Behind the Bastards - Part One: Behind the Swastika

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

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)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. In a killer, we were still on the loose. In the 1980s, we were in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere. Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine.

Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast Sacred Scandal returns for a second season to investigate a led sexual abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars. I remember as a little girl being groomed

to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the apostle. Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is I.C. Over the years, I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. your podcasts. I know them in action in my life. Listen to I.C. Daily Game every weekday on the I.H.H. Radio app Apple Podcasts

or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me. What? Trafficking button, no wait, Sophie. We can't open like that, can we? No, that's not it. What are you even attempting to do right now? Well, you know how like back in the 60s, you'd be like, you know how like back in like the 60s, you'd be like,

if you were like getting up on the stage, you're gonna be like a beat poet or something, you'd 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. That'll be a successful. That's a terrible introduction.

It's a terrible introduction. I mean, I like, conceptually, I like that vibe for you, but yeah, but the execution was not there. I'm sorry. Cause you and I are both big, big and debit poetry. That is things that people know about us. That is what it is. Uh huh, yeah.

Classic, yeah, big, big beep. Anyway, this is behind the bastards. Podcast about the worst people in all of history. One of whom is me for today. 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 thinking 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? I'm doing great. Thank you so much to you both for having me. I'm really excited. That you so much to you both for having me. I'm really excited.

That was a really professional introduction. I just want to say when I met Chelsea, I met Chelsea in person. It was like a week before Lauren. How do we describe Lauren? Lauren, yeah. Lauren is somebody who does a lot of like PR stuff for us. Yeah, Lauren is like the patron saint of podcast. Yeah. Lauren's like, yeah, Lauren's Lauren's reached out. 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 Arbitral Friend's Hermarchal. And I met Chelsea, like several Jello shots in. It was great. It was such a good time. It was a complete, like, happenstance. Not perfect. You just seen the Wicker Man, which Sarah's been obsessed with.

And we also watched it. Speaking of trafficking, yeah, I love the Wicker Man. Wicker Man was very cool. Wait, wait, which one? Nicholas Cage. No, the OG. OG, original. Okay, okay, good. Yeah. We're going to be very cool. Wait, wait, which one? Nicholas Cage. No, the OG. OGA original.

Okay, okay. Okay. I'm very good. I'm very good. We're the annoying, the cops are all there. They're actually both charming in their own ways. Really. There's, there's 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 wanna ask you a question that I ask all of my friends, all of my family members, kids at the playground near my house. How do you feel about swastikas? I feel bad about them.

Bad, bad about swastikas, okay. Generally, don't like seeing them. I don't like hearing about them being seen. Anti-Sewastica here. Have you ever in the world seen a swastica that was like definitely not a Nazi swastica? Hmm. Do you mean sort of perhaps like an attempt to shock by a teenager? No, I mean, that is also a thing that happens.

Sure. But I mean, what do you know about the origins of the swastika? Pre, you know, Hitler, et cetera. That's gender. I know, I know sort of the cliche answer of that it was originally, I believe, an Indian symbol of something like Goodlock. Is that true? Was that right?

It is, it is a Hindu symbol. It's also a Buddhist symbol. Indian symbol of something like good luck? Is that true? Was that right? It is, it is a Hindu symbol. It's also a Buddhist symbol. It actually goes back much further than this. So 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 bastard.

So we're going behind the Nazis by talking about the origins of the swastika, as 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 swastika, that's like the Nazi thing, which causes problems for people, for whom it's like a religious symbol that goes back a long time.

So that's what we're gonna talk about this week, because there's a lot of history here that most people are unaware of. So yeah, well, you ready to learn all about swastikas? I have never been more ready in my life. That's good. I'm buckled in. It would be probably kind of problematic if you had been. That's good. I'm buckled. It would be probably kind of problematic if you had been. Just share it at the bit and learn about swastika. I was. That's why I read a book. You know, I do read books about World War II a lot. Yeah, yeah. I do like this 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. All right. Well, let's let's go back in time. Everyone can imagine your particular favorite time machine noise,

and we're going back way back to the mid-1930s. It's a rough period for olhomo sapiens. Hitler has just risen to power in Germany. He started the process of crushing his enemies, which obviously includes everyone in the country who has of Jewish ancestry. He introduces the Nuremberg laws, I think 1935, which bring international attention to a growing stream of outrageous 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 Emanuel Synagogue, watch in stultified horror as Hitler's bigotry empowers anti-Semites across the globe. Like many DSFers Jews, they raise money to help their relatives immigrate from Europe.

