LogFAQs > #979969230

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Debatable. There's a fair few Asians who still use it in its original religious context and get a bit pissy when people complain about it. Sort of a "I think our thousands of years of symbolic meaning outweigh what those German a******s did with it" attitude.

It's mostly Westerners who get uptight about it (for obvious reasons).

This is true. Arguably that's not so much reclamation as it is rejecting the Nazis' efforts to despoil it, but it is nonetheless an effort to use it in a non-Nazi fashion.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It'll actually be interesting to see what happens with it over the next few centuries, honestly. It's still a raw wound in the West because it's relatively recent, but time has a way of erasing all context and wariness.
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I think we're already getting to the point where WWII is barely "real" to most of the younger generations. A few more generations and we might see a shift in how things are perceived overall.

WWII is indeed far enough away now to start being more of a hypothetical idea than a real event (at least for younger people that have never encountered a WWII veteran, which I think is the strongest tie we can have to a historical event without actually being there), but I don't know that the swastika has lost any of its Naziliciousness for the passage of that time. Mostly, I'd attribute that to the fact that neo-Nazi groups still exist and use the symbol to represent the same ideology, so swastika=Nazis is also a present-day observation and not just history. Until Nazism goes away entirely (and that's likely to be a couple centuries, if ever), I don't think we're going to get to a point where Western people think of anything other than Nazis first when a swastka shows up.