductor. We need to return to tradition.
Just boys and shovels, you know. That was That's what
what built civilization is groups of boys with shovels, paid
pennies a day. That's what we need to go back to.
I just rewatched the Inana Jones movie, so im.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
I was like, what is in your brain right now?

Speaker 1 (28:27):
So he gets his boys and he shows up at
the Troad and I'm going to quote for what comes
next from a write up by archaeologists for the British Museum.
Frank Calvert lived in the Troad, an owned land next
to the mound of Hissarlik. An amateur but skilled archaeologist,
he was convinced that this would be a good place
to dig, so when Shleeman visited in eighteen sixty eight

(28:48):
with homer in one hand and a spade in the other,
determined to make his name in archaeology. Calvert found him
easy to persuade. Now, this is a time when Calvert,
you know, kind of convinced is Shleman that like he's
got a spot to dig that he thinks is where
Troy is. This is a period of time where the
Ottoman Empire, which governs the area is kind of the
sick man of Europe, and so it's it's a great

(29:11):
place to be a rich guy who wants to like
pay to fuck around. Because normally most countries, if you're like,
I want to dig up one of your like historical
landmarks just to see what's under there, they'd be like, well, no,
you're not allowed to do that. But Shleman is kind
of just able to bribe his way into things. It's
a little bit messier of a period of time, and

(29:32):
shockingly Calvert was right. He picks the right area. He does,
in fact know where the ruins of Troy are, but
it's not immediately obvious. They start finding like ruins and
shit aphemera, but it's not obvious to them because they
don't really know what they're doing that these are ruins
of Troy that they found. They're just kind of coming

(29:53):
across pieces of pottery, old bits of buildings. But in
Shleiman's mind, Troy is this like wealthy city and everything's
plated in gold and colorful, and they're just finding like
old crap because like that's what everything old looks like.
Unless you really know what you're looking at, it's just
like junk most of the.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Time, right, looking for a brad Pitt.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
He was looking for Brad Pitt in there. You know,
he is expecting something glorious and impressive. And obviously, again
this is kind of a logical because if you even
if you take the story in the Iliad as literal, like, well,
the Greek sacked it, right, they wouldn't have left the
good shit. It's just gonna be junk that's left behind
after they kill everybody. So they dig past what they

(30:34):
think of as the crap. They keep going deeper, and
they keep going deeper. And I'm gonna quote from the
Smithsonian magazine now, as after his first excavation season failed
to yield promising results, Schleiman adopted a new tactic, instructing
his team to dig an enormous forty five foot deep trench.
His methods a note Jill Rubikalba and Eric H. Klein
and digging for Troy from Homer to Hissarlik were savage

(30:55):
and brutal, even by the standards of the nineteenth century.
The authors add, he plowed through layers of soil and
everything in them without proper record keeping, no mapping of finds,
few descriptions of discoveries. So he finds Troy, but he
digs past it and destroys most of the ruins of Troy,
or at least a lot of them, until he finds

(31:16):
some gold that he decides must have belonged to the
famous king Priam. Archaeologists will later prove it's way older
than that. Like, he did find some cool looking gold shit,
but it is not from fucking Priam, and he he
obliterates most of the actual traces of historic Troy because
Schliemann is kind of a we aboo, right, Like he's
a Homer we aboo right. Anyway, very funny story. How

(31:40):
this relates back to our premise today is that one
of the clear discoveries that Heinrich did make was he
finds a bunch of pottery in this mound, adorned with
a fascinating symbol, the swastika. Now at this point people
knew the swastika is in use. Not only are the
you know, the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest
using it, but it's in use all over you know,

(32:02):
Southeast Asia, right. It is a religious symbol for Hindu people,
it's a religious symbol for Buddhist people. You find it
all over stuff in China. It's a very common symbol
in China as well, not just for Buddhists. So this
is kind of and the reason why this sort of
electrifies people is that when you're talking about the late
eighteen hundreds, you know, think back to the episodes we've

(32:24):
done on Helena Blovatsky and stuff. This is the origins
of the stuff that's going to become Nazi race science
people are already talking about Aryans. They're talking about this
kind of mythical precursor civilization that they believe seeded, you know,
high civilization around the world that presumably to a lot
of Europeans is like white, right, Like that's a big

(32:47):
like belief at the time. And we know that like
these Indo Aryan people that kind of start off in
the Indus Valley have traveled around like up in through
Southeast Asia, up through like modern day Russia and into Europe.
And the fact that they find swastikas in these ruins
of Troy is kind of evidence of this root race,

