Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser

The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol: An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context

and Meaning across Cultures

Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 2006 Paper No. 662

Universität Duisburg-Essen

Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser

University of Hong Kong (China) & Marketing Consultant Lahnstein (Germany)

The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol: An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context and Meaning across Cultures

Copyright by the authors Reproduced by LAUD 2006 Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 662 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen

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Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser

The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol: An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context

and Meaning across Cultures

1. Introduction

“And what does it mean?” Langdon always hesitated when he got this question. Telling someone what a symbol “meant” was like telling them how a song should make them feel – it was different for all people. A white Ku Klux Klan headpiece conjured images of hatred and racism in the United States, and yet the same costume carried a meaning of religious faith in Spain. “Symbols carry different meanings in different settings”.

(Brown, 2004: 39)

In the Fall of 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak, which (temporarily) devastated the Hong Kong population and its economy, the retail industry was under considerable pressure to regain its market position and to re-capture a much-depleted customer base. The economic downturn propelled many businesses to adopt quite aggressive marketing campaigns, the most notorious of which was the deployment by a Hong Kong textile company (www.Izzue.com) of the swastika and attendant Nazi regalia in their autumn promotion of men’s casual clothing.

The marketing ploy provoked outrage amongst local and, especially, expatriate communities; it lead to official representations from the German and Israeli Consulates, and outright condemnation by the ever-vigilant Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York. In the face of such local and international outcry, yet not without some delay, the fashion retailer eventually backtracked and issued a public apology, before withdrawing its display and associated merchandise.

The Izzue.com debacle offers a powerful case study for exploring how symbol as Visual Pragmatic Act (VPA) means within the intercultural perspective of different socio-cultural contexts of use, and how the redeployment of symbol, within new or unexpected settings, is mediated by a matrix of interdependent discourse practices. These practices we refer to as either contextual triggers or contextual drivers, depending on their salience in the construction of meaning within a particular setting – in the present instance, Hong Kong, China. The paper examines the visual and linguistic rhetoric which accompanies the VPA – the display of Nazi regalia by a Hong Kong-based retailer – using as its starting point data drawn from contemporary newspaper reports and editorials. The paper then explores the discourse practices which underlie this visual event: local marketing and advertising strategies; the symbology of the swastika; the writing about Dictatorship and media focus;

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the writing about Holocaust. In short, the paper deals with multi-modal discourses in an intercultural perspective.

The swastika is iconography at its most graphically powerful: its ‘geometric purity allows for legibility at any size and distance, and when on its axis, the whirling square gives the illusion of movement’ (Heller, 2000: 3). By any standards of graphic design, the swastika is beguilingly eloquent. Yet the unspeakable twentieth century attributes of racism and hatred it has come to embrace confound any attempt to resurrect or rehabilitate this most sinister of icons. By invoking the swastika, the authors are aware that they are contributing to a discourse which sustains the symbol. But they are not nurturing it. To cite Quinn (1994: xii), this work must not be seen ‘as part of an heroic discourse of reclamation and salvage’. Furthermore, as in the case of Quinn’s book, the central concern is not so much with Nazism per se as with the swastika as symbol. This paper offers a paradigmatic account of the (mis-) use of what for the Nazis ‘became the commodity sign par excellence’ (Quinn, 1994: xii). The re-contextualisation or displacement of that sign in another world, in another place, at another time is a profound violation of its ‘immutable symbolic space’ (Quinn, 1994: xii).

At the same time, this paper is not a rehearsal of the rationalist or fetisihistic interpretations of the swastika. (For discussion of such treatments and detailed analysis of the symbology of the swastika, see Heller 2000; Quinn 1994.) Rather, the paper uses the swastika – as potent symbol it is, with worldwide distribution (Whittick, 1960: 270) – as a heuristic for demonstrating the vital, dynamic role that context plays in the making and instantiation of meaning within and across cultures. It is against context, where the symbol becomes a meaning-producing agent in its own right (Quinn, 1994: 11), that the swastika is considered in this sense; comparisons are made – to the extent that they can be – with similar commercial exploitation of ‘de/resymbolized’ Communist ‘memorabilia’ which, by contrast, generally attract less censure.

The paper underpins the vital role of context for Pragmatic theory and its evident applications in the intercultural domain. The paper identifies a number of contextual triggers and contextual drivers and we label our overall approach as Contextual Matrix Analysis or Matrix Analysis, for short. The notion of context and these other terms are discussed in the following section. The paper also explores the instantiation of multi-modal meanings with passing reference to: cultural relativism, cultural scripts (after Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2004), (visual) pragmatic acts (after Mey, 2001), historiographical discourse (after Hobsbawm, 2002) and Halliday’s ideological principle of Failed First Try (Halliday, 2003: 222).

At a more general level, this paper suggests that the (intercultural) pragmatic agenda can be purposefully broadened to investigate multi-modal discourse. It further suggests that the insights gained from ‘applying’ (intercultural) pragmatics can lead to social empowerment and informed political sensitivity. In the present instance, intercultural

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pragmatic awareness can take us beyond a more static structuralist/semiotic reading of multimodal discourse and lead us to an understanding of how meanings are made and how deeply they resonate in very real, societal contexts.

2. Matters of Theory, Context and Associated Terminology

Context is everything and nothing. Like a shadow, it flees from those who flee from it, insinuating itself as the unnoticed ground upon which even the most explicit statements depend.

(Hanks, 1996: 140) The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority as it retains, is distributed over the whole context in which it appears.

(Berger, 1972: 29)

It is frequently remarked that we live in a visual age – in the words of Gombrich (1982: 137): ‘We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night’. The Mona Lisa (in Her multifarious guises) and King Kong, the Swastika and Cocoa-Cola are universal icons which few would fail to recognize and to respond to. The visual communicates directly and powerfully. How can pragmatics help us to understand the meanings of visual images or multi-modal discourse where the visual element is salient? Traditionally, pragmatics has been seen as a perspective on verbal communication, with its focus on language users, language use, and contexts of use, and the dynamics of the interaction between these interlocking elements.

This paper is an attempt to apply a pragmatic perspective beyond this more usual concern with verbal communication. The paper proposes to extend, in a systematic way, a pragmatic approach to the discussion of multi-modal discourse – in this instance, the marriage of the visual (symbol as a graphic representation) with the verbal (the accompanying discourses which prime and motivate understanding of how the symbol comes to make meanings). Others, such as Tanaka (1994), have used a pragmatic framework in their approach to visual texts, but are often restricted in their focus (Tanaka’s study is based on the theory of relevance as applied to advertising texts). Furthermore, preoccupation with structure (composition) and classification (genre) is often at the expense of how visual images are made to mean, their intended effects, and how they are received and responded to within the totality of contexts in which they occur and with which they interact. In pragmatic terms, this entails assessing their illocutionary point and force, perlocutionary effect(s) and uptake (Austin, 1962). The shifting contexts in which they appear make viewing images – and the swastika as symbol is a visual image – such a dynamic and complex activity. In their introduction to visual culture, Practices of Looking, Sturken and Cartwright (2001: 25) emphasize the significance of context for experiencing the visual:

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The capacity of images to affect us as viewers and consumers is dependent on the larger cultural meanings they invoke and the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they are viewed. Their meanings lie not within their image elements alone, but are acquired when they are ‘consumed’, viewed, and interpreted. The meanings of each image are multiple; they are created each time it is viewed.