They write furious letters to newspapers, ignoring Hitler's crimes. And they worry more than anything else, right? Which is understandable. How much further will this hate spread? Are they safe even in New Jersey? And 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 to have that in your synagogue in the 1930s, and after a quick discussion, they decide to pave the swastikas out. Fast forward about 100 years, you know, you have World War Two, all that horrible stuff happens. You know, the rebuilding process occurs afterwards. Life goes on. And on December 5, 2021, for the first time in like 90 years or so, the Aedath Emanuel 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 swastikas that had been placed inside the vestivule of the synagogue long before the rise of Hitler and the swastika added there in the 2020s 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, the Confederate flag, for example, the Klanzmann'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 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 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. 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 the Indus Valley, right? So in 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 this old, the dates are kind of fluid.

But best sort of assumption is that around the fourth millennium BCE is when the swastika first shows up in the end as Valley. So that's pretty old. I feel like this, I don't know, Chelsea, I feel like this is not something like, if you're hearing it's one of the oldest symbols ever created by human beings, was not something I knew. No, no, I did not expect that at all. I've been reading a lot of books lately about kind of the origins of the conception of God, which includes so much religious symbolism.

This feels right in my interest right now, and I'm so excited about this. We'll talk a little bit later about why, but there were starting kind of the 1800s, which is when scholarship around the swastika 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 see the sun, you draw a circle or whatever, but like the oldest complex shape, there's no way to prove that, right? That's an absolutely unproven, 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.

And 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 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 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 1908 at the Paleolithic settlement of Mazeen near the Russian border. On the torso of the bird is engraved an intricate meander pattern of joined up swastikas. It is the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world and has been radiocarbon dated to an astonishing 15,000 years ago. 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?. It was found with a bunch of dicks, right? Like it 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 15,000 years ago. So one way or the other, it has nothing to do with the, the present issues with the far right in that part of the world. Again, this is, it like predates the first city by like 5,000 years. And despite the shocking age of the Ukrainian swastikas, this does not mean that they originate, that the symbol itself was first used

near Kiev or 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 and kind of the 1800s, 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, right? 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, right? 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 ceded 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 explanation as to how came in 1965 from a paleontologist named Valentina Bibikova, who was looking at this Ukrainian piece of art with swastikas in it.

And she posited 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 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. Wow, that's so cool. That's so cool. Yeah, I had no idea about this, isn't it? No, I was thinking of like a collective consciousness. Like if we went a little bit far out until like a young Ian universe, like these some sort of primordial symbol being expressed

in different places, but what you said sounds a little bit more possible. A bunch of ladies and dudes fucking around with bones for a long time. And then being like this represents the bones, which represents the animal, which I want to eat. So, 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 bones were the original podcast. Oh, yeah. You know, it is no.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a fact. Yeah, this brings me to our sponsors for this week. Bone box. Just a lot of honestly, it's just a bunch of illegal ivory. You will get in a lot of trouble if that's catchy ordering. I believe the 20 bucks a month. The first Barbie was carved out of mammoth bone. Yeah, that's absolutely true.

We just did a whole episode on Barbie and yeah, by Greta Gerwig, she actually goes back about 15,000 years to people don't know this. She's actually a mortal. Yeah. Yeah. She continues to prove it. And for those keeping track, it did take us only 15 minutes to make a Barbie reference. You're welcome. That's right.

That's right. We know what the people want. The origin of all human culture. So yeah, I think that's really interesting, rather than kind of 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 world kind of arrive at the swastika independently.