(33:09):
this precursor Aryan people. Right, That's how it gets interpreted
by a lot of folks at the time. Right, this
is proof of these theories that are starting to gain
a lot of purchase among chunks of European society. Schleeman
is fascinated by the swastika, and he continues, you know,
it's a big deal when he finds what he thinks
is Troy, that we now know is something else. But

(33:30):
he keeps doing archaeology around the world, often illegal archaeology,
generally bad archaeology. But because a lot of people had
not been digging in the place as he was, he
also does find a lot of shit. And some of
the shit he finds is that he keeps finding swastikas
on stuff. Right. He would later decide that the swastika
because he finds a bunch of swastikas in like old Jewish,

(33:52):
like religious icons and like temples and stuff. He decides
that it's related to the Hebrew letter Tau, which is
the sign of life and was ritualistically drawn on the
foreheads of believers, which incidentally is how Charles Manson would
later explain why he put a swastika on his forehead.
Now note that I said how Manson explained, not why

(34:14):
he actually did it. But that is there. Manson is
where like Manson is reading this kind of stuff decades later, right,
because it's still relevant and sort of weird fringe occult
communities and whatnot. Speaking of Charles Manson, why you know,
who would have been a lot better at running a cult?
Who's that our sponsors?

Speaker 5 (34:35):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Yeah's easily easily, of course. Yeah, in a way, we're
all in that cult already, and we're back and we're
talking about our wonderful sponsors who something something helter skelter whatever.

(34:58):
Let's continue with the episode. Schleiman's findings of the swastika
are read attentively by growing communities of Aryan nerds, these
kind of proto Nazis, and anthropologist Gwendolin Lake will later write, quote,
when Heinrich Schleiman discovered swastika like decorations on pottery fragments
and all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as

(35:19):
evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants
of the site had been Aryan all along. The link
between the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was
impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings
and associations onto a universal symbol which hint served as
a distinguishing boundary marker between non Aryan, or rather non

(35:40):
German and German identity. So this is going to take off,
particularly among the Germans right, which are just starting to
be a thing. You know, he's in Troy eighteen sixty eight.
Germany gets invented two years later, right, Maybe I don't know,
we could have just done Belgium too, and probably saved
ourselves a lot of trouble. But you know, whatever would

(36:02):
have been nice would have been nice. So the growing
swastika craze among European intellectual weirdos and Americans who are
themselves weird fanboys of European intellectual weirdos leads us right
back to the Navajo. Now, up until the late eighteen hundreds,
the swastika or the whirling log in this context was
used only in religious ceremonies by at least by by

(36:24):
the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest, primarily like
sand paintings. But there's these two Americans who start opening
like Caucasian Americans who start opening trading posts in Navajo Territory.
And these guys names are Lorenzo Hubble and JB. Moore,
And they're aware of the swastika craze that's sweeping across
Europe as a result of Schleiman's work, and they start

(36:47):
they become aware of the fact that the whirling log
is in use throughout the Southwest. Now, another thing that's
happening at this time is that the quote unquote West,
you know, in that sort of conception of life like
the Wild West whatever, which is obviously flawed at inaccurate
historical conception, but it is a popular conception in the

(37:07):
minds of a lot of Americans, particularly in the East Coast,
has ignited a craze for all things Native American. Right,
both Americans and the coasts are kind of obsessing over
generally inaccurate stories and pieces of you iconography, items that
had been owned or made by Native Americans. And this

(37:27):
is also a huge deal over in Europe.

Speaker 4 (37:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
A lot of this is centered around these kind of
noble savage depictions of indigenous peoples in fiction like the
books of Carl May, which inspire Hitler to a significant degree,
and to hubbl and more, the fact that all this
is happening at the same time represents a clear opportunity
for profit. Right.

