Designer peddles Nazi design as symbol of ‘peace’ and ‘love’

A new company markets shirts online that feature the swastika, the primary symbol of Germany’s genocidal World War II-era Nazi party.

The image of the swastika remains a painful sight for millions of people throughout the world, who associate the symbol with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. A company called KA Design, however, has set out to reclaim the swastika’s Hindu and Buddhist origins, philosophies which employed the symbol as a religious icon before the Germans adopted it in the 1920s.

According to KA Design, the swastika is “coming back,” only this time the company claims it will represent “peace” and “love,” which are words that are also printed on the swastika-adorned wares the company is peddling. Among the scant information available on the web regarding KA Design is a low-budget promotional video that simplistically claims the swastika is really a symbol of “luck, infinity, and life,” which the Nazis “rotated 45 degrees” and “stigmatized” as an icon of “hatred, fear, war, racism, and power.”

Those are certainly the ideas that most people in the world associate with the swastika. For the Jewish people in particular, the symbol remains a painful reminder of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi party used the swastika as its primary calling card, with uniforms, concentration camps, and buildings bearing the design. To this day, it remains the primary symbol left by anti-Semites when they commit hate crimes of vandalism and similar offenses.

While KA Design claims its t-shirts, whose graphics are rendered in the rainbow colors reminiscent of the gay pride movement, are an attempt to stop the Nazis from “limiti[ing] our freedom,” the response to date has been far from positive. Arsen Ostrovsky, executive director of the Israeli-Jewish Congress, referred to the t-shirts as “obscene and disgusting” on his Facebook page on Sunday.

Ostrovsky’s response was echoed repeatedly in the comments on KA Design’s post advertising the t-shirts, with responses ranging from “[the swastika] has been forever tarnished” to “have some shame!”

By: World Israel News Staff