Why laugh? Hammer and sickle is the iconography for worker/peasant unity, often associated with Communist parties and Socialist states. What's the joke?
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Your comment upthread was fine but this is taking things further into ideological flamewar (and snark) and we don't want that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
TIL the word is actually from Hindi - I was all ready to object to your giving them the same name (if only I'd known what the Hindu one was called, assuming it was different) - I thought they were entirely unrelated symbols and ideas that just happened to have a similar representation.
Seems obvious in retrospect, knowing स्वस्थ ('svast'/'swast' meaning healthy) though I suppose being British/born (decades) post-war my association for 'swastika' are just not anything to do with well-being at all.
I'm from the UK and was well aware, I think you may be surprised at how common this knowledge is. I worked in a bat in Sydney Australia that was decorated with a mosaic swastika and had signs up explaining it was built by Hindus ore WW2. AOf course they didn't build it as a bar originally.
Ok. I don't think I claimed that nobody knew/most people didn't? I was just interested to learn it myself and thought there might be one or two others who'd be interested too. Sorry to trouble you.
If you're objecting to me associating it to being British-born post-Nazism.. well, I spent a lot more time in school learning about the war and war-adjacent topics than I did Hinduism. And I don't recall the svastika from what I did learn about Hinduism at all. (I'm aware of it through film and reading.)
If I saw it in the street or as a tattoo (which I never have, aside from that depicted in American film and television) I would assume Nazism, unless it had dots or perhaps if it wasn't at an angle (or in film, obviously not if it's Bollywood). And the connotation of that isn't 'well-being' to me; I don't doubt (now, knowing the common origin) that's why they chose it, I'm simply explaining how I'd failed to make the connection.
> my association for 'swastika' are just not anything to do with well-being at all
Or if this is being misinterpreted - to be absolutely clear, I mean the word, as rendered in the English alphabet. I have absolutely no problem with it being used as a positive symbol, a स्वस्तिका, all I meant was that I didn't realise there was any connection at all! I thought there was one with positive associations, and one with negative, and they just looked similar but that was that.