What appears to be central is the activity of reading images rather than passively looking at them. Albert Manguel, in A History of Reading (1996: 27-28), argues that to look at an object is to be active in its creation: ‘By the mere fact of looking […] we have prolonged a memory from the beginnings of our time, preserved a thought long after the thinker has stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of creation [our italics] that remains open for as long as the incised images are seen, deciphered, read’. Calling to mind Sturken and Cartwright’s (2001) observations on contextual themes, Manguel (2002: 35) remarks in his companion volume, Reading Pictures, that: ‘If the circumstantial evidence surrounding any act of creation is part of that act [our italics], can any reading ever be said to be final, even if not conclusive? Can a picture ever be seen in its contextual entirety?’

To examine the swastika in its contextual entirety would involve, amongst other things, exploring this symbol in the light of what it has meant over the millennia. We do not read such loaded symbols with innocent eyes. As the art critic, James Elkins (1996: 591) has argued, when we view a painting or any visual image, we infuse it with our own experientially-driven meanings (quoted in Barnet, 2002: 21). The activity of reading the swastika is no exception. And it can only mean in a context.

Context, rather the dynamics of context, is the underlying concept in this paper (for fuller discussion, see Hoye, 2005). Being a contextually-driven perspective on communication, pragmatics sees context as paramount. It is, as Mey (2001: 14) declares: ‘the quintessential pragmatic concept’. In his comprehensive introduction to the theoretical basis of pragmatics, Verschueren (1999: 75f.) refers to Malinowski’s observations on ‘context of situation’ ‘as one of the necessary pillars of any theory of pragmatics’. Both authors argue the case for a contextually-oriented approach to communication. This approach we adopt and adapt in this paper. It is an approach familiar in art critic circles, where the interdependence of meaning with context and the individual’s engagement with the visual is often discussed in terms of reception theory (see Barnet, 2002).

Defining context is a major project in its own right. Common observations like ‘you need to hear/read/see it in context’ or ‘it’s all a matter of context’ acknowledge the role of context yet the term is often invoked with little explanation given of its scope and how it applies in the very real world of our actions and perceptions. The term is used here with an eye firmly fixed on its mediating effects (its powers of agency and its mediatory role in the instantiation of meaning) and modulating effects (its powers to modify and its controlling influence on meanings intended and meanings understood). Context is therefore seen as a complex dynamic – a serial combination of forces that stimulate change within the

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communicative process. Below we outline our understanding of context and define the related terms of recontextualisation, contextual driver and contextual trigger.

In its broadest sense, context refers to all the factors or circumstances which surround a particular event or phenomenon – be this attending a live concert, reading a poem, viewing a painting, recognizing a familiar logo, witnessing a trial, participating in live debate – whatever. And these circumstances always have a direct bearing on how we understand and respond to such events or phenomena. Something of the dynamics of context can be captured by way of some examples. The mediating effects of context can be very potent: contrast the cable TV broadcast of a football championship with the experience of seeing the game live; or of listening to their CD rather than being with the ‘Three Tenors’ in concert in the surroundings of the Stadio Braglia, Modena, Italy or in the Forbidden City, Beijing, China. Or, to situate us in the realm of fine art and wall painting, consider the impact of seeing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes in the flesh, live at the Vatican, rather than as reproductions on the living-room coffee table! And in the context of great art, of art’s greatest icon, context itself may draw the crowds and become the focus of attention in its own right. Recalling the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, Leader (2002: 3) remarks: ‘It was the empty space left by the vanished Mona Lisa that the crowds flocked to see. It was less a case of going to see a work of art because it was there, than, on the contrary, because it wasn’t there’!

The contextual setting can embody and trigger unique meanings and associations. The British archaeologist Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of a young Egyptian Pharaoh, Tutankhamen, in 1922, caused a worldwide sensation. It was possibly the most remarkable archaeological find of the twentieth century, and it was to provide unique insights into the mysteries and royal culture of ancient Egypt. The excavation of the tomb and subsequent retrieval of countless objects of beauty has become the stuff of legend and the mainstay of many an exhibition up to this day. Something of the sheer awe and excitement surrounding the discovery is captured by Carter’s own diary entry (November 26, 1922), describing what he witnessed when peering into the inner burial chamber of the tomb for the first time:

It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.

This is nothing less than living context! For Carter and his colleagues, the funereal objects possessed a signature all of their own, resonant with their surroundings, with their history and with the purpose they were originally destined to serve: to provide for the young Pharaoh in his new life in the next world. Now removed from their cradle of origin, portrayed as exhibits in a museum and thus divested of their funereal role, these

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‘extraordinary objects’ can now only hint at the wonder Carter and his team must have felt at their discovery.

In this instance, the physical environment, the tomb itself, is required for the meanings of the various objects to be fully articulated and properly understood in terms of their originator’s intentions. The terracotta tomb warriors of Shaanxi province, north-west China – another major archaeological discovery of the twentieth century – are a further case in point. Here, the site of the excavation itself – an enormous mausoleum – remains an integral part of the experience. Some 7,000 life-size figures and warriors and other artefacts have been excavated thus far and restored in situ. As with the artefacts in Tutankhamen’s tomb, this underground army, buried in front of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb, had the purpose of accompanying their master into the afterlife, in this case to defend him. It is as if the context fulfils and completes the meanings embodied by these tomb sculptures.

Removal of an object from one context necessarily involves its placement in another. We refer to this process of relocation as recontextualisation and use it in preference to the terms displacement and decontextualisation. The former expression refers to the process of moving something from one place or position to another; it carries with it the implication of some atavistic throwback, that there is one true, correct, or original placement of the object concerned. Any term with historical or ancestral connotations is inappropriate for treating the swastika, as we argue below. Decontextualisation, the extrapositioning of an object from the circumstances of its existence, its being as it were, is likewise considered inappropriate because it suggests that an object can somehow be ‘objectified’, ‘sanitised’, dehistoricised, or neutralised in terms of its surroundings.

When an object is recontextualised, new meanings are created, just as old ones are lost. Objects, in this sense, can not exist independently of their ‘new’ context, by which they undergo processes of contrast (with earlier context(s) if known) and transformation (as they negotiate the ‘here and now’ of their new-fashioned existence). Admittedly, Carter’s viewing of the objects in the setting of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings is very different from our viewing of those ‘same’ objects transformed, in the context of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Yet, context is always present: it is a constant, fluid and dynamic force. As André Malraux (1978: 13-14) remarked, museums ‘have imposed on the spectator a wholly new attitude towards the work of art’. Thus, whilst it was never intended – or at least envisioned or anticipated – that the tomb sculptures and artefacts in Egypt and China should see the light of day again, the recontextualisation that their discovery, excavation, and relocation has brought about remains potent and imbues these same objects with new and unfamiliar meanings. The process of recontextualisation where objects are presented for their aesthetic enjoyment – properly called aestheticization – may involve radical shifts in meaning. Would, for example, the representation of the Nazi swastika as an autonomous entity, somehow render the unacceptable acceptable? (Cf. Walter Benjamin, 1936, on the aestheticization of fascism.)

