monetizeyourcat:

you don’t really get to defend using a swastika on the basis of “it was a traditional hindu/buddhist symbol first” if you’re not you know hindu or buddhist

The swastika shows up in the archaeological record from Western Europe to - if you include Buddhist influence, and why wouldn’t you it’s as real as any cultural manifestation - Japan.

History recognizes Nazi racial identity as Nordo-Germanic because that was the Third Reich’s territorial maximum and thus the widest “us” it ever tried to define against “them”.

But the brilliant thing about identifying the master race as “Aryan” - a term which was at the time most prominently associated with what we now call the Indo-European family of languages - was that it could feasibly be expanded up to a complete paneurasianism with irredentist claims on all inhabited continents.