Madame Blavatsky and the swastika

[Robert Zydenbos]

DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA wrote:
>
> The spokes of Nazi swastika point in opposite direction
> to the swastika of Indians. I heard some people remark
> that this the reason why Hitler was defeated. Thank god
> Hitler reversed the direction!

This is just a plain untruth. I don't know how it is possible that so
many people can insist on believing something that is so easily
disproven. When I disproved it once before an American anthropologist
(not an Indian hindutvavadi; but he had other ideological reasons for
believing the untruth), he had the impertinence to say that the
photographs I showed must be wrong.

And so, many cases of stupidity appear to be incurable.

And all this is so utterly absurd, because, as L.S. Cousins wrote:

> >This is pretty silly. The Nazis used both the cross and the svastika; that
> >does not make either of them racist symbols. [...]
> >
> >More generally, one should not confuse the ideas of the 1920s and 1939s
> >with those of a half century earlier in an entirely different context.

Indians, Tibetans, Amerindians and others *cannot* be held responsible
for what other persons at much later times have done with the same signs
and
symbols.

There was a question here recently about what constitutes scientific
methodology. A good start on the scientific path is: *look at things the
way they are*. Then you will discover that in India svastikas can turn
in either direction, hence also (and in fact more often) in the 'Nazi'
direction.

Let us hope that all this amateuristic nonsense quickly moves away from
this list back to the USENET, where it apparently belongs.

--

Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Mysore (India)
e-mail zydenbos at vsnl.com