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As these examples demonstrate, context plays a constitutive role: it is immanent to the object it surrounds and accompanies. It permeates these same objects to infuse them with a complex of meanings. (The term object here is used to refer not only to the artefacts mentioned in the examples above but in a more general and abstract sense to refer to the material features of any semiotic system – linguistic, visual, or musical.) Context therefore is not some optional, tag-on, static dimension of meaning. This point is made forcefully by Halliday, 2003: 196) in his remarks on linguistic applications of Systemic Theory:

It is a general feature of semiotic systems that they develop and function in a context, and that meaning is a product of the relationship between the system and its environment […].

Elsewhere, Halliday (2003: 79) writes of the constraining role of context: the choice of a linguistic act and the meaning of the choice are determined by context. Perhaps, however, context is more about the liberation or generation of associations than about their constraint, and is determinative rather than deterministic. To adapt and apply this Hallidayan view to symbol: located in, say, social context A (for instance, current Hindu art and architecture) the use of the swastika is a function of its sacred status in Hindu iconography, which in turn determines how it is read as a common design motif. Located in another context, say context B (for instance, a costume party in the UK) the use of the swastika (as an integral part of a German Afrika Korps uniform) is problematical; its evident Nazi attribution would normally determine how it is read as the countersign of fascist politics and racist, Aryan dogma. The (re)location of the Nazi swastika within the frivolous context of a fancy dress party raises the fundamental issue of whether this particular symbol can be thus renamed or desymbolised. A chief aim of this article – where the concept of recontextualisation is central – is to explain that the contemporary discourses accompanying this unique symbol suggest that, in its occidental, Nazi guise, the swastika has become symbolically immutable and cannot be rewritten historically or imbued with ‘new’ meanings. At least not without provoking heated controversy.

Context is further invoked in terms of contextual triggers and contextual drivers. A contextual trigger is a stimulus, a causal phenomenon – verbal, visual, auditory, olfactory, or any combination of these – that acts as a trigger and sets in train a series of powerful and interdependent contextual drivers. The response to this initiating mechanism might be of a collective kind. In the case of Izzue.com, we conjecture that the socio-political and economic climate in Hong Kong in 2003, on the cusp of the SARS epidemic and its aftermath, largely engendered specific marketing initiatives that characterised how business was conducted by the relevant sectors of the community and how it was driven by the commercial imperatives of the moment. Alternatively, the response might be of an individual kind, which we have defined elsewhere as the context of psychological disposition (Kaiser and Hoye, in preparation). This particular contextual factor is what Carl Jung in Man and his Symbols (1964: 36) calls a psychological ‘cue’ or ‘trigger’; it may

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account for the onset of benign – or, as here, with Izzue.com – malign memories or associations, as ‘when a sight, smell or sound recalls a circumstance in the past’. Jung writes:

A girl, for instance, may be busy in her office, apparently in good health and spirits. A moment later she develops a blinding headache and shows other signs of distress. Without consciously noticing it, she has heard the foghorn of a distant ship, and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting with a lover whom she has been doing her best to forget.

The contextual trigger as we define it is a conscious, motivated response rather than a subliminal reaction. It is to do with the ‘intentional’ rather than the ‘unintentional’ contents of the mind (Jung, 1964: 37).

The term contextual driver makes deliberate analogy to (loudspeaker) driver technology, where the synergy between one (electro-) mechanical component and another is a process involving the transmission of motion and power. Contextual drivers are to be seen as dynamic forces which act upon each other and mediate the discourse they accompany. Our working definition of this concept for this paper is as follows. A contextual driver refers to any event or state of affairs (socio- cultural/ economic/ political in origin, etc.) which has a direct bearing on our understanding and hence response to a given stimulus: verbal, visual, or multi-modal. In the general context of the Izzue.com marketing campaign, a number of contextual drivers can be identified: the nature of the Nazi swastika symbol (and as compared with the symbols or emblems of other totalitarian regimes, such as the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Empire); historiographical practices and traditions in the writing of histories on Dictatorships and Totalitarian regimes and, not least, the persistent media focus on Hitler and the Third Reich; the Holocaust engine and discourses on genocide and racism. Contextual drivers are fluid categories of contextual function; they impact on each other and to some extent merge. Thus, in terms of modern history and the twentieth century, mention of genocide is to invoke the age of totalitarian collectivism and the historiographical discourses surrounding the mass slaughters committed by totalitarian regimes, amongst them: the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, Stalin’s purges in Russia, the excesses of the Mao regime in China, the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Armenian massacre in the Ottoman Empire, not to mention the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan Genocide (Rubinstein, 2004: 7-8). How one identifies contextual drivers and enumerates them is more a matter of descriptive convenience for the outside observer than a true and profound reflection of the myriad realities and associations that such ‘horrifying, repellent and barbaric practices’ might have had and still have for those involved in and who survived any of these and other mass killings.

It is essential to note that these diverse contextual elements form a series, a network of connections. In this regard, the contextual theory advanced here, which we call Matrix Analysis, is not unrelated to Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) ethnographic study of discourse,

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known as Nexus Analysis or ‘the study of the ways in which ideas or objects are linked together’ (2004: viii). In their system, this entails ‘the mapping of semiotic cycles of people, discourses, places, and mediational means involved in the social actions’ that are being studied (2004: viii). Fully endorsing the vital role of context, the authors state that ‘nothing happens in a social and political vacuum’ (2004: viii). In contrast to Scollon and Scollon, we do not propose an extended ethnographic theory of communication: our approach focuses primarily on the interlacing or patterning of a wide variety of contextual cues, specifically in relation to symbol (although this is not to deny the potential for wider application of the theory). Contextual triggers and drivers create their own matrix or matrices. In the case of the swastika, the constellation of contextual triggers and drivers is a complex and formidable mix of elements. They become an inextricable part of that symbol and are invoked whenever it is used. They and it fuse to become a highly potent visual pragmatic act.

3. The Trigger and the Uptake: Hong Kong, Late Summer 2003

In many ways SARS could not have hit Hong Kong at a worse time. […] All of a sudden, the hint of [economic] optimism was shattered. Passenger arrivals by air and land collapsed and tourism dried up. Hotels were reporting lettings in the single digits. Domestic economic activity ground to a near halt as restaurants and shops were deserted.

(Brown, 2004: 190) How then can artists and graphic designers communicate cross-culturally? If our culture sets the parameters of our vision, then how can we hope to communicate to others whose visions are colored by quite different cultural lenses? […] Although absolute translation is rarely possible, cross-cultural interpretation of a design or work of art is attainable. Those communicating across cultural borders, however, must be prepared for the possible reinterpretation of their work along somewhat different lines. As long as misinterpretation is avoided, we should be satisfied when our work speaks back to us with a foreign accent. That is, in fact, how we know that we have been successful; it says to us that we have communicated meaningfully to others on their own terms.

(Guldin, 1995: vi) We live in a world where boundaries are fluid and where things that were once serious are all too easily made trivial.

(Hoffman, 2002: 6)

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Setting the Scene

Towards the end of June 2003, Hong Kong was removed from the WHO’s (World Health Organization) list of SARS-affected areas. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) had plagued the former British colony for 100 days. It had been a 100 days of anxiety and fear. Territory-wide hysteria was fuelled by the embattled rhetoric of local and international media coverage (Lo, 2005: 35; Eagleton, 2004). The sinister virus was likened to the plague, reports even recalling the great influenza outbreak following the First World War, when over 20 million people died worldwide (Lo, 2005: 34). SARS not only wreaked havoc amongst the population, it had a devastating (if temporary) impact on the local economy. As multinationals pulled out their employees, as tourists stayed away in droves and as the WHO maintained its travel advisory, Hong Kong became acutely aware that it had been isolated, now to stand alone. As Loh and Welker (2004: 218) comment: ‘Hong Kong’s economic lifeblood is the constant flow of people, cargo, services and capital. When people started to avoid Hong Kong, the perception of residents was that they had been forsaken’. To walk its streets was to witness a wasteland: walkways, restaurants, hiking trails, cinemas and shopping malls were all but deserted.

