Cross Purposes

The US Navy is preparing to make extensive renovations to a barracks complex because it has the shape of a swastika when viewed from above. Aerial photographs appearing on Google Earth "revealed the buildings' shape to a wide variety of computer users", some of whom might easily have gone off and become Nazis just because the US Navy was associated with a symbol the Nazis appropriated.

"We don't want to be associated with something as symbolic and hateful as a swastika," said Scott Sutherland, Navy Region Southwest's deputy public relations officer. Indeed, there are few things more symbolic and hateful than the swastika. The swastika is evidently somewhat more symbolic than the Stars and Stripes which, no doubt by some malicious irony of fate, is displayed on many US Navy vessels.

The Wikipedia entry on the swastika notes that the term is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning well-being, and that the symbol is widely used in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. "Damn those Hinduists, Buddhists and Jainists, and their hateful symbolism of well-being," say the owners and operators of Scott Sutherland, Navy Region Southwest's deputy public relations officer.

In a chilling prefiguration of rivalry between the US Navy and the Air Force, early aviators, including the Americans Matilde Moisant and Charles Lindbergh, carried swastikas for good luck. Lindbergh, of course, went on to become a Nazi sympathiser, Holocaust denier and conservationist. There is even a design of interlocking swastikas on the floor of Amiens Cathedral, which may help explain why the French sided with Saddam Hussein during recent freedomising operations.