One note were the example of the use of these symbols comes from the Akhan people of Ghana who used it in their gold weights at around 1400 AD. You can find some photos of these online and they look like Nazi gold, right? Like look at that. You would guess that's probably like some stolen Nazi gold, but these predate the Nazis by, you know, 500 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. Right. It does point to how potent the symbol remains as a symbol of evil too, just like because of, you know, demonazies. But yeah, so in 1894, 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, 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 and tribe to tribe and traveled intentionally with meaning and tact across cultures. There

is no way of proving this. And it seems like Wilson was, I, it's probably fair to say now, he was coming on 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 undocumented patterns of trade, really kind of the only way to just like, it's also been found as 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 15,000 years ago. From what we can tell, people, indigenous people in the Americas who we hear much longer than that, we're using swastikas 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, a dicey story. But we do know that swastikas were in use, and I'm going to stop calling

them swastika's in a second because the people of the Americas didn't call them that. But we're in use particularly in what is now the American 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, 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 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 got a heroic character who is forced on a dangerous journey,

he receives the aid of gods and spirits and he kind of learns mystic lessons along the way, right? And the 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 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, right? 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 kind of a problem. Were they telling a story with it? 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 know? I think 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 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 way it was. I don't want to do that. A culture that I's kind of the extent of, I don't wanna like get too deep into the way that it would not be that.

I know, I don't wanna be that. A culture that I, you know, is not, very far outside of my wildhouse, but it 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 wanna 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 symbol in Navajo textiles, Dennis J. Anger, Sites Thomas Wilson's research in the 1890s 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 and 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. That's obviously 1890s language here, but it does originate. You find it in a number of parts of North America. I believe there's evidence of it in South America.

But it's fucking North America. Yeah, Ohio and Tennessee. And Tennessee. It was a big brass swastika that was found like underground as part of an excavation. And 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 and 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 the swastika wouldn't. It's not more complex than a bow and arrow, for sure. But yeah, so I have a question really quick. So does that mean there was some sort of like ivory situation happening here? I'm not like very privy to early animals. You know, in the air. There are mammoths in the Americas.

Right. So it may have been that it may have just been somebody 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 made it like a spindle world. You know, I, who knows where it came like how it first got used because it's, it's earliest documented use kind of is outside of the, the whirling log use that the Navajo are using

in the, the southeast part of the continent, because we're talking about 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 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 1890s 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. It all starts with a, what I would call a stupid genius, a guy named Heinrich Schleeman. And Heinrich Schleeman 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 Schleeman's an interesting character. He's born December 26th, 1822, and a town that I'm not going to try to pronounce.

It's in Germany, one of those German towns with just a massive name. He's the fifth of nine children. 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 of the mid-delay 1800s when he's going to school and whatnot, the Trojan War is seen as probably an apocryphal story, time and kind of the mid-delay 1800s 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 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 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 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 Schleeman spent the next few years going through something of an Odyssey himself. He lost his job after he started coughing up blood randomly one day. This is the 1800s. Just happens. 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 doesn't die even though the boat he's on crashes in a storm. He survives and makes it to age 22 at 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, and by the time he's like 36 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, improving that it was real. And I know you're wondering, where do the swastikas come in? They're a they're a comment, don't worry. This is like such an interesting midlife crisis that's happening. I do feel like a lot of midlife crisis is start with, well I read the Odyssey, like I do feel like that is usually in the origin. No, the, you know, the, well, nowadays, I think the equivalent of that is reading American psycho for, for middle-aged businessmen. But back in the day, with the Odyssey, the American psycho of the old world. So great. Yeah, I, we all remember that moment where Odysseus is talking with the other Greeks about

his business cards. Yeah, I we all remember that moment where Odysseus is talking with the other Greeks about his business carts. So as I noted earlier, there was tremendous debate in the day as to whether or not any cities 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, uh, called, there was a part of, of Anatolia called the Trood 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 Iliad in the Odyssey, right? So in ancient Roman days, we're talking two thousand years ago, rich nerds are like traveling to the Tro ad 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. How about that? Yeah, yeah, that's the birth of nerd culture right there. Anyway, whatever.

There's no evidence again. There was not hard evidence that the city of Troy had been there. It's just the place people had gone to. Schlimen though was certain that it was real and certain that the Tro Adds 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. And I'm gonna quote now from- He's literally like that guy over there as a gnober. It happened. I was there. He's that guy. So did he show up with a shovel? Yeah, we're talking about a team.