Speaker 4 (37:46):
Oh, and also that's when the wild West shows are happening,
right exactly, Yes, Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yeah, so all of this is kind of happening at
the same time. And Hubblan Moore notice this. They want
to take advantage in sell art that's being made by
by Navajo, particularly by Navajo silversmiths, and silversmithing is like
a really significant thing. I mean, it has a lot
to do with the survival of the Navajo people. There's
a very good book about this called The Counterfeiters of

(38:13):
Bosque Redondo. Fascinating book, really interesting piece of history about
how effectively the Navajo averted a genocide that was, you know,
being carried out by the United States. Really interesting story.
But anyway, there's a lot of like really good silver
products being made and there's tremendous demand for them, particularly
over in the cities of the East Coast and in Europe,

(38:34):
and win Hubble and Moore, see that the swastika is,
you know, or in this case, the whirling log is
a simple in use here. They're like, you guys, got
to start putting that on some of this silver stuff
and some of this other artwork that you're putting out,
because that shit'll sell. People love the like white people
love swastikas, right now, you got to start making this

(38:55):
on stuff, right and so yeah, and again a lot
of the stuff that's been made is being made by
folks in the area, like Pueblo people, but it all
kind of gets marketed as like you know, a specific
you know, these are you know, Navajo relics and whatnot
that we're selling to you in New York or whatever.
And the two most popular motifs in the artwork that's

(39:16):
being taken from the south West and sold over in
the cities of the East coasts are Indian heads and swastikas.
Those are the two like things that that white people
want to buy when they're buying this stuff.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
Yeah, no idea, Yeah, I had no idea.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
Klein, who has written a book on Navajo spoons Silver
Spoons to be published by the Museum of New Mexico
Press or that was published by the Museum of New Mexico.
Press noted that the first spoon that she had located
with both a swastika and an engraved date coincided with
the opening of the Saint Louis Exposition in nineteen oh four.
The item was years made years earlier, probably in the

(39:53):
late eighteen hundreds, but like like that's where it was sold,
so probably it was made and then it got stamped
with a date later on so it could be sold
at this big expo where there's a ton of tourists, right,
presumably Europeans who are coming over to the Americas for
this World's Fair, and they want to buy something that's
like native American, right, because that's a craze over in Europe,

(40:14):
and the people selling this stuff know that, like, well,
Europeans love them some swastikas, they're all they can't shut
up about it. So let's get some of that shit
out and let's put it on the fucking table.

Speaker 4 (40:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
So these two guys that I was talking about start
a commercial spoon company manufacturing quote unquote Navajo spoons as
mementos of the fair. These are just generally mass produced
spoons that have absolutely nothing to do with indigenous people,
but like they're lying, you know. In nineteen oh six,
More starts offering swastika spoons in his catalog, and by

(40:46):
the time the spoon craze dies out, and around nineteen fifteen,
as Klan writes, quote, you had so many stamps and
dies with swastikas that the symbol appears on bracelets, sides
of rings, ash trays, salt sellers. Any silver stamped item
was fair game for the swastika camp. And again this
is the like yeah, uh uh yeah, that's so, that's

(41:08):
that's kind of how the swastika becomes a big popular
thing in the Americas as like an actual uh chashki, right,
Like that's how it's this sacred symbol that's used in
religious observances. And then Americans are like, see what's happening
with Schleimann, see this kind of craze over Native American products,
and are like, well, let's just fucking take this shit

(41:31):
and sell it at world's fairs and stuff. What's capitalize
on this baby, you know, that's what we fucking do.

Speaker 4 (41:36):
And so those like Americans were already kind of soaked
in this symbol. I guess everywhere like a w A
dummy JD bracelets.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Well, that is actually exactly how ubiquitous it becomes. Yeah,
so this is the growth of the swastika obsession in
the United States. And again, the actual symbol as it's
being used by Indigenous Americans or at least you know,
the group that it's being claimed to be made from,
is the whirling log But I'm saying swasti swastika because
that is what Americans are calling it, and they're specifically

(42:07):
thinking about the quote unquote aryan swastikas that Schleiman has found.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
So, in Europe, obviously the anti Semitic rite, which is
a growing power, is using the swastika and adopting it
as kind of a symbol, but it's still not exclusive
to it there. And in the United States it becomes
very quickly divorced from any real meaning at all beyond
good luck or general good vibes. Through the early nineteen hundreds,

(42:33):
it starts to become one of the most ubiquitous symbols
from marketing and product logos in the country. If I
could compare the swastika in the Americas in the early
nineteen hundreds to any modern symbol. It would probably be
the peace sign like it is used. Think about like
a peace sign on a can of Arizona iced t
That's how they use the swastika in this period of time.

(42:54):
And again, some Americans, particularly in the cities, would be
familiar with it as an aryan symbol. Many of the
would have seen it in purported Indian artwork, you know,
spoons and the like. But they also wouldn't have looked
askance at seeing a swastika printed on the label of
a cigar, which happened regularly, or on a color for
a ad for Coca Cola, who used the swastika freely

(43:14):
in both print ads and decorative chatch games. Oh yeah,
this actually, this causes a problem last year because there's
this guy in Chattanooga with a metal detector who's just
kind of like walking around the woods or whatever, and
he finds an old metal swastika with a Coca Cola
logo on it. Wow, advertising bottles for just five cents.

