Damn Hitler...Always Ruining Everything

This post is meant as a response and a brief history lesson. There were a few (only a few, thankfully) people who were shocked or at least given pause when I put this picture up on Facebook last month:

"Why Connor," they said, "what ever were you doing hiking up to a Nazi shrine?" For the uninitiated, the Swastika is actually a millenia-old symbol of Hindu religion. Buddhism, as an outgrowth of Hinduism, adopted the symbol long ago and it is positively everywhere in Korea that has any Buddhist connections. Every temple I have visited has been decorated with several. The Nazi Party adopted the symbol in the early 20th century, and Hitler made it the centerpiece of his Nazi flag. You will notice, though, that he flipped the symbol -- those that you see here will look slightly different because they are facing clockwise, rather than counterclockwise as Westerners are used to seeing.

It is funny the power that even a simple symbol can have on human beings. I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded person, and the swastikas painted onto the side of temples here look like a perfectly natural part of the architecture to me, as they should. However, with only the color and direction reversed, it is hard not to experience the typical knee-jerk reaction when you see this flag flapping in the wind:

It can hardly be called subliminal, because surely we're all aware of it, but the ability of something as innocuous as two geometric lines to pervade one's consciousness is quite strange.