Do we have a team? He shows up with boys, right? Like he hires boys to do the digging. That's what he did back then, hire bunch of boys. That's it. Yeah, everyone's talking today about how we've just developed a new semi conductor. We need to return to tradition, just boys and shovels.

You know, that's 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 Indiana Jones movies. So I'm not a real. I was like, I was like, what is what is in your brain right now that you're a brain dude? Oh, so he gets his boys and he, he shows up at the charoad. And I'm going to quote for what comes next from a write upup by archaeologists for the British Museum. Frank Calvert lived in the Trood and owned land next to the mound of his Sarlic. An amateur but skilled archaeologist, he was convinced that this would be a good place to dig.

So when Schleben visited in 1868 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 convinces Shuleyman 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 a great 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, if you're like historical landmarks just to see what's under there, they'd be like, well, no, you're not allowed to do that. But Shleeman is kind of just able to bribe his way into things. It's a little bit messier of a period of time. And 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 ruins and shit, a femura. 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 across pieces of pottery, old bits of buildings, but in Schleeman's

mind, Troy is this like wealthy city and everything's plated and 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 time, right? He was looking for Brad Pitt. He was looking for Brad Pitt in there. He is expecting something glorious and impressive. And obviously, again, this is kind of a logical because 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 did pass what they think of as the crap. They keep going deeper and they keep going deeper. And I'm going to quote from the Smithsonian magazine now. As after his first excavation season failed to yield promising results, Schleeman adopted

a new tactic instructing his team to dig an enormous 45 foot deep trench. His methods, a note Jill Rubikalba and Eric H. Klein and digging for Troy from Homer to his Sarlic were savage and brutal, even by the standards of the 19th century. The authors add he plowed through layers of soil and everything in them without proper record keeping, no mapping of fines, 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 some gold. That he decides must have belonged to the famous King Priyum. 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 Priyum. And he like he obliterates most of the actual traces of historic Troy because Shleeman is kind of a weeiboo, right? Like he's a homer weeiboo, right? Um, anyway, very funny story. How 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's 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, 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 1800s, think back to the episodes we've done on Helena Blavatsky and stuff, this is the origins of the stuff that's gonna become Nazi-Rafescience. People are already talking about Aryans. They're talking about this kind of mythical precursor civilization that they believe seeded high civilization around the world that presumably to a lot of Europeans is like white, right?

That's a big belief at the time. We know that 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, 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 he keeps doing archaeology around the world, often illegal archeology, generally bad archeology, but because a lot of people had not been digging in the places 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, like religious icons and like temples

and stuff. He decides that it's related to the Hebrew letter Tao, 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 he actually did it, but that it, there's a big gap between those two. Oh, where? Manson is reading this kind of stuff decades later, right?

Because it's still relevance 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 occult? Who's that? Our sponsors. Oh yeah. Easily. Easily. Of course. Yeah. In a way we're all in that cult already.

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We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again,

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So, Shleeman's findings of the swastika are read attentively by growing communities of Aryan nerds, these kind of proto-nazis. An anthropologist, Gwindolinolin Lake will later write, quote, When Heinrich Schleeman discovered swastika-like decorations on pottery fragments and all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as 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 hints served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan or rather non-German and German identity. So this is gonna take off particularly among the Germans, right, which are just starting to be a thing. You know, he's in Troy 1868,

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 whatever. What have been nice? What have been nice. So the growing swastika craze among European intellectual weirdos and Americans who were themselves weird fanboys of European and intellectual weirdos, leads us right back to the Navajo. Now up until the late 1800s, the swastika or the whirling log in this context was used only in religious ceremonies by at least by 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 Schleeman's work. And they start, they become aware of the fact that the, the whirling log is in use throughout the Southwest. Now, another thing that's happening at this time is that the, the quote unquote west, you know, in that sort of conception of like the, the wild west, whatever, which is obviously a flawed and inaccurate historical conception, but it is a popular conception in the 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 iconography, items that had been owned or made by Native Americans. And this is also a huge deal over in Europe, right? A lot of this is centered around these kind of noble, savage depictions of deal over in Europe, right? A lot of this is centered around these kind of noble, savage depictions of indigenous peoples and fiction, like the books of Carl May, which inspire Hitler to a significant degree. And to Hubble and more, the fact that all this is happening at the same time represents

