THE NAZI SWASTIKA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 68, 22 March 1933, Page 6

THE NAZI SWASTIKA.

When the so-called National Socialists of Germany crossed the Rhine recently into tho demilitarised zone they a.re said to have run up their emblem, the swastika. This symbol is well known, a, cross with equal arms, the ends of each being turned inwards to form a, "geometric" design. Jt i& a popular lucky mascot, though at first there appears to be.no obvious reason for dts adoption as the badge of the Hitlerites. The world is informed by Hitler that it is the wheel of Gautama the Buddha, the teacher of Aryan India; and since the Nazis are Aryans and "anti-Semite*" they have adopted the Aryan symbol. Why the most bellicose of modern nationalist cults should have adapted the syipbol of tho most pacific of ancient religions is never explained. In point of fact, the swastika » neither Aryan nor Buddhist in origin. It is an ancient symbol of life and the sun; and doubtless it survives among the Buddhists as an heirloom, inherited from Gautama's ancestor, Maha Saminata, son of the sun. Putting the rather outworn Hitler ethnology aside—for the blessed words "Aryan" and "Semitic" are the names of languages rather than of peoples—it can be definitely stated that tho symbol is of very great antiquity. Sehliem.ann found it painted upon a metal figure which he unearthed at Hissarlik Hill, the site of old Troy. It was well known in ancient Anatolia. The famous Iron Age shield discovered at Battersea, in England, has the emblem in red enamel. The theory of Hoiusay, the Belgian archaeologist, who believed the swastika, to be a decadent form of the sacred octopus of the Mother Goddess of ancient Crete, seems utterly fantastic at first; but by tho study of comparative art in the ancient East the gradual transformation of the eight-limbed celaphod into a meaningless four-armed whirligig has been clearly demonstrated, though Housay's theory has not yet found universal acceptance. The oldest swastika in the world was. diecovered upon painted pottery of the Elamitee, a half negroid people who inhabited the highlands to the east of Mesopotamia, about 3000 B.C. Throughout the homelands of the Aryanspeaking peoples in. Asia and elsewhere settlements of Elamites, or people with a similar culture, have been discovered. Since Elamite and Mesopotamian civilisation is much older than anything that the Aryan speakers can produce, Elliot Smith supposes that the Aryans received their first dose of "culture," and presumably the cult of the swastika, from their southern neighbours. We may be certain that if our alleged cousins in the Kultur Staat knew more about ethnology and talked less about it, if they knew that Mr. Hitler has borrowed hii> pet mascot from black persons, the.National Socialist stock would be in for a long period of deflation. —W.B.