(43:35):
And Sophie's going to show you this this Coca gar I.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Like can't speak what.

Speaker 4 (43:42):
It's a bottle opener too.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
Hook on there to models.

Speaker 4 (43:47):
That is so wild, And of course I imagine that
people did not know the full context of this item
when it was put onto the internet.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
If this wasn't equated to Nazis, what a very cool
looking thing.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah yeah, well yeah, I mean again, it's hard to
imagine if the Nazis hadn't come along and used it.
But like, there's an alternate reality in which there's just
swastikas all over the place. People are like fucking Jim Bros.
Are getting tattooed with them and not as a Nazi thing.

Speaker 3 (44:19):
Yeah, this does explain the ending of mad men like
a lot.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah. So Carlsburg used it on their beer bottles, and
the Boy Scouts take it up as one of their symbols.
And I'm going to quote now from a book by
a guy named Stephen Heller, who writes an excellent, excellent
history book about the swastika's origin.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
The Boy Scouts established an Order of the White Swastika
in Portsmouth, Ohio, Camp Russell, New York, and Saint Joseph, Missouri.
Over the course of twelve weekends, Scouts completed twelve different skills.
Boys who fulfilled their tasks received a white Swastika badge.
I'm going I guess the value of that dropped real precipitously.
In the mid thirties, Wow, the Girls Club of America

(45:03):
also took up the symbol, and they named their popular
magazine the Swastika. That was the Girls Club's official magazine.
From nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen, Every Girls Club member
would receive a colorful magazine studded with the future symbol
of the Third Reich. Members would save for weeks in
order to be able to afford the club's most coveted

(45:25):
piece of merch, a diamond covered swastika pin. One add
cheerfully proclaims what every girl wants her own swastika.

Speaker 5 (45:35):
God.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
Absolutely, these are not fascists. There's nothing problematic about these.
But you cannot find an issue of the swastika that
doesn't look like straight up Nazi propaganda, right, and it makes.

Speaker 5 (45:48):
Everything so confusing?

Speaker 4 (45:49):
And what is can we Nazim's because America?

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Can we?

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, it's just this thing that you're showing us.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Robert Chelsea, do you want to take that home?

Speaker 2 (46:01):
You want to try that?

Speaker 5 (46:01):
Because it's okay, choice, okay.

Speaker 4 (46:05):
So in large letters on the top, it says the
Swastika written and issued. Wait it says written issued and
read by the Girls Club. On either side of that,
we have two swastikas, and then below that a glamorous
girl scout girl club member who's wearing kind of like
a big bow in her hair, and she's got like

(46:26):
a handkerchief tied around her neck and she's just kind
of looking up in a glamorous look.

Speaker 5 (46:33):
And then it says.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
Cheru blike at the same time cheru blike, yeah, definitely
chero blike. But there's like a little undercurrent of like
something controversial about her.

Speaker 5 (46:43):
I don't know what it is.

Speaker 4 (46:44):
But then it says junior, seniors, everybody. And then it
gets really small and I carry it.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
Here's one more month, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:55):
Winning a prize in the big.

Speaker 1 (46:59):
Big second contest. I just love that. What every girl
wants a swastika of her own. Oh incredible, here's ads.
We're back. So by the time the Girls Club adopts

(47:20):
the swastika, it is already in use by certain elements
of the European occultist far right. Now. One of the
most influential figures here is a guy named Jorg Lonz
von Liebenfels or Adolph Lands is his real name. He
calls himself again, whenever you see one of these guys
who doesn't, who decides to pick up a name with
a Vaughan in it, they're trying to pretend to be

(47:42):
German nobility. So Adolph Lands is a Christian gnostic and
a former member of the Cistercian Order, or at least
an initiate into the Cistercian Order. I don't think he've
everfunk comes a full member. In eighteen ninety two, he
experienced a vision that caused convinced him that there was
a coming war between Arian and the lesser races of
the world. So he decides to dedicate his life to

(48:04):
preparing the ground for such a conflict. In eighteen ninety nine,
he founds what he calls the Order of the New Templar.
It focuses on advocating for racial purity and controlled breeding.
It also pushed what Lands calls an aero Christian doctrine,
which is in many ways a precursor for Nazism. Now.

