Buy your Nazi Fashion Bag at Zara

by Victoria Revay | September 21, 2007 at 10:29 am

3707 views | 16 Recommendations | 7 comments

I find it hard to believe that Zara doesn't check it's suppliers, but apparently this is so. The statement was made after a British girl demanded a refund for a bag that she purchased at the store, only to find moments later that it had swastika's on it. Zara spokespersons say the bags were made in India, where the swastika is an ancient religious symbol for Hindus and Buddhists and represents sun, strength, and good luck to many groups around the world. Zara has 3,330 stores in 66 countires.

Since its adoption by the Nazi Party in 1920, people in the West have associated the swastika with Nazi dictator Hitler.

(Jordan bangs his head upon his keyboard, mumbling "double-you tee eff...")

Not only did Hitler ruin the swastika for all eternity, but a facial hairstyle as well.

Yeah, Charlie Chaplin owned that look until Hitler came along...

Where I grew up there used to be a women's hockey team called the Fernie Swastikas. Here's a great photo of them.

This was before Hitler claimed the symbol, but it was still shocking to walk through the arena (which I did every morning as a kid for figure skating) and to see a photo of all of these women in three neat lines, with their hair done in the 20s style, smiling big and bright with huge swastikas on their chests.

There was a campaign launched at one point to have the photo removed; instead an informative plaque was added which explained the history of the symbol. This was, I felt, a great step to take. Hundreds of kids and young adults filtered through that arena every day.

Does anyone know why Hitler chose the swastika as his symbol for the Third Reich?

The swastika has an extensive history. The motif seems to have first been used in Neolithic Eurasia.
The symbol has an ancient history in Europe, appearing on artifacts
from pre-Christian European cultures. In antiquity, the swastika was
used extensively by the Indo-Aryans, Hittites, Celts and Greeks, among others. In particular, the swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism
— religions with over a billion adherents worldwide, making the
swastika ubiquitous in both historical and contemporary society. The
symbol was introduced to Southeast Asia by Hindu kings and remains an integral part of Balinese Hinduism to this day, and it is a common sight in Indonesia. It also was adopted independently by several Native American cultures.

In the Western world, the symbol experienced a resurgence following the archaeological work in the late 19th century of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the site of ancient Troy and associated it with the ancient migrations of Proto-Indo-Europeans.
He connected it with similar shapes found on ancient pots in Germany,
and theorized that the swastika was a "significant religious symbol of
our remote ancestors," linking Germanic, Greek and Indo-Iranian
cultures.[3][4] By the early 20th century, it was widely used worldwide and was regarded as a symbol of good luck and success.

The work of Schliemann soon became intertwined with the völkisch movements, for which the swastika was a symbol of "Aryan" identity, a concept that came to be equated by theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg with a Nordic master race originating in northern Europe. Since its adoption by the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler, the swastika has been associated with fascism, racism (white supremacy), World War II, and the Holocaust in much of the West. The swastika remains a core symbol of Neo-Nazi groups, and is used regularly by activist groups to signify the supposed Nazi-like behavior of organizations and individuals they oppose.