MANWOMAN

  The numerous groups who used the swastika before the Nazi Party adopted it are victims of cultural genocide. The perpetrator of this genocide is not the Nazi Party, for it had no intention to destroy any of the particular groups who had found powerful symbolism in the swastika. It joined these groups and entered a long symbolic tradition. But the Nazi Party incidentally became more notorious than any of the other groups of this tradition. It’s a tradition which by the way includes so may disparate groups[1] that it starts to seem like a large chunk of the northern hemisphere lost a part of its culture when it associated the scorn toward the Nazi Party with some scorn toward the swastika. The fervor with which the general public repudiates the swastika is an action of cultural genocide which these folks commit upon themselves. Lemkin’s ideas about genocide being a detraction from the general world culture apply here, but it seems like at some point I’ll stop differentiating any human action. Not that it matters.

  There’s one fellow who’s resisting the self-righteous disgust that the world at large has for the swastika. His name is ManWoman. He makes art, which in this case seems like a non-genocidal act. Here's his website. He resists the subaltern genocide enacted by the world’s Holocaust victims against the swastika. He does so not by engaging in a sub-subaltern genocide against those angry memories. He mostly paints I think.

  It’s not really sensible to equate burning books with killing people, so it’s even less sensible to equate some kind of internal hatred with killing people. But I’m engaging in cultural genocide all day and so is everyone else, if “cultural genocide” is a phrase that has any meaning. The internet puts us all inside of each other. We’re each equally supremely guilty before every single other person, like an infinitely hot and dense point.

---

[1] The swastika had been in popular use in ancient Greece, Iran, Ural, Armenia, Argentina, Australia, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, India, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, The United States of America, by Hindus everywhere, by Freemasons, by Jews, by Navajo, Hopi, Apache, by Sami, etc. etc.