(48:24):
Lands is very much a medievalist, and he is obsessed
with a somewhat historically questionable view that the Templars of
the Crusades had been fighting a secret war to wipe
out evil rather than they were operating like a bank
basically right, Like that's you know. So he decides he's
going to revive the order and he runs it from
Cassel Werfenstein. Yes, if you're a fan of those video games,

(48:47):
this is the actual origin of all of that shit. Yeah,
castl Werfenstein. So he starts carrying out ceremonies, occult ceremonies
there dedicated to the Aryans and sort of this like
coming war with the lesser races, and all of those
ceremonies are conducted under a new flag that he has
designed for himself, a red swastika and blue lilies on

(49:09):
a golden background. In nineteen oh five, he founds a
magazine Ostara, which is the most racist magazine that you
can imagine, more or less, and the cover of it,
the logo is a drawing of a knight wearing robes
that look a little clanny, and they're bedecked with swastikas. Right,
just this fucking night couldn't have more swastikas on sass.

(49:31):
So midway through World War One and like nineteen sixteen,
Lonz creates the term ariosophie to describe his new brand
of Aryan race science. Among other things, he advocates for
keeping brood mothers in convents for Aryan stud males to impregnate.
This is more or less the policy that Heinrich Himmler,

(49:52):
who also later will have a castle where he carries
out occult rituals, would attempt to follow. For the SS right,
they have a Libans born program that is very much
based on lands as ideas I actually read, you might
find this fascinating, Jelsey. I read a book recently. It's
called Swastikan Night, and it is a kind of dystopian

(50:12):
future fiction about a future world where like the Nazis
and Japan kind of split the world between them, and
seven hundred years after the victory of the Nazis, they
have basically wiped out the concept of women as like
a part of the human race. They're only used for breeding.
The Nazis are all kind of like, it's kind of

(50:35):
this almost Greek thing where they like, you know, have
a lot of these sort of like relationships with each
other that are It's an odd book. What's interesting about
it is that it was written in nineteen thirty seven
by an early feminist, So it's this like treatise because
her attitude is that the root of like Nazi authoritarianism
was the domination of women by men, and so it's

(50:56):
this her kind of meditation on what society men would
build if they could eliminate women effectively. It's a really
interesting book. It is probably the book that inspires nineteen
eighty four or Well takes a number of structural elements
from the book fascinating. The Feminist Press has a version
of it that they put out with a really good forward.

(51:18):
I devoured it in about an afternoon. Really interesting book,
Swastika Night. But it's very much based because again, nineteen
thirty seven is when this book gets written. One of
the interesting things about it is that, like in Envisioning
a Nazi Future, there's no reference to Himmler or the
SS because in thirty seven he wasn't really as big
of a figure in the Nazis that like somebody in

(51:39):
the UK or whatever would have known about. But the
author of that book is really familiar with Lands and
with a lot of the stuff Lands is saying about
his desire to sort of take women out of society
and make them into brood mares for the anyway, interesting stuff.
Check out swastika Knight. If you're interested in that kind
of thing, it's a fascinating piece of history. So LANs

(52:03):
has his castle, he's doing his proto Nazi rituals, right.
He's got this magazine Ostara, and he's got this swastika
flag that's becoming increasingly influential on like this chunk of
the occult anti Semitic rite. And one of the things
we know is that Hitler is a frequent enough reader
of Ostara that kind of during his rise to power,
he visits Lands to get copies of issues of the

(52:25):
magazine that he had been missing. Lanza's ideas and his
use of the swastika were hugely influential in the growing
far right, which is going to be supercharged when the
German army collapses in nineteen eighteen. Now, nineteen eighteen is
coincidentally the year the Girls Club stops using the swastika
for their magazine. Yeah, this might have had something to

(52:47):
do with the fact that after the Germany loses you
start seeing a lot more swastikas on a lot more
like murderous far right militias. Maybe the Girls Club didn't
want that press, you know that it might have been
a fall.

Speaker 4 (53:01):
And it's so interesting because like, I don't know, obviously,
there's a lot of misconceptions about Americans in the nineteen
thirties and what we thought about, you know, the white race,
and sure, and it was very much like our context
and our ideas were simultaneously inspiring the Nazis.

Speaker 5 (53:19):
We also have.

