Word: swastika
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...university’s indifference to anti-Semitic violence in Germany on which I focused at the Wyman Institute’s conference. The press at the time linked the Hanfstaengl episode with the administration’s permitting the Nazi consul to place a wreath bearing a swastika in the University chapel, calling this Harvard’s recognition of the Hitler regime. Moreover, although British universities boycotted the “Nazified” University of Heidelberg’s anniversary celebration in 1936, Harvard chose to participate in this Hitler propaganda festival, at which top Nazi leaders...
...formed in the late 1930s. It was members of the Totenkopf ("Death Head") SS who served as guards and executioners at the concentration camps, wearing black caps and skull-and-crossbone insignia on their collars. The double S was rendered in a lightning-bolt design that, along with the swastika, became an emblem of the Nazi regime...
However, outrage at Nazism, while justified and warranted, is not exactly breaking news or intellectually compelling discussion; Nazism has been so thoroughly debunked that it is no longer an ideology to be taken seriously. What would have happened, though, if Harry had not sported the swastika but opted for the hammer and the sickle instead? Would the public outcry have been as vocal and immediate, and as monolithically damning, if Harry had worn a Soviet instead of Nazi uniform? No, it most certainly would not have been. In our society communist paraphernalia is considered to be humorous or ironic...
Judging from the content of popular culture, one can safely say that if Harry had chosen to sport the hammer and the sickle of Stalin, Beria and Dzerzhinsky instead of the swastika of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels he would have attracted little notice. The widespread popularity of Che, Castro, Lenin, CCCP or Marx t-shirts, and the frequent usage of the Soviet five-pointed star or the crossed hammer and sickle, are only the most obvious examples of the curious double standard between our views on Nazism and Soviet Communism. Harvard’s own beloved...
...pinnacles of totalitarianism; but the similarities, especially in terms of human suffering and misery, are overwhelming enough for them to be judged in the same vein. We would never consider putting mock-Nazi propaganda on a House Committee t-shirt; nor would we ever think of making a swastika out of a beer-bong and a keg tap. We probably wouldn’t wear a t-shirt saying “give me some lebenstraum,” and we would never think of sporting a t-shirt with Hitler’s face on it. This is because...