By the time our tale of the swastika hit the front pages, the drama and economic fallout caused by SARS had begun to subside, but the some 300 lives it had claimed and the citywide devastation it had brought about lingered in the public conscious. How could the general mood be captured? There was, perhaps, a collective feeling that, like the bacillus in Camus’ The Plague, the SARS coronavirus ‘never dies or disappears for good […] and that for the bane and the enlightening of men’ it might rise again ‘in a happy city’ (Camus, trans. Gilbert, 1948: 252).

Perspectives

Against this setting, it is plausible to suggest that there were in fact a number of contextual triggers at work. The need to rebound from the socio-economic ravages of SARS was a very real community-wide imperative and not least amongst the retail bloc. In order to survive, commercial interests needed to reach out to the general public and continually try and persuade them to buy into a particular life style. Or, as Dyer (1982: 5) comments in Advertising as Communication, ‘Advertising is one of the means used by manufacturing and service industries to ensure the distribution of commodities to people in society at large and is designed to create demands for such goods and services’. Marketing design teams operate with their own precepts yet whatever the preferred advertising strategy happens to be, it needs to ensure that that demand is somehow created and nurtured. At the time, Hong Kong badly needed to rebuild it reputation as the ‘Shopping Paradise’ and to rekindle consumer confidence, locally as well as internationally. There are local as well global strategies in marketing and advertising which might inform the approach of the Izzue.com marketing team.

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Enter the Players: Izzue.com

We conjecture that some time in early summer 2003, with the added imperative to restore something of their ailing finances following the SARS epidemic, fashion retailers throughout the territory – along with other sectors of the economy – were busy preparing for their Fall/Winter season. At that time, the worst excesses of SARS seemed to be over, as the siege mentality yielded to mounting optimism and the prospect of a brighter, more prosperous future. Following Hong Kong’s removal from the WHO’s list of SARS-affected areas, the government announced a HK $ 400 million promotion plan to lure back Mainland and overseas tourists (Chiu and Galbraith, 2004: xxvii).

Enter http://www.izzue.com – not just a website, but a fashion chain of 14 retail outlets, with flagship stores in the central district and other main shopping areas spread across Hong Kong. According to its website, Izzue.com ‘suggests not only a fashion brand for the younger generation, but also a benchmark [sic] of the latest desirable products’. How might the marketing team promote the label and their new men’s collection? If art aspires to the timeless, advertising has a ‘certain impatience with the world’ and leans to the immediate effect, for ‘in advertising the span of time that gets the most attention is the short attention span’ (Hoffman, 2002: 10). What could Izzue.com use as part of its attention-grabbing strategy? How could Izzue.com propel their autumn collection into the marketplace, making an immediate and striking impact on this small yet culturally diverse, East-meets-West community, boasting several million well-healed shoppers?

In Marketing Across Cultures, Trompenaars and Woolliams (2004: 98) remark that ‘The influence of ascribed status in Chinese culture is most conspicuous in the use of authorities and experts in marketing campaigns’. With rapid economic development on the Mainland, this influence has become increasingly prominent. According to these authors, status is not simply a matter of people: it is more abstract in its realisation and broader in scope than its more usual human attribution would suggest: ‘Status is […] also ascribed to buildings, locations, etc.’ (2004: 99). A case in point are the several colas modelled on the American Coca-Cola brand which have ‘emerged and disappeared in China’. Could it not also be that a symbol – with political and corporate clout – might also serve as an ‘expert’ model, albeit within the Hong Kong context? The invocation and subversion of a well-known – even if controversial – symbol would surely fit the bill nicely, and lend itself to restatement and reinvention in a new context.

In Cross-Cultural Design, Steiner & Haas (1995: 10) argue that ‘To qualify as a true cross-cultural design […] it is necessary for an image to be transformed in some way; to be appropriated and redefined. An image should be more than a quotation that gives a sense of local color. It must take on a new significance in the context [our italics].’ One of the categories of design technique these authors identify (1995: 28-35) is symbolism: ‘Here objects are transformed by being placed in an unexpected context’ (1995: 28). The authors refer to this process of transformation as ‘displacement’ – we use the term re-

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contextualisation, for reasons argued above – by which an image from one culture comes to represent and comment on a concept in another. The particular symbol Izzue.com have in mind is widely acknowledged for its graphical potency. The transient nature of the advertising enterprise would ensure that whatever was deployed would not be there for it to fester too long in the public imagination. And there were local precedents for this brand of advertising.

Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army had already been appropriated by an upmarket Hong Kong competitor, Shanghai Tang, purveyors of chic and traditional Chinese clothing and accessories, including ‘witty [sic] gift items like cufflinks featuring Chairman Mao’ (http://newyork.citysearch.com/). The many downtown antique and curio shops that populate the Hollywood Road and local markets have long been peddling artefacts from the Cultural Revolution – clocks, plates, busts and other communist memorabilia – where the late Chairman Mao looms large, possibly conjuring up romantic images of the past, and of other ‘glorious’ revolutions. In the light of these contextual imperatives, the marketing team at Izzue.com had to be seen by their peers to be innovative, daring and provocative. They might not have the deep corporate pockets of their competitors to produce lavish TV commercials or glossy mailshots but they did have recourse to the kind of shock tactics that have so frequently hallmarked the advertising campaigns of the likes of Italian clothing franchise Benetton. Deploying controversial advertising techniques and themes (war, Aids, racism, birth, sex, death, capital punishment) and trusting in the oft-gruesome reality of photojournalist-type images to vividly project them, Benetton the company has become synonymous with its ‘shockvertising’ strategy. If, to put it crudely, the basic tenet of advertising is to grab the consumer’s attention and to keep it grabbed long enough to clinch a sale or, minimally, to keep a company and its brand in the public purview, then Benetton is a model exemplar.

Perhaps Izzue.com could take a leaf out of Benetton’s manual on communication strategy? Perhaps it might draw inspiration from Benetton’s advertising philosophy? Olivero Toscani – onetime creative director at Benetton – once described its brand of advertising as ‘a Rorschach test of what you bring to the image’ (Oliviero Toscani’s advertising Philosophy, The Center for Interactive Advertising, www.ciadveretising.org). His take on the use of images in advertising is characteristically apposite:

Using […] images in [an] unconventional way is an effort by Benetton to break through the complacency that exists in our society due to the constant flow of even the most horrendous realities communicated through conventional media such as the evening news or the morning paper. By removing these images from their familiar contexts and putting them in a new context they are more likely to be noticed and given the attention they deserve as the viewer becomes involved in the process of answering the questions: What does this image mean? Why does this image appear with a Benetton logo? How do I feel about the subject of the image? What can I do?