Speaker 4 (53:20):
This like huge rise of the KKK again, where the
KKK becomes like kind of heroic. It's a very strange
time in American history that I think we simplify because
it's like, oh, the United States versus the Nazis, and
we're some kind of anti fascist heroes when really we're
extremely fascist ourselves. And I don't know, it's interesting that

(53:42):
it went as long as it did. But I'm glad
the girls decided, you know, this isn't for us.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Yeah, the girls, though, mixed the right call here in
nineteen eighteen really really good time to stop using the swastika.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
I mean there were KKK beauty pageants not you know,
a decade or so before, so they could have gone either.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and like not to say that. Yeah. Anyway,
very very interesting period of time. And also the stuff
we're talking about with how the swastika becomes very wrapped
up in the minds of Americans with like Native Americans
is part of like has an impact on Hitler because
Hitler kind of idolizes Indigenous Americans at the same time

(54:21):
that he idolizes the US government's use of camps and
genocidal tactics. In order to take the content he's like,
it's confused. You can refer back to our Karl May
episodes for sort of more on that. But yeah. The
first use documented use by like a far right millet
militia in Germany using a swastika was in nineteen nineteen,

(54:45):
when a specific unit of Freikorps veterans who gunned down
socialists in the street, like have a bunch of swastikas
on their shit, Like that's the symbol that they fight under.
This is after the empire kind of collapses. The use
of swastika's buy the different right wing militant groups is
seen as a hopeful sign by the Aryan nerds and
anti Semitic wizards of the Tula Society, which strongly pushed

(55:08):
for the use of swastikas among the far right in
Weimar Germany. The Nazi Party is going to adopt the
symbol in nineteen twenty, and Hitler probably picks the swastika
because of Lonz's use of it in his flag, because
again Hitler's reading Ostara. But there's other stories you'll get
as to why Hitler picked it that are a little weirder.

(55:28):
One that you sometimes hear that's almost certainly not true,
almost like ninety nine percent definitely apocryphal, is that his
mom had a swastika on her headstone when she was buried,
and the symbols stuck in Hitler's mind ever since. People
were because it was kind of a good luck symbol.
There's definitely people that get like a swastika on their
gravestone back in the day. It's not like I don't

(55:48):
think it's impossible. But this is much less credible to
me than the explanation Stephen Heller gives in his book
and excerpts from Minkomf devoted to symbolism. He wrote in
a stupa defyingly formal prose, replete with euphemisms and epithets
that enforced his own self styled heroism, yet convincingly argued
the need for a powerful symbol, emblem, logo for his

(56:10):
nascent party. The lack of such symbols, he wrote, had
not only disadvantages for the moment, but it was unbearable
for the future. The disadvantages were above all, that the
party members lacked every outward sign of their belonging together.
Well for the future, it was unbearable to lack an
emblem that had the character of a symbol of the
movement and that as such could be put up in
opposition to the international the Communists. Hitler called the first

(56:32):
time he witnessed a large Communist Party rally, where he
saw a sea of red on flags, scarves, and flowers
among the one hundred thousand in attendants, I personally could
feel and understand how easily a man of the people
succumbs to the suggestive charms of such a grand and
massive spectacle. And so that's probably like that's realistically, he's
looking for a powerful symbol that can be like that

(56:52):
red flag that people can like you nine under that's
already iconic, and the swastikas everywhere. People are comfortable with it.
People like it. It's a striking symbol. The fact that
it's been around for so long is proof that it's
just some people are just drawn to swastika's right even today,
Like the best if you're writing a fucking book that
it involves in any way the fucking Nazis, right, best

(57:14):
thing you do is stick a swastika on the cover
because motherfucker's walking past and the book stopped. Like they'll
stop at a swastika to look at it, right.

Speaker 5 (57:20):
And they already have good feelings about it at that point.

Speaker 4 (57:23):
Yeah, right, it's like, oh, it's a swastika, yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Yeah, the the pschon, Yeah, it's it's something else.

Speaker 5 (57:31):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
So the specific version of the swastika that Hitler adopts
is called the hogen Kroi, which is just a German
term for hooked cross. Right, uh, it faces the opposite direction.
Hitler's gonna like flip the swastika around from its most
common use, but others you can find swastikas that are
flipped around prior to the Nazis. He's not like the

(57:52):
only person who ever does this. Where Hitler is unique
is that he tilts his hogen Kroi forty five degrees
from horizont And this is the way you're going to
see it in like the nineteen thirty five national flag
of Germany, his swastika is usually tilted right. There is
one more point that kind of argues for the fact
that Lansa's swastika flag in his magazine Ostara was the

(58:13):
influence for Hitler, which is that when the Nazis come
to power, Hitler bans Lonzo's writing, and Heller suggests, quote,
this is perhaps a way for Hitler to disavow the
fact that he was influenced by anything other than his
own immaculate conceptions.