a clear opportunity for profit, right? Oh, and also that's when the Wild West shows are happening, right? Exactly, yes, yes. Yes, Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows are happening. Exactly, yes, yes. Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows. Yeah, so all of this is kind of happening at the same time. And Hublin' Moore noticed this, they want to take advantage in cell art that's being made 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 Counter-Fitters of Bosque Rdondo, 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. And when Hubble and more see that the swastika is, you know, or in this case, the, uh, the whirling log is a simple and you see, 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, that you're putting out because that shit will sell. People love the, like white people love swastikas right now. You gotta start making this on stuff, right? And so yeah, and again, a lot of the stuff that's being 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 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 white people want to buy when they're buying this stuff. Yeah. No idea. Yeah, no idea. Client 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 St. Louis Exposition in 1904. The item was years, made years earlier, probably

in the late 1800s, 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 that it could be sold at this big expo where there's a ton of tourists, right? Presumably Europeans were 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 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, right? So these two guys that I was talking about start a commercial spoon company, manufacturing quote unquote Navajo spoons as momentos 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 1906, Moore starts offering swastika spoons in his catalog. And by the time the spoon craze

dies out in around 1915, as Klein 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, uh, yeah, that's so that's that's kind of how the swastika becomes a big popular thing in the Americas as like an actual Chachki, 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 Shleeman see this kind of craze over Native American products and are like well Let's just fucking take this shit and sell it at world's fairs and stuff. Let's capitalize on this baby.

You know, that's what we fucking do. And so it sounds like Americans were already kind of soaked in this symbol. Yes. Yes. Everywhere like a W. A. W. J. D. Braceletters. 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 swastika because swastika because that is what Americans are calling it. And they're specifically thinking about the quote unquote Aryan swastikas that Schlieben has found. Right. Okay. Okay. So in Europe, obviously the anti-Semitic right, 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 1900s, 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 and the early 1900s 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 IST. That's how they use the swastika in this period of time. Wow. And again, some Americans, particularly in the cities,

would be familiar with it as an Aryan symbol. Many of them would have seen it in purported Indian artwork, you know, spoons and the like. But they also wouldn't have looked as scants at seeing a swastika printed on the label of a cigar, which happened regularly. Or on a color-fer a ad for Coca-Cola. They use the swastika freely in both print ads and decorative chotch geese.

Wow. 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, my advertising bottles for just five cents. And Sophie's going to show you this, this, this Coca-Cola sauce. Sorry, I like it.

I can't speak. What? It's a bottle opener, too. Yeah. It's got a little opener. It's got a little opener. Hook on there to own bottles. 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.

If this wasn't acquitted to Naziism, what a very cool looking thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, it's hard to imagine if the Nazis hadn't come along and used it. But like like there's an alternate reality in which there's just swastikas all over the place. People are like fucking Jim Brose are getting tattooed with them and not as a Nazi. Yeah. This does explain the ending of madmen like a lot. Yeah.

So Karlsberg used it on their beer bottles and the Boy Scouts take it up as one of their symptoms. 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. Quote, the Boy Scouts established an order of the white swastika in Portsmouth, Ohio, Camp Russell, New York, and St. Joseph, Missouri over the course of 12 weekends, Scouts completed 12 different skills. Boys who fulfilled their tasks received a white swastika badge.

completed 12 different skills. Boys who fulfilled their tasks received a white swastika badge. I'm going to guess the value of that dropped real precipitously in the mid 30s. Wow. Wow. The Girls Club of America also took up the symbol and they named their popular magazine, the swastika. That was the Girls's club's official magazine from 1914 to 1918. Every girl's club member would receive a colorful magazine studded with the future symbol of the third rike. Members would save for weeks in order to be able to afford the club's most coveted piece of merch. A diamond covered swastika pin. One ad cheerfully proclaims what every girl wants her own swastika.