(cited in Ganesan, 2003: 6)

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Save for a later claim by Izzue.com’s parent company IT, that its marketing strategies show “IT has a little bit of attitude” (Simon Parry, South China Morning Post, sec. A., November 9, 2003). it is impossible to say, in the absence of hard evidence, that Benetton was their Muse yet, given the very real contextual imperatives of the marketplace referred to above, it is not implausible that the ‘shockvertising’ background culture this company has engendered might also have had some bearing on Izzue.com’s decision to launch its very own controversial advertising campaign. Highly controversial campaign, as it turns out …

The Plot: A Symbol Rides out to Public Outcry

On 9th August 2003, the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, carried the following headlines: “Nazi-themed fashion promotion outrages shoppers”. The article continued:

Walking into any of fashion chain http://www.izzue.com’s 14 stores is like taking a trip back to the dark days of Nazi Germany – with swastikas and party logos displayed on the walls and flags hanging from the ceiling. The symbols – and references to dictator Adolf Hitler – are also emblazoned on clothes for sale.

(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 9, 2003)

Every store in the 14-group Izzue.com chain carried the spectacle of Nazi-themed lines of clothing, including T-shirts and trousers featuring portraits of Adolf Hitler and assorted other Nazi symbols. Fluttering ominously in regimented rows, like volk saluting at a Nuremberg rally, red flags and banners hung unfurled from the ceilings to display their sinister black gammadions framed by the double lightning flashes, symbols of the SS, and the imperial eagle astride an iron cross, bearer of the Third Reich.

So complete was the panoply of Nazi regalia, that it is easy to overlook the absence of the white disk, the habitual cradle of the Nazi swastika. It is as if Izzue.com had created a pasticcio of Nazi symbols, a parody of the echt symbolism of the Third Reich. With what can at best be described as a macabre desire for ‘authenticity’, one store set the visual event to the accompaniment of Nazi propaganda films and recorded speeches, like a ham-fisted Riefenstahlesque montage of Nazi regalia. This seemingly blatant and cynical manipulation of the Nazi propaganda machine made for a potent cocktail of innuendo which all but eclipsed the perpetrations of the original Nazi symbology. There is nothing ‘witty’ (cf. comments about the design of cufflinks featuring Chairman Mao) about this concatenation of symbols.

Of course the motivations with which we have credited the Izzue.com design team are largely a matter of conjecture; given the remoteness of the local culture from the occidental trappings of the ‘reinvented’ symbol, it could be argued that the designers were simply inept. Perhaps they just lacked intercultural awareness, although this would hardly exonerate them from being responsible for their actions! More importantly, the reporting in South

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China Morning Post does suggest the design team were at least partly aware of what they were doing, even if they failed to anticipate the consequences.

At one of the stores, a salesman reportedly said: ‘We always have a military theme. We had American military uniforms last summer and we have the German one this summer’ (Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 9, 2003). At the time, GI uniforms lacked the sinister connotations of their Nazi counterparts. (Some might argue today that, in the light of the 2003 US-UK led Iraq War, and the international ruckus this has engendered, the uniform has lost something of its ‘innocence’, if not entirely its fashion appeal.) What was crucially different is that, now, the military trappings were not contemporary statements but historical incarnations drawn from the Nazi era of the 1930s and 1940s. As suggested above, the Izzue.com implementation of Nazi designs was more one of reinvention and adaptation than one of faithful reproduction down to the last detail – to wit the absence of the white disk; the modified design of the iron cross with the swastika superimposed in its centre (when compared with the 1939 version). However, the designers seemed to be fully acquainted with much of Nazi symbology: the colour themes of red, white and black; the eagle; the iron cross; banners, and drapes. By their manipulation of the various symbols, it was clear that the designers’ intentions were to ascribe these same symbols the status of fashion icons, a ploy that would mesh with their marketing prerogatives. This hardly smacks of ineptness at the level of graphic design.

The decision to use Nazi regalia led, not surprisingly, to a mighty furore, which brought the campaign and, a little later, the sale of its associated merchandise, to an ignominious end. Asked what was meant by the campaign, Izzue.com’s marketing manager remarked:

This is Hong Kong, and Chinese people are not sensitive about Nazism. If you grab 10 young people from the street and ask them if they know what Nazism is, I bet you none of them would answer ‘yes’. People should not be too sensitive. It is simply the creative work of a very politically ignorant and insensitive designer […] We’re not sure that this issue is so serious that we have the whole thing [the sale of Nazi-themed products] pulled. It would cost millions of dollars to replace the line. Most of the complaints are from foreigners, but our customer base is local Chinese. Even the local [Chinese-language] papers didn’t make a big deal out of this.

(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 12, 2003)

The following week, South China Morning Post carried the editorial ‘Such crass insensitivity threatens our reputation’ (August 17, 2003). Whilst the marketing manager’s statement, it argued, was no justification for the use of Nazi symbols for commercial purposes, the tenor of her comments exposed the widespread ignorance in Hong Kong of the Nazis and their awful agenda. It were as if remoteness in time, place and culture could somehow be used to justify belittling the relevance of the Nazi Holocaust within the Asian – or at least Hong Kong – perspective. Ironically, perpetrators and victims alike might now be

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seen – if they were seen at all – through the inverted lens of a rather different kind of Otherness than that described by Edward Said (1979) in Orientalism. Now it is a case of the Orient exercising an authority over the West and seeing itself as if mirrored by that opposition. The enormities committed by the West in the West are now viewed more lightly in the East than in the West. That would be a plausible cultural frame perhaps. This perspective is analogous with anthropological and ethnographical approaches to communication and the view that different speech communities not only have different ways of speaking but envision the world differently, according to their own local norms and conventions. In the present instance, it is not ways of speaking that are at issue and the cultural scripts which frame them, rather the concern is with ‘ways of seeing’ or ‘ways of reading’ images. Viewing use of the swastika as a momentary aberration, a trivial ineptitude without consequence, would be a pretty extreme form of cultural relativism. Yet, as the above editorial was to conclude, the issue was not simply a matter of Hong Kong’s international standing: ‘Being aware of what the Nazis did therefore, is not simply to take an interest in past events in distant lands, it is to gain insight into and understanding of [the racist] problems that persist today’.

A Visual Pragmatic Act

Leaving aside the question of the origins and migrations of the swastika through history (which we consider briefly in the next section), its appropriation by Izzue.com raises further questions about the public response the designers were hoping to encourage. The short, simple and cynical answer is that they deliberately courted controversy to gain public attention, secure the limelight, and pack in the customers, voyeurs and consumers alike. If that were the intent, the ploy backfired as the company was obliged to issue a public apology through an advertisement in the South China Morning Post, as well as to withdraw all its merchandise. It had clearly underestimated the public response.

The display of Nazi regalia was a complex set of what we call Visual Pragmatic Acts (VPAs for short). VPAs are related to speech acts in linguistics but our use of the term is properly analogous with Mey’s theory of Pragmatic Acts (2001) and the view that all communication is situated activity, involving the agent and the act performed within a given context. Referring to verbal discourse, Mey (2001: 94) writes:

The language we use, and in particular the speech acts we utter, are entirely dependent on the context of the situation in which such acts are produced. All speech is situated speech; a speech act is never just an ‘act of speech’, but should be considered in the total situation of activity of which it is a part … and therefore … it is always a pragmatic act rather than a mere speech act.