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Uh huh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
Classic Hitler, Yeah, classic Hitler.

Speaker 4 (58:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
While the symbol at this point started to accrue a
distinctly more toxic sheene for Europeans Americans than is now,
didn't give two tugs of a dead rat's tail what
those creepy foreigners were during over in Europe. The nineteen
twenties are a banner age for utterly meaningless uses of
the swastika in any fucking product imaginable. And I think

(58:58):
my favorite in retrospac funny swastika themed product is probably
this tube of fresh antiseptic deodorant cream, which also heals
and suits tender sore feet for just ten cents, little,
just a little, swastika underneath the picture of this lady
who smells nice thanks to the cream.

Speaker 5 (59:15):
Yeah, it's sort of a creepy man, right, he's.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Doing it, Joe Biden, Right, he's sniffing her hair, you know,
because he likes this. He likes Nazi swastika cream so much.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
You can't see his hands in the photo, but you
know they're not supposed to be a delightful antiseptic deyodor cream.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Yeah, no, no.

Speaker 4 (59:39):
And there was just so much meaningless shit being pumped
out in the twenties anyway, because it was like we
had so much surplus money after the First war. It's
just a big party, and you know, let's let's party
with the products we make too, apparently.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
Yeah, And it's I think you have to a lot
of times when people are talking about why the Nazis
adopted swastika, they focus a lot like we have on
lawns and these kind of occult use of it, this
sort of attitude of its involvement with the arians, And
that's obviously an important part of the story, but it's
equally important that the swastika is a benign symbol. It's
such a benign and safe symbol that you could use

(01:00:14):
it to self fucking deodorant, right. Yeah, that is a
big part of why it's a useful symbol for the Nazis.
And this kind of comes back to We talk a
lot on the show when we're talking about fascism. We
talk a lot about Umberdo Echoes definition of fascism. And
one of the things Echo notes that is among his
kind of most salient observations is that fascism. One an

(01:00:38):
inherent characteristic of fascism is that it is syncretic. And
here's how he describes what that means. Syncretism is not only,
as the dictionary says, the combination of different forms of
belief or practice, such a combination which tall must tolerate contradictions.
Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom,
and wherever they seem to say different or incompatible things,

(01:00:58):
it is only because all are eluding allegorically to the
same primeval truth. If you browse in the shelves that
in American bookstores are labeled New Age, you can find
there even Saint Augustine, who as far as I know,
was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and stone Hinge,
that is a symbol of her fascism. And one of
the things that Echoes talking about here is this use

(01:01:20):
of pieces of history, of iconography, of mythology that you
can adopt into a fascist understanding of the world, and
that acts as kind of a llure to different groups
of people. Right, you know, you're into stone Hinge, you're
into Aliens, you're into you know, Saint Augustine. If you
can find a way to kind of like it's this

(01:01:40):
thing QAnon does, right. It absorbs everything sort of into
itself as part of its ability to spread, and.

Speaker 5 (01:01:47):
It's creating a full mythology.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
Yeah right, it's like creating that was a big part
I think of Nazi Germany was taking the Old Germany
and bringing it back.

Speaker 5 (01:01:56):
But it wasn't factually the Old Germany.

Speaker 4 (01:01:58):
And it's just pieces of different folk that made it
sound badass and heroic and strong. And that's how powerful
folklore can be, especially if you take bits and pieces
of it and build your own shit.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
It's like it doesn't have to it doesn't have to
be logical, it doesn't have to all fit. You can
take pieces of Norse mythology and Odin worship and you
can subsume that into your fashions at the same time
as you're taking bits of Catholicism, right, Yeah, And likewise
kind of you take the swastika, the symbol that we've
all always used, that's been everywhere, and you make it

(01:02:33):
yours and the kind of good will. And you know
nowadays obviously that there's no more good will for the swastika.
That's just sort of inherent in most cultures at least,
But back in the day, basically everyone felt fine with
the swastika. So you make that your thing, and it's
one of the things that can help draw It makes
you seem come like less scary, it makes you seem

(01:02:55):
more approachable. It's just one of the things that helps
build the appeal of this movement. And yeah, this is
good stuff, just good, good shit. So beyond this. By
the time the Nazis draw close to power in the
early thirties, they had been marching and bleeding and fighting

(01:03:15):
under the swastika for a full decade. Some four hundred
of them have died in sundry assassinations and street fights
in the Weimar era, and these men, along with the
dead of the beer Hall Putsch, had become sainted by
the party and the bloody flags they fought under, bloody
swastika flags started to gain a religious significance to the
devoted in Germany. George L. Moss, one of the twentieth

(01:03:37):
centuries historians of Nazi Germany and also a survivor of
the Holocaust himself, later observed it was the strength of
fascism in general that it realized as other political movements
and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century, Europe
had entered a visual age, the age of political symbols
such as the national flag or national anthem, which as
instruments of mass politics, in the end proved more effective

(01:04:00):
than any didactic speeches. And that's where we're going to
end today.

