{"id":270355,"date":"2017-04-08T14:58:50","date_gmt":"2017-04-08T18:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/?p=270355"},"modified":"2020-11-13T15:15:36","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T20:15:36","slug":"the-man-who-brought-the-swastika-to-germany-and-how-the-nazis-stole-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/the-man-who-brought-the-swastika-to-germany-and-how-the-nazis-stole-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who brought the swastika to Germany, and how the Nazis stole it"},"content":{"rendered":"
RAEL\u2019S COMMENT:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
Great article except the conclusion, while condemning white supremacists is ironically very “Western supremacist”. While a little minority of world population still have a bad image of the swastika, hundreds of million of Asians or Blacks or American \u201cIndians\u201d have no problem with it, and on the contrary proudly wear it or pray in front of it in temples.<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

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When archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer\u2019s\u00a0Iliad. The epic poem was widely believed to be no more than a myth, but Schliemann was convinced otherwise. For him, it was a map to the hidden location of ancient cities.<\/p>\n

Over the next several years the German businessman, who made his fortune in trading raw materials for ammunition production, tramped around the Mediterranean. Schliemann took Homer\u2019s advice on everything from local customs to\u00a0treating physical maladies. Trained at the Sorbonne, he used Homer\u2019s verses to identify what he thought were the epic\u2019s real-world locations. \u201cOne of his greatest strengths is that he had a genuine historical interest. What he wanted was to uncover the Homeric world, to know whether it existed, whether the Trojan war happened,\u201d\u00a0writes classics scholar D.F. Easton. \u201cBut here also is a weakness. He was not very good at separating fact from interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until 1871 that Schliemann achieved his dream. The discovery catapulted him to fame, and with his fame came a burst of interest in all that he uncovered. The intrepid archaeologist found his Homeric city, but he also found something else: the swastika, a symbol that would be manipulated to shape world history.<\/p>\n

Schliemann found his epic city\u2014and the swastika\u2014on the Aegean cost of Turkey. There, he continued the excavations started by British archaeologist Frank Calvert at a site known as\u00a0Hisarlik mound. Schliemann\u2019s methods were brutal\u2014he used crowbars and battering rams to excavate\u2014but effective. He quickly realized the site held seven different layers from societies going back thousands of years. Schliemann had found Troy\u2014and the remains of civilizations coming before and after it. And on shards of pottery and sculpture throughout the layers, he found\u00a0at least 1,800\u00a0variations on the same symbol: spindle-whorls, or swastikas.<\/p>\n

He would go on to see the swastika everywhere, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa. And as Schliemann\u2019s exploits grew more famous, and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca-Cola products, Boy Scouts\u2019 and Girls\u2019 Club materials and even American military uniforms,\u00a0reports the BBC. But as it rose to fame, the swastika became tied into a much more volatile movement: a wave of nationalism spreading across Germany.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/man-who-brought-swastika-germany-and-how-nazis-stole-it-180962812\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAEL\u2019S COMMENT: Great article except the conclusion, while condemning white supremacists is ironically very “Western supremacist”. While a little minority of world population still have a bad image of the swastika, hundreds of million of Asians or Blacks or American \u201cIndians\u201d have no problem with it, and on the contrary proudly wear it or pray […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":282657,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/lt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}