Finland's air force quietly drops swastika symbol
It was long a rather surprising choice of imagery for Finland's Air Force Command - a swastika and pair of wings. The symbol will always be intrinsically linked with Nazi Germany and its crimes, even though its roots go back many thousands of years. But now it has been confirmed the Air Force Command has quietly stopped using this unit emblem.
Finland's air force has been using a swastika ever since it was founded in 1918, shortly after the country became an independent nation and long before Nazism devastated Europe. Until 1945 its planes bore a blue swastika on a white background - and this was not intended to show allegiance to Nazi Germany, though the two nations were aligned.
While the symbol was left off planes after World War Two, a swastika still featured in some Air Force unit emblems, unit flags and decorations - including on uniforms, a spokesperson for the Finnish air force told the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
= new reply since forum marked as read
The swastika is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when the right-facing tilted form became a feature of Nazi symbolism.
The swastika is a Navajo symbol for good luck, also translated to "whirling log". The symbol was used on state road signs in Arizona.
The Arizona roads site explains: This was actually taken from a Native American design. It was removed in the 1940s, after it became associated with the Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
No symbol is "intrinsically" linked.
The very notion of a symbol is that it's linked in the minds of people. Like words are symbols and have no fixed meaning outside of a community of speakers.
A lot of people like to try to manipulate symbols--which really means manipulating the population--for their own ends. But a symbol requires interpreters to assign them meaning; and if something is being used as a symbol, it requires a person to intend the symbol.
If I write "CP" in a Russian historical context, do I mean "communist party" or "social revolutionary" (the Russian Cyrillic abbreviation of which was CP, pronounced "esser"
. Making the interpreter the final determiner of what I mean and punishing me for their stupidity is both unjust and standard these days. But it's easy--you know what must be intended as evidence of the other person's "intrinsic" hatefulness so judgment is simplistic. Doesn't take much thinking before you're out destroying the person and moving on, like locusts.