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
Wow, I am so I'm just so impressed and intrigued
by this research. And yeah, I just I had no idea,
and I honestly feel a little shocked at myself for
not knowing more about this.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
I mean I did most.

Speaker 5 (01:04:23):
How I not know about that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
When I when I read that bit about like, well
maybe it's from like the fucking the way a cross
section of a fucking mammoth, you know, tusk looks, I
had to like sit back and go shit, Huh. That
actually makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
Yeah, And I just love the idea that symbols simultaneously
appear in different cultures like that. I mean, and I
think there are these explanations that we can have, but
there's also something possibly built into our DNA that maybe
we'll never understand about why we're attracted to certain symbols biologically.
Maybe they represent something that we're recognized on an unconscious level.

Speaker 1 (01:05:02):
But yeah, it's just like the use of red is
an effective color to use for a lot of different
things because it gets our attention in the same way
that like I have a little feeder from my chickens
where they like there's little red nubs because chickens just
pecket shit that's red because like blood is red. It's
the same reason why like if one of them gets injured,
the other others will like start eating it, right they

(01:05:22):
see they see red and they go after it. Uh.
And you know, we don't quite do that, otherwise hospitals
would be much scarier places. But we do react a
certain way when we see that color, and it's effective
for doing certain.

Speaker 4 (01:05:36):
And you know what else, yellow is the most effective color,
and that is why buses are painted yellow because our
eye perceives it, you know, point zero zero and whatever
percent faster than any other color, you know. And that's
so that's always happening on levels that we don't recognize
or understand. But uh, we're always reacting to the world.
And I think about that all the time. How we're
reacting to the world. Uh, on an unconscious is biological,

(01:06:01):
animalistic level, And there seems to be I don't know,
there's something about the swastika that feels like a collective
consciousness type of symbol.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
Yeah, I think there's definitely like that.

Speaker 4 (01:06:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Again, as you said, that's kind of like a young
and sort of attitude towards it. I mean, we do
have this, and who knows how much of that is
like because we you and I at a certain level,
I can read this history. Neither of us can see
the swastika or think about it without thinking about the Nazis.
It is impossible for a modern person, at least in
our culture, less the case maybe you go over in

(01:06:34):
India and something where someone's first experience with the symbol
is going to be wildly different. But you and I
cannot see a swastika even knowing intellectually this stuff and
not see it as that right even you know, yeah, exactly,
that's just the way it is. But you know what
I can see and view objectively is your excellent podcast,

(01:06:58):
American Hysteria. Well I can't see it, but I can
listen to it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
Yes, do you have?

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):
Everyone can Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
Yeah, you want to do your plugs?

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (01:07:07):
Sure, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:07:09):
As you mentioned, we do a show about the fantastical
thinking of American culture and how that's affected everything from
you know, even sometimes before colonization, but America as we
know it breaking down its urban legends, moral panics, conspiracy theories,
craze as, hoaxes, everything. Anytime that something weird happened in America,
we're on it and try to explain that thing through

(01:07:32):
history and how it changes through the decades and give
context in that way. Yeah, and you can get it
anywhere that you find your podcast. We're on Instagram at
American Hysteria Podcast. And I hope you guys come listen.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
Hell yeah, hell yeah, all right, everybody, this has been
behind the bastards. I have a novel. It's called After
the Revolution. You type that title into anything where you
buy a book from It doesn't matter where or scream
it into the face of the manager of your favorite
or least favorite bookstore.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
I thought you, for some reason, you were going to
say Applebee's Scream scream.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
An applebe the Applebee's manager with what's going to happen
to him? After the revolution. Famously, Mark said, the two
classes in society are Applebee's managers and everyone else. And
one day we will liberate ourselves. My brothers, sisters can't.

Speaker 5 (01:08:23):
Wait to get that bumpersticker.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Yeah, and that's the episode.

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.