Things We Can't Talk About
A year after TikTok suspended my account for talking about this symbol...
It’s December of last year and TikTok has suspended my account.
It’s not a ban. I haven’t been removed. It’s just a week-long suspension.
My crime?
Posting a video of Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.
It’s not what you’re thinking—they didn’t pull it down because of copyright.
They pulled the clip of The Da Vinci Code down because it depicted images that go against TikTok community guidelines.
Images like the swastika.
In the video, Hanks—playing Harvard Professor of Symbology Robert Langdon—asks his audience, “How do we sift truth from belief?
How do we write our own histories personally or culturally and thereby define ourselves? How do we penetrate years--centuries--of historical distortion to find original truth?”
His questions are timely, and the irony of Tiktok proving his point by suspending my account is strong.
“How do we sift truth from belief?”
Watch the clip:
Understanding the past actively determines our ability to understand the present. When a symbol’s meaning is replaced or subverted, the original truth gets buried.
And not by accident.
December 25th is one of our modern culture’s most subverted symbols.
“Most Christians today probably can’t imagine Christmas on any other day than December 25,” Sarah Pruitt explains in History, “but it wasn’t always that way.”
The Roman Empire picked December 25th for political reasons—they wanted the date to coincide with existing pagan festivals.
While you and I know Jesus was obviously not a Capricorn, many still don’t realize that we celebrate Christ’s birth in the shadow of pagan gods like Saturn and Mithras.
Just like December 25th, the swastika has a history that long predates its common association—an association much harder to talk about than Santa Claus and reindeer.
The swastika has come to represent one of the most horrific and brutal regimes of modern history. But the evil that it conjures in our minds is completely different than the symbol’s original truth.
As one of the world’s most ancient symbols, the four pronged pinwheel predates the Nazi regime by millennia. The swastika was one of the central symbols of Proto-Indo-European society, the society that gave rise to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, and Roman societies in Europe, as well as Hindu society in India.
It’s a symbol that has been discovered in every corner of the globe, with some arguing that it is humankind’s first identifiable symbol—full stop.
As an ancient symbol it represented the search for balance, and peace. In mystical traditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries the swastika alluded to cosmic or universal balance and represented the natural rhythm of the universe.
The swastika symbol stills alludes to these things today (visit any Indian sweets shop and you’re sure to find it amongst the decorations) but it also represents evil and hatred—a hatred so strong that it’s shaped our modern world.
The fear and hatred embedded in the acts of Nazi Germany against Jewish people, and others they deemed less than human, still reverberates through the world today.
It’s a big reason people support Israel. It’s possibly the biggest reason people support Israel.
The popular narrative around Israel is that it needs to exist because of the Holocaust.
Despite the fact that the creation of Israel and the planned genocide of the Palestinian people was in the works for decades if not centuries before the Holocaust.
Banning the swastika was never about protecting people. Banning the swastika was about burying pain and making people numb.
Numb people are more susceptible to propaganda—especially when that propaganda is designed to trigger their suppressed pain, keeping them in a loop of fear and reactivity.
Instead of healing from the misuse and misappropriation of the swastika and returning it to its original nature, we kept the fear alive.
Fear so alive that it warped the minds of the masses.
At least until October 7th when a new layer of our collective awakening began.
Just like the Roman Empire wanted to cast a shadow over the gods of Rome’s pagan subjects to make Christianity the official religion, the current “powers that be” co-opted the swastika for their own purposes.
Now it’s time for us to take it back.
Not necessarily as a symbol of peace—that may not happen in our lifetimes in the West (though can you imagine how wonderful the world will be when we’re healed from the fear?)—but as something we can talk about openly.
As something we refuse to keep buried.
To heal from the hatred, we have to claim the pain placed on top of this symbol and dissolve it. We have to face it head on.
Remember: symbols are not co-opted by accident. Symbols are used by regimes of power to serve their own, often imperial and genocidal, purposes.
The swastika is just one example of how we’ve been manipulated into staying small and stuck.
This is an invitation to witness the pain beyond the propaganda.
It is an invitation, in a world full of infinite beliefs, to dig deeper and seek original truth.
“How do we sift truth from belief?
How do we write our own histories personally
or culturally and thereby define ourselves?
How do we penetrate years - centuries - of historical distortion
to find original truth?”
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
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“At least until October 7th when a new layer of our collective awakening began.” I felt shock reading this. The atrocious, insane, normalized, compartmentalized, escalation of violence that began on Oct 7 is part of exactly whose “collective awakening?” This formulation feels sickeningly dismissive of the victims.
I appreciate your clarification.