SEMIOTICS, SWASTIKAS, & SHADOWPLAY

by Colin Liddell

Every day when I’m out and about, I see dozens of swastikas. That doesn’t mean I am surrounded by Nazis. I’m not. I just live in Tokyo, and the swastika is a common symbol on maps and signs denoting Buddhist temples.

We live in a semiotic world (I bet a few of you misread that last phrase), by which I mean one where symbols, simulacra, icons, and signs occupy the level of perceptual consciousness, which once existed merely to perceive direct reality. In the struggle to deal with an ever-increasing influx of data, our minds have been colonized, distorted, and in many cases short-circuited by our reliance on such signage and totemry with all their pre-programmed connotative meanings.

This disjunction between reality and perception naturally favours those who can manipulate it best – on a macro level those with media power, and on a micro level the leaders of actual gangs and cults.

A perfect example of this can be seen in the relatively recent phenomenon of ISIS, where Islamic imagery was favoured both by the gang masters themselves (positively) and the media power of those opposing them (negatively) for their separate reasons. The reality of the situation, however, was that ISIS was, maybe still is, a case of displaced nationalism, a misplaced struggle against the oppression that Sunni Arabs in Syria and Iraq have faced.

Something similar can be seen in the Ukraine, where we are repeatedly told that we must not support the Ukrainians because they are either (a) "Jewed-up stooges of globalism" or (b) a bunch of Nazis – a laughable contradiction. Of course, it is not difficult to track down pictures of Ukrainian nationalists, like the stalwarts of the (in)famous Azov Battalion, posing with Nazi regalia and symbols, or performing the stiff-armed salute of early twentieth century Fascists.

In our simulacra-swallowing world, this prima facie evidence is taken as incontestable fact, precluding the need to look any deeper. Kremlin media, like Russia Today, are especially quick to jump on any Nazi-esque manifestations found among the Ukrainian opponents of the Neo-Soviet Empire, immediately equating them with actual Nazism and then fast-tracking their “discoveries” to their numerous and increasingly tedious shills in the West. This is sheer semiotic pornography and completely misrepresents what is actually going on.

This reminds me of the thesis put forward in the book Gaming the World: Soccer, Nationalism, and the Campaign for Anti-Racism by Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann, which I reviewed in 2010. These two American academics saw nothing but “racism” and “fascism” on the terraces of European football, simply because the fans, in their loutish desire to wind-up their opponents, often resorted to extremist jargon and poses.

Perhaps the best example is the famous hissing noise that the various opponents of Tottenham Hotspur, a North London club traditionally supported by Jews, make in imitation of the gas chambers that were reportedly used to gas Jews. Assuming on this basis that each and every member of these crowds was an actual Nazi is of course an absurdity, otherwise a real Nazi, like Colin Jordan, would have been elected Prime Minister of Britain sometime in the 1970s, when such hooligan jests were at their peak.

Among elements of the Ukrainian military, especially among volunteers like the Azov Battalion, there has been a similar element of offensive posturing, but it is also backed up by the totemic needs of the Männerbund – the basic unit of the army in the same way that the family is the basic unit of society. Among primitives, totems are always taken from powerful or agile animals with which the tribesmen wish to associate themselves in an attempt to acquire some of their power and virility.

For Ukrainians, oppressed by the Tsarist empire and then crushed under the heel of Soviet Communism, which we all know was not real Communism but rather a form of Russian Fascism, the image of the German storm trooper or Panzer commander has been a powerful and totemic image that counteracts that.

For Ukrainians, Nazi symbolism does not in any way represent a positive assertion of Nazi beliefs and ideals. How could it? Ukrainians are after all Slavs, a despised race according to the ideology of Hitlerian National Socialism. But Nazism was of course more than a mere ideology. In its historical manifestation it also existed as a potent force uniting diverse elements of European civilization and even non-European civilization in a grand struggle against Stalinist Imperialism.

While Nazism and its symbols have meant many things to many people – occasionally even including actual Nazism – for the Ukrainian nationalists Nazi imagery is almost always simply code for being extremely anti-Russian, the “extreme” part a reflection of the asymmetry of power that Ukrainians have long felt towards their giant neighbour and former master.

Rather than being fooled by the scary imagery of the swastika-touting Azov Battalion or the Islamic symbols of ISIS and there successors, we should look beyond the shrill manipulation of symbols, both by the gang masters and the media, to the realities that underlie them – namely the desperate struggles of nations and peoples to carve out their own spaces and destinies.


Note: This article was banned by Facebook's algorithms.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).