Pragmatic acts involve adaptation to the environment. To cite Mey once again, their instantiation derives its force ‘from the situation in which they are appropriately uttered’ (2001: 219). The ‘situation’ to which Mey alludes is nothing less than the contextual

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triggers and drivers – the contextual matrix – discussed above. Meaning derives not from the language itself or from some predetermined match between utterance and uptake, but through the particular synergies created when user, language and concrete circumstance interact (cf. Mey 2001: 219-223). The relevance of pragmatic act for visual or multi-modal discourse immediately becomes apparent. The image or symbol does not mean by itself. It cannot be ‘desymbolised’ for its (symbolic) meaning is instantiated once it synergizes with and is articulated within a concrete situation.

Consider, for example, Alfred Keete’s famous poster depicting Lord Kitchener, an image which was subsequently adopted for use in a wartime recruiting poster (‘Your country needs you’) and later adapted in many different versions. The original depicts Kitchener, face on, head and upper torso full frame, gaze fixed on the viewer, arm, hand and forefinger outstretched, pointing directly at the viewer. The look is at once stern, proud, austere, commanding – in short, engaging. We might call it the Mona Lisa effect, except that there is no ambivalence as to how the viewer is intended to understand the force of the gaze: ‘Your country needs you’ … ‘So sign up (be a patriot/fight for King and country/show your true mettle/or else)’. The visual act could be regarded as a prototypical directive (Searle 1979). Ultimately, however, it can only be properly understood as such once circumstance and intention are taken into account. There are a number of ‘ifs’ at stake here. Some of them might be: if it is wartime, if government is actively recruiting, if the viewer has not already been conscripted/is not already signed up, if the viewer – better, reader – is able and willing to join up, if the image is consumed as an encouragement/instruction/ warning (rather than, say, as the advertisement for a film, a portrait of a great military man, or as an aestheticized exhibit in the poster collection of the Imperial War Museum in London). The explanatory power of pragmatic acts lies in its focus on the environment. To quote Mey again: ‘The emphasis is … on characterizing a general situational prototype, capable of being executed in the situation’ (2001: 221). Mey labels the prototype or generalised pragmatic act as a pragmeme and its instantiation in a particular situation, as a pract.

Reports at the time copies of the poster went up (September 1914) suggest that it did make an active and positive impact on numbers signing up, even if it cannot be credited with the initial surge in patriotism (cf. Imperial War Museum, London: ‘Transcription for Kitchener Recruitment Poster’). The uptake was then, in many cases, the action of signing up, where the poster served as a catalyst, or a spur to action that made a difference in the world. That said, it is impossible to know what was really going on in the minds of these eager young recruits, beyond the most general of observations about their determination to be part of the war effort or, in some cases, to be conscientious objecters. The themes and discourses of war are highly complex contextual matrices. In fact, little did the innocent recruits realize, or the country at large for that matter, that, far from the widespread expectation, war was not to be over by the Christmas of 1914 and that in early 1916, 16

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months later, as the death toll mounted and new men were required, conscription was introduced for the first time in British history. This postscript necessarily modifies how we see that poster in the context of this essay, as an object in a museum, or in terms of any other forum where it becomes situated. At every instantiation, the image becomes a unique VPA or, to adapt Mey’s term, a visual pract (2001).

The passion to effect change in the mindsets of people – to entice, to cajole, to shock, to awe, to persuade – whatever the motivation is for spurring them into action – is certainly a creative urge and one that is common not just to the kind of recruitment propaganda mentioned above. It is common to advertising in general. Peter Kropotokin’s anarchist doctrine of ‘propaganda by the deed’ with its emphasis on decisive physical actions, such as political assassination or acts of terrorism, is an extreme manifestation of pragmatic act but it is not wholly removed in its rationale from the shockvertising strategies of Benetton discussed above. Nor is it, perhaps, wholly removed from Izzue.com’s decision to thematize Nazi regalia for commercial purposes. For many, the invocation of the Nazi swastika and its sinister attributes is itself an act of violence, or ‘advertising by the deed’ to corrupt Kropotokin’s injunction. Certainly, the perceived inappropriateness of re-contextualising the swastika and thus harnessing its meanings to the prerogatives of a marketing campaign in the Asian context, involved making a series of VPAs which caused maximum offence to individuals and institutions. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York was outright in its condemnation which it linked to not simply Jewish suffering but to racist-inspired atrocities, wherever committed:

Apparently, some believe that the use of images of Hitler, swastikas and other Nazi symbols connote the symbols of strength. In fact, these images should remind the people of Asia of their own suffering at the hands of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany’s ally during World War II. Indeed, we owe it to the six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust that Nazi symbols should forever invoke the horrors of genocide, racism and anti-Semitism that Hitler and his henchmen brought on the world.

(Simon Wiesenthal Center, New York, 11 August 2003)

The message’s didacticism was echoed in the discourse of many respondents. The responses of the local German and Israeli Consuls are cases in point:

‘It’s totally inappropriate because these symbols of the Nazi regime stand for cruelty and crimes against humanity’, remarked the German Vice-Consul in Hong Kong. ‘It is unbearable to think that anyone can design a marketing campaign that desecrates the deaths of millions of people’, echoed his Israeli counterpart.

(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 12, 2003).

The German Consul-General further observed that:

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They [Izzue.com] used the symbols as a [public relations] gag. Those symbols are no longer innocent. It is their mistake […] [and] they should admit to it. They should have thought about it earlier and chosen a politically less contentious symbol that does not relate to crimes against humanity.

For many, parading Nazi symbols was tantamount to glorifying the Japanese rape of Nanking, itself described by one commentator as “The forgotten holocaust of World War II” (Chang, 1997).

What is the power of this symbol? What sets it apart from, say, iconic images of Stalin or Mao, or commercial uses of the Communist hammer and sickle, banner of the former Soviet Union? Answering these questions involves examination of the matrix of contextual drivers referred to earlier: the Nazi swastika in opposition to other totalitarian symbols; the practice of writing histories on Hitler and other Dictators, coupled with the constant media focus and attention on Hitler and The Third Reich; and the Holocaust engine and discourses on genocide. An overview of these issues is offered in the next section.

4. The Matrix: The Swastika, the Nazis, the Reconstruction of a Symbol

Men have been encouraged to project upon their nation or the state godlike attributes of wisdom and power they would never claim in their right minds for themselves as identifiable individuals. Symbols like Fatherland, King, Il Duce, the Old Flag, serve to unite in compulsive automatic behaviour people who might, in relation to the everyday realities of the common life, exercise rational judgment and good sense.

(Mumford, 1938: 359)

We have suggested that a unique confluence of contextual triggers – the ravages of SARS; the attendant economic downturn in Hong Kong; robust (and often exaggerated) international media coverage of the scourge; the general siege mentality, territory-wide; the perceived need for radical marketing initiatives; trends and styles in global and local (glocal) marketing and advertising strategies – drove Izzue.com to create a series of Visual Pragmatic Acts, namely the incarnation of Nazi symbols for commercial ends, as part of their Hong Kong marketing campaign. These visual acts elicited a variety of (mostly hostile) responses from the local Chinese and expatriate and international communities. It is argued that these responses can be accounted for in terms of a number of contextual drivers: the nature of the swastika symbol itself; the public discourse on genocide and Holocaust; historiographical practice; media focus on and preoccupation with Nazism and the Third Reich.

