Why wear the Nazi swastika?

Why wear that symbol?

 

People who know me know that I like shirts that have superheroes on them. I like the imagery and iconography of superheroes, but I also believe in the empowerment that can be found in superhero narratives.

Basically, they are cool, and they allow me to express what I like and what I believe in. I think a lot of people treat their clothes and fashion that way. These are expressions of you, they say a lot about who you are and how you want people to think of you. 

 

So I was appalled last week when I saw a group of high school kids walking around in wifebeaters that had swastikas on them. I live near a public high school, and you can tell the students from the time they go home and the color of their uniform pants. They had shed their polos and were proudly sporting the symbol of Nazi fascism.

 

The Nazi swastika in itself is the perversion of the original symbol. That original symbol was meant to signify good or auspiciousness. Of course, once that symbol was appropriated by the Nazi party, it came to embody quite the opposite. 

 

I mean, really, how easy is it to draw a line between the good guys and the bad guys than the fascists who were committing genocide in WWII and everybody else? And so pretty much anytime that we see this, we are likely to think of the kinds of atrocities that were committed in support of the beliefs it represented. 

 

So why would a bunch of dark Pinoy, public school kids want to be wearing a symbol that essentially advocates the inferiority (and elimination) of any ethnicity outside of the Aryan race, including dark Pinoy public school kids? Do they have an awareness of the symbol and its implications? Or do they just think that it’s badass? 

 

I think that obviously part of this would be the rebelliousness of adolescence and the desire to make a statement by wearing things that people would consider offensive. I have to laugh because I fell into this trap, wearing inverted crosses and razorblades and other stupid stuff as part of my own adolescent rebellion. 

 

I was wearing supposed devil-themed attire (it sounds so stupid now that it is in prose form and I am so many years past it), I was having an anarchy sign shaved into my undercut, and all that stuff. When in all truth, I failed to understand anarchy beyond the simplest expression of no rules. Beyond that, I failed to understand what that symbol really meant or said. I just thought it looked cool and was part of what I wanted people to think. 

 

Now, the question is: what do these kids think that people think when they see the swastikas? I don’t think that there is an appropriate time to wear it, even ironically. [http://www.sovereignlife.com/essays/swastikas-hypocrisy.html] And I think that it’s clear to these kids that they shouldn’t be wearing it. So they have made a conscious decision to wear the symbol. 

 

Is it meant to offend people? Oh definitely it is. But then a lot of shirts are offensive. This elevates that offense to another level. 

 

We have to wonder if they are wearing this symbol with full awareness of the implications of the symbol, or if there is ignorance behind it. Has the school system failed them? Should they have a sense of world history that instills in them the kind of sensitivity to ensure they wouldn’t wear a swastika out on the street? One would hope. 

 

But is it merely the school system? Or is this indicative of a kind of larger willingness to appropriate symbols that we aren’t entirely sure of or don’t totally understand. I understand these kids trying to find something to represent their rebellion. What I don’t get is that they didn’t try to understand what it means. They just decided that: heck, this looks cool!

 

I wonder if this can be translated to think about the kinds of symbols and appropriations that we make in popular culture or everyday life. 

 

Do people take things without thinking about what they could really mean? For example, the things we see on television like “That’s My Tomboy”; what is the meaning behind that kind of segment? What is this saying about gender? Is it an acceptance of gender? Or is it an objectification and fetishization? And how many people in the audience are bothering to ask that question? 

 

When a guy is in the mall walking around with his girlfriend, and he is wearing a shirt that says, “The DaVirginizer,” does that mean that they are both in agreement to broadcast that he is a devirginizer of women, or at the very least a devirginizer of said girlfriend who is on his arm as he is wearing the shirt? Or am I taking that too seriously? 

 

Shouldn’t we take the symbols or the statements that we wear seriously? We are, in that kind of microinteraction, communicating so much about ourselves and the way we view the world. 

 

I think we should be careful about what we communicate. We are able to create meaning through symbol and context, and what is being communicated by the swastika, or statement T-shirts, anything we decide to use as ways to express ourselves. 

 

Everywhere you look, a symbol is being used to convey meaning. We have to take care with the symbols we choose and the meanings we create. — KDM, GMA News

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Carljoe Javier is a professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, and the author of the non-fiction book “The Kobayashi Maru of Love.”