Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The power of symbols
I had an interesting chat with Jan last night about symbolism. In Germany it is illegal to show the signs of the swastika, the SS logo and several other Nazi related symbols. On the one hand this strikes me as a good thing - it makes it hard for the extreme right to use these symbols in public spaces which means that they either try and invent new symbols or use these ones sparingly to avoid a fine or a prison sentence, and it means that people who suffered horrendously under the Nazi's are not reminded of those horrors by being exposed to the central symbols of the regime.
Another part of me however is very queasy about banning any kind of symbols - no matter how they have been used and what they have/do stand for. I don't want to particularly get into the semiotics of language and how all signs are just that and no more (i.e. they are not moral agents in and of themselves but are only given meaning as we ascribe it to them - perhaps most obviously in this case in that a Hindu would see a swastika as a symbol of their religion, whilst a Jew would beg to differ). My key objection would be that it removes the possibility of the symbol being re-appropriated. The word 'queer' was for many, many years an insult to homosexual people - yet the word has now lost most, if not all, of its insulting power and has instead become a mainstream, fairly positive word used by both the homosexuals and heterosexuals, even featuring in mainstream TV shows (Queer eye for the straight guy, Queer as folk etc...).
The word has in short been reclaimed. Gay activists in the 1980's and 1990's started to use the word as a descriptive term themselves, in both written and spoken form. This re-appropriation robbed the word of its offensive and insulting overtones and reclaimed the word as a positive and pretty playful term. This process can be seen in many places - perhaps for Christians in the icon of the cross - a Roman torture method. Could the cross in the 1st century AD could be compared as a symbol to the swastika in the way it would have conveyed a sense of horror and brutality?
I really have no idea how the swastika and SS symbols may be re-appropriated but part of me hopes that at some point the future they will be.
Labels: symbols