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Tracing the Swastika: The Swastika as Symbol

The design, as a new identity, acts as a catalyst. It makes an organization focus on what it does, who it is, and where it’s going.

(Steiner and Haas, 1995: 144) It was the strength of fascism in general that it [the swastika] realized, as other political movement and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century Europe had entered a visual age, the age of political symbols, such as the national flag or the national anthem – which, as instruments of mass politics in the end proved more effective than any didactic speeches.

(Mosse 1999, cited in Heller, 2000: 60)

Whilst contextually significant, the discourses surrounding the swastika – tracing its origins and history, its functions, and the myths and cults of swastika lore – are dealt with comprehensively elsewhere (cf. Heller, 2000; Quinn, 1994; Wilson, 1894) and thus attract only very brief commentary here. Described in a major nineteenth century monograph (Wilson, 1894: 763) – thus predating its adoption and adaptation by the German Nazi Party – as ‘the earliest known symbol’, the swastika has a rich socio-cultural and contextual base and one which is uniquely disparate in its origins and global reach. Its iconographic diversity is comprehensively recorded in Wilson (1894) in terms of: ‘geographic dispersion’ – it surfaces throughout the Far East, the Near East, Africa, Ancient Greece, the Mediterranean, and Asia – and ‘the migration of symbols’ – where the aetiology of the swastika is seen as a process of migration and reconstruction, rather than as one of ‘independent invention’ (Wilson, 1894: 983). Although its origin(s) and early history seem forever ‘lost in antiquity’ (Wilson, 1894: 948), there are, as Heller (2000: 28) records ‘an extraordinary number of extant examples from all periods and from all parts of the globe’. In its many nineteenth and early twentieth century guises, and prior to its Nazification, the symbol was regularly deployed as an inoffensive design logo with religious, decorative, and commercial applications, carrying with it positive connotations of ‘well-being’ and ‘good fortune’. The swastika had many such benign uses. Rudyard Kipling adopted the swastika as his personal logo; likewise the Staatliches Bauhaus, the Swedish company Allmänna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget, and the Danish brewing giant Carlsberg; Coca-Cola issued a swastika pendant and it also embellished many a household and leisure artefact (see Heller, 2000: 81-105). The symbol has played – and continues to play – an important symbolic role in many world religions such as: Hinduism; Buddhism; Jainism; and to a lesser extent in Abrahamic religions. It is found in Chinese and Japanese cultures (temples and shrines on Japanese maps are regularly indicated by a little swastika, with the ‘hooks’ sometimes turning right, sometimes left); until just after the outbreak of World War II, it was used by Native American tribes; it is also evidenced in many pre-Christian European traditions.

Heller (2000: 41) suggests that the arms of the swastika ‘could very well symbolize folklore, mythology, occultism, and ideology, for these underscored its significance during

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the early twentieth century’. The symbol underwent a series of metamorphoses before being adopted by the Nazis, the chief grounds for which were its dubious Aryan credentials as the countersign of a Nordic master race and, from the design viewpoint, its graphic directness and simplicity. Overtones of racial purity, purging and supremacy abound and its anti-Semitic message made explicit by Hitler himself, in this extract about the new Nazi flag from his autobiography, Mein Kampf (1925-1926): ‘In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic’. Furthermore, as Whittick (1960: 272) records, in his speeches, Hitler would refer ‘to the swastika as that symbol of resurrection, of the revival of national life’ thus emphasizing the symbol’s association with its traditional values of regeneration and renewal. It should be noted that the swastika did not appear cold, but customarily in the middle of a white disk, this in turn set against a red background.

Yet, as Heller (2000: 60) argues, the precise manner of the symbol’s adoption ‘has been veiled by the mythology created by and for Adolf Hitler in an attempt to purge any outside influence from his past’. In the end, the usurpation of the swastika or, as it is called, the Hakenkreuz, by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP, lasted for only a short span in the symbol’s several-thousand-year history, that is from its official adoption by the Nazis in 1920 until 1946, when it was constitutionally banned – and remains banned – from any public display in Germany. Whilst not prohibited by law elsewhere, and leaving aside the claims of revisionists, rehabilitators, and fetishists, there is widespread aversion to its re-use or reinvention today, for whatever purpose, regardless of its pre-Nazi past and how once it travelled the world as a symbol of luck and good fortune.

Hitler, as professed author of the Nazi swastika, took full credit for its compelling design and newly-fashioned purpose. His was a very personal as well as professional obsession with its reinvention and freshly minted propagandist role. The swastika enjoyed pivotal status in the context of Nazi propaganda and pageantry. Its complete and creative dissemination and deployment, chiefly through the expert offices of Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, and Albert Speer, ‘Hitler’s Architect’, ensured the symbol its unique place and potency in the articulation of Nazi identity and ideology:

Even the most vociferous opponents of Nazism agree that Hitler’s ‘identity system’ is the most ingeniously consistent graphic program ever devised. That he succeeded in transmuting an ancient symbol that had such a long-lasting historical significance into one even more indelible – and in such a comparatively short span of time – is attributable to his complete mastery of the design and propaganda processes.

(Heller, 2000: 69)

Hitler and swastika are as one and their association a unique symbiosis in the annals of totalitarian symbology. The full measure of the symbol, which was to take on a life of its

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own, is vividly captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s pioneering masterpiece of political propaganda: Triumph des Willens, Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary – rather glorification – of Hitler and his symbol, made during the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. Hitler, symbol, Fatherland are inseparable and interchangeable. A minute after the film opens to a Wagnerian theme, the Nazi eagle fades in slowly, relieving the otherwise dark screen. Nearly two hours later, as the film closes to the final strains of Horst Wessel Lied, the national anthem of the Nazi party, a huge swastika is superimposed on the screen, in the final sequence, before the scene fades, once again to black. In his closing speech at the rally, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, fiercely proclaims: ‘The Party is Hitler! Hitler is Germany just as Germany is Hitler! Hitler!’ As Quinn (1994: 64) observes: ‘When Hitler is absent in Riefenstahl’s film, his place is taken by the swastika, which, like the image of the Führer, becomes a switching station for personal and national identities’. Who was Hitler; with what did the swastika cohere? The British historian, J. M. Roberts (1999: 402), sums up the man in this way:

No simple formula … contains Hitler or his aims. He expressed Germany’s resentments and exasperations in their most negative and destructive forms and embodied them to a monstrous degree. Obsessed and haunted as he was by the fanatical animosities shaped in his youth, he was given scope by economic disaster, political cynicism and a favourable arrangement of international forces to release these negative qualities at the expense of all Europeans, Germans included. In doing so, he felt no internal restraints and the oputcome was a barbaric regime and international disaster.