Absolutely, these are not fascists. There's nothing because America can we just try this thing that you're showing us Robert? Chelsea, do you want to take that off? Yeah, you want to try that because it's okay. It's a choice. Okay. So in large letters on the top, it says the swastika, written and issued, wait, it says written issued in red 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 a hanker chief tied around her neck and she's just kind of looking up in a glamorous look. And then it says, Cheerob like at the same time. Cheerob like.

Yeah, definitely. Cheerob like, but there's like a little undercurrent of like something controversial about her. I don't know what it is. But then it says, Junior seniors, everybody, and then gets really small and I carry. Here's one more month. Yeah, super fun. Winning a prize in the big contest.

The big swastika contest. Oh my goodness. I just love that. Whatever a girl wants, a swastika of her own. Oh my gosh. Incredible. Here's ads. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022,

is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community,

that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States, until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him, the Apostle. Their leader was arrested, and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts.

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We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy.

Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is King Slime, the prosecution of Young Thug and YSL. In May of 2022, the arrest of young thugs sent shockwaves through the hip hop world in the city of Atlanta. Over the past decade, Jeffrey Williams, the rapper Young Thug, has become an internationally famous rap star. But police alleged that over those same 10 years, Williams was building a criminal enterprise

of violent Atlanta street gang accused of committing a slew of crimes, including murder. All they say at Williams be haste. He's the one that's keen slime. I'm Christina Lee, a music journalist who has covered Atlanta's hip-hop scene for over a decade. And I'm George Cheating, a crime and politics reporter based in Atlanta, and will uncover secrets

about the people at the center of this case. All of this before a single juror has been selected. Listen to King Slime on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So by the time the Girls Club adopts 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 Jor Lanz von Liebenfelds, or Adolf Lanz, is his real name, he calls himself again.

Whenever you see one of these guys who decides to pick up a name with a von in it, they're trying to pretend to be German nobility. So Adolf Lanz is a Christian nostick and a former member of the Susturgeon Order, or at least an initiate into the Susturgeon Order. I'm more or less an initiate into the Susturian Order. I don't think I've ever been a full member. In 1892, he experienced a vision that caused convinced him that there was a coming war between

Aryans and the lesser races of the world. So he decides to dedicate his life to preparing the ground for such a conflict. In 1899, he found what he calls the Order of the New Templar. It focuses on advocating for racial purity and control breeding. It also pushed what Lance calls an Aereo-Christian doctrine, which is in many ways a precursor for Nazism. Now Lance 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 it, you know. So he decides he's going to revive the order and he runs it from Castle Wurfenstein. Yes, if you're a fan of those video games, this is the actual origin of all of that shit. Yeah, Castle Wurfing style. So he starts carrying out ceremonies, a cult ceremonies there dedicated to the 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 a golden background. a red swastika and blue lilies on a golden background. In 1905 he founds a magazine, Ostarra, 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 night wearing robes that look a little clanny, and they're bedecked with swastikas, right? Just this fucking night couldn't have more swastikas on us. So Midway through World War One and like 1916, Lons creates the term erasofi 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, who also later will have a castle where he carries out a cult rituals would attempt to follow for the SS, right? They have a Leibensborne program that is very much based on lands as ideas. I actually read, you might find this fascinating, Josie, I read a book recently.

It's called Swastika Knight, and it is a kind of dystopian future fiction about a future world where like the Nazis and and Japan kind of split the world between them and 700 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 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 1937 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 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 1984 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. I devoured it in about an afternoon, really interesting book, Swastika Knight, but it's very much based because again, 1937 is when this book gets written.

One of the interesting things about it is that like in envisioning an Nazi future, there's no reference to him or the SS because in 37 he wasn't really as big of a figure in the Nazis that like somebody in, you know, the UK or whatever would have known about. But the author of that book is really familiar with Lans and with a lot of the stuff Lans is saying about his desire to sort of take women out of society and make them into brewed mayors 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, Lanns has his castle, he's doing his proto-Nazi rituals, right? He's got this magazine, Ostarra, and he's got the Swastika flag that's becoming increasingly influential unlike this chunk of the occult anti-Semitic right. And one of the things we know is that Hitler is a frequent enough reader of Ostarra that kind of during his rise to power he visits lands to get copies of issues of the magazine

