Michel Valentin: Political correctness and swastikas – Missoulian

Symbols are important, especially in our digital, inter-connected, high-tech civilization.

Although knowledge is supposedly at our fingertips, a motley convergence of negativism based on ignorance, intolerance, and reactionary politics, and positivism motivated by neo-puritanism, identity politics and political correctness wants to erase, destroy, and censor everything deemed controversial. To make things worse, the algorithmic, consumer-based logic governing the a-/social media helps polarize people by spreading the malevolent prejudices of partisan politics or the absolutist judgements of nave progressivism. Both force their black-and-white conclusions on an already confused public.

But sometimes, reason prevails, as the recent UMs swastika issue illustrates (Left-facing swastika symbols to remain on UM building for education, Missoulian Nov. 7). The decision to de-construct (Derridas meaning) the swastika by adding an interpretative sign next to it for those who ignore religious symbolism makes sense.

The swastika goes back to time immemorial, long before recorded Western history. Tibetan, Hinduist (God Ganesh), Persian, Basque, North American (Hopi, Navajo), and Meso-American cultures, to name only a few, used the swastika. They are literally everywhere in different forms: pictographs, pottery design, friezes, weaving patterns. Most are square and geometric; others are rounded and wave-like. Some archeologists even claim that they were Atlantis sign. Galactical symbolization, cosmic allegory, labyrinthine metaphor, life/death cycle representationWho knows?

Two kinds exist. One clockwise (swastika) symbolizing death; the other counterclockwise (sauwastika) symbolized life good fortune in Sanskrit and Japanese. Both signs had nothing to do with Nazism. Then why did Hitler choose it in 1920 as a Nazi symbol ruining its mystery for everybody? Some historians established that a strange relationship existed between Nazi ideology and European occultism. Nazis fantasized that the swastika was an Aryan symbol, sign of racial supremacy.

The right thing to do is to reclaim the sign from Nazi abuse and defacement. People who want to erase the swastikas on UM buildings mean well, but they are motivated by misguided and simplistic emotions.

During World War II, the French flag, an emblem of national unity and rallying symbol, was used both by French fascists/Nazi-collaborators and by anti-Nazi rsistants. Should the French flag then, be jettisoned? Both Neo-Nazis and Socialist Democrats fly the American flag. Should a new flag be designed? The Torah, the Bible, and the Koran are both used/abused by fundamentalist Jews, Christians and Muslims to fuel hatred. Should one ban these books?

By the same token, some Nazis loved classical music. Should it be banned? Or preceded by interpretative messages? Many great writers had fascist tendencies. Should they be banned? Remember the Heidegger controversy.

Decades ago, Rabelais, a giant of European literature, was banned from the UM Freshmen Humanities Program because Gargantuas Panurge wanted to fortify Paris medieval walls with callibistrys (vulvas). We could go on and on Everybody has reasons to be unreasonable, intolerant, irrational, and to censor (of course) the other.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast. Pascal.

One really disturbing thing though, in this entire well-meaning brouhaha. Not one religious leader, faculty member, or student, ever protested, or even mentioned the demise of the Humanities (philosophy/history/foreign languages /English/religions/sociology/mathematics) at UM.

What about a plaque cemented on the brand-new Art Museum explaining what UM used to be 12 years ago, and what it has now become, after the great re-alignment/re-prioritizing complete and replete with the number of Humanities professors gone?

Lux et Veritas has become Obscuritas et Machinatio.

Michel Valentin is a retired UM professors/EPIS researcher/writer.

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Michel Valentin: Political correctness and swastikas - Missoulian