Hyperallergic Stands With the Swastika

We interrupt our regularly scheduled book club to deal with a week full of Jew-hatred.

Believe them when they tell you who they are. (source)

The outpouring of rage in Washington, D.C. this week was sufficiently galling to make entry impossible into the genteel world of Marco Grassi. I’ll discuss Part 1 of his book early next week, and Part 2 the following Friday as per the schedule. In case you missed it:

Outside the fenced-off Capitol, the scene was most tense at Washington’s Union Station as pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas demonstrators removed American flags and hoisted Palestinian ones in their place. At one point, an American flag was set on fire alongside an effigy of Netanyahu, prompting cheers from the crowd. “Netanyahu, you can’t hide. You’re committing genocide,” protesters shouted. Protesters also spray painted graffiti on a monument to Christopher Columbus and an adjacent Liberty Bell replica, including the words “Hamas is coming” and “All Zionists are bastards.”

Also “Fuck Israel,” “Fuck Pigsrael,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Fuck Capitalism.”¹ Though hundreds of protesters vandalized monuments and assaulted police, fewer than two dozen arrests were made, half of the arrestees were immediately released, and as far as I can tell none of them are in jail. I expect such scenes to be a regular feature of a Harris presidency, should it come to pass, with the head of state issuing stern condemnations of antisemitism, while antisemites terrorize the citizenry and deface our cultural heritage with impunity.

Another incident, minor in comparison but arts-related, was brought to my attention by an alert reader. Since I avoid Hyperallergic just as I avoid everyone who regularly spews racist filth, I missed a recent article about the effort to rehabilitate the swastika.

The Whirling Log symbol appears under different names and variations for communities across the world—manji in Buddhism, swastika in Hinduism. Specifically for the Diné or Navajo people, whose ancestral homelands are in what is now called Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, the symbol is known by a variety of names in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language). It references the Diné Bahaneʼ or Navajo creation story and is generally understood as a harbinger of good luck, healing, and balance. But for some viewers dealing with historical trauma, it calls only one meaning to mind: Nazi propaganda.

Understandably. People aren’t born knowing the global history of symbolism in art, and Westerners are most likely to know the subset that most pertains to their piece of it. Too, let’s remember how freely progressives have cast Nazi as an epithet at their enemies over the last decade. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said of the conservative MPs who supported the 2022 trucker protests that they were standing with “people who wave swastikas.”

The comment came in response to a question from Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, who is Jewish. Lantsman, the MP for the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, said Trudeau “fans the flame of an unjustified national emergency.”

“When did the prime minister lose his way?” she asked.

Trudeau shot back.

“Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag,” he said, defending the government's decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to quell unrest in the nation's capital.

“We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, to be able to get their lives back. These illegal protests need to stop, and they will.”

The protests were legal, and a court found that the Prime Minister had violated the country’s constitution when he crushed them at the behest of the Biden administration. Note that Trudeau invoked the swastika to silence a non-complaint Jew, because it will come into play later. Note as well that Trudeau was not connecting the conservative MPs to the Buddhist manji, but the pinnacle of evil. It is not an arbitrary view to associate the symbol with the latter.

Back at Hyperallergic:

Still, many non-Native museumgoers insist on centering Nazism and their own misinterpretation of an image over the actual content of the artwork, erasing the Diné religious interpretation of the Whirling Log in the process.

We’ve gone from dealing with historical trauma to insistence on centering Nazism. An ongoing theme of progressivism in the arts is the erasure of Jewish pain. The idea that Jews are willfully foregrounding their own experience of the swastika in defiance of the art under consideration, and not simply coming to art with their own valid experiences just as the Navajo do, is playing into the trope of Jewish endemic moral inferiority that has been a part of antisemitism since the early days of Christendom.

But it gets worse. The two authors of the article, Sháńdíín Brown and Zach Feuer, go on to say,

As the grandchildren of people who survived ethnic cleansing attempts—the Holocaust and the Navajo Long Walk to imprisonment—our adrenaline runs high at signs of legitimate antisemitism. In this moment when false claims of antisemitism are used to justify what human rights organizations have named a genocide in Palestine and applied to any action that does not directly align with Zionism, it is crucial to understand the Whirling Log’s history and enduring importance. The projection of antisemitism as a tool of erasure, whether of an Indigenous religious symbol or of Palestinian people and culture, should not be acceptable.

At this point, not only are the Jews willfully foregrounding their own experience of the swastika, they are doing so as an act of erasure of Native American culture. Furthermore they’re expanding that experience to all antisemitism and conducting an erasure of all Palestinian culture.

This is presumptive and revolting. Identitarian progressives share with the neo-Nazis whom they so closely resemble an insistence that Jews leverage antisemitism unfairly to silence criticism of Israel. In nearly every case they do so in order to indulge in baldly antisemitic criticism of Israel that presumes total, inborn, and irredeemable Jewish culpability. As was the case with Trudeau, they are invoking the swastika to shut up the non-compliant Jews.

Trudeau was projecting his authoritarianism onto his enemies, and Brown and Feuer are projecting their erasure onto the Jews. It is the authors who are disappearing Jewish humanity and suffering in this argument. Hyperallergic has brought in Feuer, who elsewhere describes himself “as an American Ashkenazi Jew whose father was born in Occupied Palestine,” to kosher this racist slime. The majority of Jews support Israel. You can find exceptions like Feuer but he typifies nothing except the ugliness and nastiness of contemporary progressivism.

It is weird for Jews to encounter the beneficent swastika of Hinduism and the Navajo for the first time, and it’s weird for Hindus who grow up in households where the swastika is a good luck charm to encounter Americans who associate it with Hitler no matter which way it is spun or oriented. But with a modicum of cultural intelligence and goodwill one can adapt to either view without much trouble. Once again we find Hyperallergic bereft of both.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. If you’re wondering what capitalism has to do with the rest of those, remember that we’re dealing with an entirely negative ideology in which the myriad oppositions combine without conflict.