that he had been missing. Lands' 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 1918. Now, 1918 is coincidentally, the year the Girls Club stops using the Swastika for their magazine. Yeah, this might have had something to do with the fact that after the Germany loses, you start seeing a lot more swastikas and a lot more like murderous far right militias. Maybe the girls plugged in

with that press, you know? That might have been a factor. Well, and it's so interesting because like, I don't know, obviously there's a lot of misconceptions about Americans in the 1930s and what we thought about, you know, the white race. And it was very much like our context and our ideas were simultaneously inspiring the Nazis. We also have this like huge rise of the KKK again, where the KKK becomes like kind of heroic. It's 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 works dream-ly fascist ourselves. And I don't know, it's interesting that it went as long as it did,

but I'm glad the girls decided, you know, this isn't for us. Yeah, the girls come makes the right call here in 1918. Really, really good time to stop using the swastika. I mean, they're like KKK beauty pageants, not, you know, decade or so before. So they could have gone either way. 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 that he idolizes the US government's like use of camps and genocidal tactics in order to take the content. He's like, it's confused. You can refer back to our Carl May episodes for sort of more on that. But yeah, the first use documented use by like a far right militia in Germany using a swastika was in 1919 when a specific unit of Freikor 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 swastikas by these 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 for the use of swastikas among the far right in Fimar Germany. The Nazi Party is going to adopt the symbol in 1920, and Hitler probably picks the swastika because of Lanz's use of it in his flag, because again, Hitler's reading Ostarra, but there's

other stories you'll get as to why Hitler picked it that are a little weirder, one that you sometimes hear that's almost certainly not true. Almost like 99% definitely apocryphal is that his mom had a swastika on her headstone when she was buried and the symbol stuck in Hitler's mind ever since. People were, 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 think it's impossible, but this is much less credible to me than the explanation Stephen Heller gives in his book. In excerpts from Mein Kampf devoted to symbolism, he wrote in a stupifiingly formal prose replete with euphemisms and epithets that reinforced his own self-styled heroism,

yet convincingly argued the need for a powerful symbol emblem logo for his 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, while for the future it was unbearable to lack a symbol 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 time he witnessed a large communist party rally,

where he saw a sea of red on flags, garves and flowers among the 100,000 in attendance. 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 red flag that people can like You 900 that's already iconic and the swastika is 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 Yeah, even today like the best if you're right writing a fucking book that it involves in any way, the fucking Nazis, right? Best thing you do, stick a swastika on the cover because

motherfuckers walking past and the bookstops, like they'll stop at a swastika, look at it, right? And they already have good feelings about it at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? It's like, oh, it's a swastika. Yeah. Yeah, this I can, this I can, yeah, it's something else. How? So, the specific version of the swastika that Hitler adopts is called the Hacconcroy, which is just a German term for hooked cross, right? It faces the opposite direction. Hitler's going to 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 only person who ever does this. Where Hitler is unique is that he tilts his hog and croix, 45 degrees from horizontal. And this is the way you're going to see it in like the 1935 national flag of Germany. His swastikas usually tilted, right? There is one more point that kind of argues for the fact that Lanz's swastika flag in his magazine Ostarah was the influence for Hitler, which is that when the Nazis come to power, Hitler bans Lanz's writing. And a 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. Uh-huh. Yeah.

conceptions. Uh-huh. Yeah. That makes sense to me. Classic Hitler. Yeah. Classic Hitler. While the symbol at this point started to accrue a distinctly more toxic sheen for Europeans, Americans then as now didn't give two tugs of a dead rat's tail what those creepy foreigners were doing over in Europe. The 1920s are a banner age for utterly meaningless uses of the swastika in any fucking product imaginable. And I think my favorite in retrospect funny swastika themed product is probably this tube of fresh antiseptic deodorant cream, which also heals and soothes tender sore feet for just 10 cents. Little swastika underneath the picture of this lady who smells nice thanks

to the cream. Yeah. It's sort of a creepy man right behind my eyes. Yeah, what's with that? He's doing a Joe Biden, right? He's sniffing her hair, you know, because he likes this. He likes the swastika cream so much. You can't see his hands on the photo, but you know they're not worth supposed to be.

No. A delightful antiseptic theater. Yeah. No. So no, and there was just so much meaningless shit being pumped out in the 20s 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 party with the products we make, too, apparently. Yeah, and it's, I think you have to, a lot of times when people are talking about why

the Nazis adopt the 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 Aryans, 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 it to self-fuck and deodorant, right? 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 umberto's definition of fascism. And one of the things Eko notes that is among his kind of most salient observations is that fascism, one, an inherent characteristic of fascism is

that it is syncretic. And here's how he describes what that means. Synchrotism is not only, as the dictionary says, the combination of different forms of belief or practice, such a combination which must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and wherever they seem to say different or incompatible things, it is only because all are alluding allegorically to the same primeval truth. If you browse in the shelves that in American bookstores are in labeled new age, you can find there even St. Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining St. Augustine and Stonehenge, that is a symbol of her fascism. And one of the things that Echoes

talking about here is this use 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 lure to different groups of people. You're into Stonehenge, you're into Aelinger, you're into St. Augustine. If you can find a way to kind of like, it's this thing QAnon does. It absorbs everything into itself as part of its ability to spread. It's creating a full mythology. It's like creating. That was a big part, I think, of Nazi Germany was taking the old Germany and bringing it back, but it wasn't factually the old Germany.

It was just pieces of different folklore 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. It doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to all fit in. You can take pieces of Norse mythology and Odin worship and you can subsume that into your fascism. 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 yours and the kind of goodwill. Now, it is obviously that there's no more goodwill for the swastika that's just inherent in most cultures at least. But back in the day, basically everyone felt fine with the swastika, so you make that

your thing. It's one of the things that can help draw it, makes you seem like less scary. It makes you seem more approachable. It's just one of the things that helps build the appeal of this movement. And yeah, this is a good stuff. Just good, good shit. So beyond this, by the time the Nazis draw close to power in the early 30s, they had been marching and bleeding and fighting under the swastika for a full decade. Some 400 of them have died in sundry assassinations and street fights in the Vimar era. And these men, along with the dead of the beer hall putch, 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 20th century's 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 19th 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 than any didactic speeches. And that's where we're going to end today. Wow. How you doing Chelsea?

I am so I'm just so impressed and intrigued by this research. And yeah, I just had no idea. And I honestly feel a little shocked at myself for not knowing more about this. I mean, I did most people, I think it has just like this. I had not know about this. 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, oh shit, huh? That actually makes a lot of sense. That's fascinating. 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 recognizing on an unconscious level. But yeah, it's just a... Yes, like the use of red is an effective color to use for a lot of different things,

because it gets our attention. And the same way that like, I have a little feeder for my chickens where they like, there's little red nubs because chickens just picket shit that's red because like blood is red. It's the same reason why like if one of them gets injured, the others will like start eating it, right?

Because they see red and they go after it. 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 things. 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, 0.00, whatever, percent faster than any other color. You know, and that's always happening on levels that we don't recognize or understand, but we're always reacting to the world. And I think about that all the time, how we're reacting to the world on an unconscious, biological, 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. Yeah. I think there's definitely like that. Yeah, again, as you said, that's kind of like a youngy and sort of a attitude towards it. I mean, we do have this and who knows how much of that is like, because 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 India and something where someone's first experience with a 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? Like even, you know, you're looking at...

Yeah, exactly, that's just the way it is. Yeah. But you know what I're looking at, yeah, exactly. That's just, that's just the way it is. But you know what I can see and view objectively is your excellent podcast, American hysteria. Well, I can't see it, but I can listen to it. Yes. Do you have any? Everyone can. Yeah, you wanna do your plugs?

Sure, sure, yeah. 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, crazes hoaxes, everything, anytime that something weird happened in America, we're on it, and try to explain that thing through 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 and American Astaria podcast. And I hope you guys come listen. Hell yeah, hell yeah. All right, everybody, this has been behind the bastards. I have a novel, it's called After the Revolution. 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, your favorite or least favorite bookstore. I thought you were, for some reason, you were going to say Applebee's. You screaming at Scream at an Applebee. Just someone can handle it. The Applebee's manager with what's gonna 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 brother's sisters.

Can't wait to get that bumper sticker. Yeah. Amazing. And that's the episode. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. From more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency?

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