No matter, then, the histories of the swastika with their tales of goodness and well-being: to read the Nazi swastika is to bear witness to the hideous acts and atrocities enacted by the Nazi regime. To deploy the swastika, for whatever ends, is to prostitute, is to extol these appalling associations. For symbol is a broad term which in everyday use refers, as Whittick (1960: 3) remarks, to ‘all [our italics] that is meant by a sign, mark or token’. A symbol is thus understood to stand for something else, to trigger an immediate, powerful and enduring association with what it represents. There is a demonstrable symbolic association between the swastika and its use in the occidental context of Nazi rhetoric, with its racist imperative. The sheer horror of the Nazi atrocities and the immorality of their agenda have impacted on the symbol well beyond its use in the World War II arena, as emblem of hatred, racism and annihilation. The symbol has thereby been appropriated from its other, wider world contexts and divested of all and any of its hitherto positive connotations. Asian commentators and others might well condemn its occidental (mis-) use and apologists argue for the rehabilitation of its more primitive contexts of use. But arguments for the symbol’s restoration or reclamation are naïve at best. They ignore, at their peril, the potency of the Nazi message and its appeal in quarters where racist dogma looms large. The powerful symbolism of the swastika makes it a rallying cry for neo-Nazis and other hate groups. For as long as the swastika is equated with Hitler and Nazism, its symbolic status will be

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determined by the force of that unique and terrible association. It is for this reason that we have argued in the introduction that the swastika needs to be read ‘against’ context, where the symbol can be seen to act as a meaning-producing agent in its own right. ‘Without context’, says Quinn 1994: 11), ‘analysis can become a set of prejudices and opinions’. A reading of the swastika as a ‘symbol in context’ – here, its contemporary use as a marketing tool – reveals the inappropriateness of a marketing strategy which implicitly seeks to divest such a powerful symbol of its associations or somehow to mask their true import. Citing Hodder (1982: 213), Quinn (1994: 11) draws attention to how a contemporary reading of the swastika must inevitably takes these associations into account:

While the distant origin of a particular trait may be of little significance in a present context, the more immediate history is relevant. The total history of swastikas is less relevant to the present meaning of this sign than its more recent associations [our italics]. In general, the choice of a symbol as part of a present strategy must be affected by at least its immediately previous use.

The swastika remains tainted. Its deployment, regardless of intention or purpose, is to expose and to exploit the symbol’s Nazi attributions. The role of the symbol in the history of design and socio-political persuasion is unique. No other symbol in the history of the twentieth century enjoys the swastika’s status nor is there one so stigmatised. Compare the communist hammer and sickle, dual symbols connoting the alliance of the industrial worker and the peasant, and a banner in whose name many an innocent life was plundered. As consumers of symbols we do not always rationalise their use. The hammer and sickle takes on almost Romantic associations with youth and the heady 1960s, an instance of revolutionary chic, with an impact and appeal not unlike that of the mythical, larger-than-life figure of Che Guevara. It is redolent with humankind’s aspirations to better its lot. But can the hammer and sickle and the swastika be compared? Symbols they may be, but is this really comparing like with like? Nazism never could be and never was a noble aspiration. How could it be with its agenda of racial purging and assertion of racial supremacy? In his autobiography, the British social historian Eric Hobsbawm (2003: 130) writes disarmingly of his alignment with the left which, as he acknowledges, was a far greater attraction for intellectuals than the right, in the first part of the twentieth century. He cites the Belgian academic, Pierre Ryckmans, who offers a poignant contrast between leftist versus rightist allegiances: ‘All of us in the intellectual world know people who have been communists who have changed their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?’ Communism had/has its ideals. Michael Halliday (2003, 222) cites communism as the ‘textbook illustration’ of what he calls an FFT (Failed First Try), and the tenor of his commentary hints, perhaps, at the very idealism and humanity of which Nazism is so totally devoid:

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Here [in communism] people tried for the first time to design history on a theoretical foundation; and we all know the result – the kind of peasant-dynastic state capitalism that went under the name of communism was a prototypical instance of FFT. No doubt we will have to wait at least a generation before the next attempt, which will not be called communism but something completely different, with a name perhaps taken from Tamil or Yoruba and certainly not ‘post-‘ anything.

Izzue’s pragmatic act of invitation to enter its world of military-themed fashion became confounded with the symbol’s equation with evil. A status and powerful set of associations man has chosen to give the symbol cannot simply be altered through the willfulness of an ill-wrought marketing campaign.

Writing History: Hitler and Dictators of the Twentieth Century

The numbers of people murdered by Stalin’s tyranny far surpass those killed in the Nazi camps. The numbers of Mao’s victims are yet greater, Pol Pot killed a far higher proportion of the population than Hitler did. Yet, even after thinking about Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to turn towards Hitler still seems to be to look into the deepest darkness of all. If we hope for a humane world, Nazism is what Nietzsche might have called our antipodes.

(Glover, 1999: 317)

In his controversial anatomy and indictment of the Nazi Holocaust, Finkelstein (2003: 143) records the fascination Nazism and its crimes holds for scholars: ‘The number of scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000’. No doubt the unrelenting flow of scholarship has gained impetus from hitherto inaccessible documents recently drawn from Russian archives and, of course, sources that originated in the former German Democratic Republic. Scarcely a month goes by without there being some major new publication on Hitler and the Third Reich. At the time of writing, the second part of Evans’ major trilogy has just been published: The Third Reich in Power (2005), a major undertaking which follows hotly on the heels of Kershaw’s monumental two-volume study: Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris (1999) and Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis (2001), a work which some argue has supplanted Bullock’s classic Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1991). The dictatorhips of Hitler and Stalin are the focus of Overy’s new study, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004), a work which will no doubt supersede Bullock’s masterful Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992). Asserting the historian’s role, Overy warns:

The historian’s responsibility is not to prove which of the two men was the more evil or deranged, but to try to understand the differing historical processes and states of mind that led both these dictatorships to murder on such a colossal scale.

(2004: xxxiii)

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The list of scholarly studies is an extensive one and the flow shows no signs of abating. An (admittedly) crude Google search on the internet shows some twenty-one and a half million hits for ‘Adolf Hitler’; just under fifteen million for ‘Mao’; around ten million for Stalin, and then Pol Pot who lags well behind this trio, with a score well under two million. A recent work on Mao, Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (2005: 509) contrasts his ‘vision’ with those of his peers, Hitler and Stalin:

What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilisation, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge – and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics.

The relevance of historiographical practices for this enquiry is that they inevitably sustain awareness of the Nazi engine and its attendant symbology, through either explicit or exclusive focus or comparison with other totalitarian figures and regimes. The more controversial the reference, the more likely it is to act as a potent contextual driving force. Consider the public furore which surrounded the Irving-Lipstadt libel case (2000), in which British historian, David Irving accused Lipstadt of libel for accusing him of being a Holocaust denier. Called as an expert witness in the case, which found in favour of the defendants, Lipstadt and Penguin Publishing, Evans (2002) went on to publish Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, which documented the much-publicised trial. It is significant that the work has not yet found a UK publisher, on account of the threat by Irving that he would file a fresh libel suit. No comparable controversy seems to surround the writing of history about Stalin or Mao, although it is claimed by some scholars that the Chang and Halliday Mao biography (2005) overstates the case against him (cf. Nora Tong, South China Morning Post, sec. E., December 10, 2005).

Scholarly studies are not alone, of course, in providing such focus and orientation. The media, especially television, are broadly preoccupied with Hitler-related themes. In the UK, BBC2 has just finished broadcasting a six-part documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the “Final Solution”. It also ran a programme Inside the Mind of Adolf Hitler – Timewatch, the final episode in a four-part series, exploring the theme of Germany at war. This is not to mention the many other programmes with their focus on World War II. Finkelstein (2003: 143) comments on the situation in America where ‘Hardly a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New York Times’.

In short, the Izzue.com Nazi-themed marketing campaign launched a series of potent contextual drivers which inevitably invoke the historiographical discourses and media practices we have outlined above and which necessarily reflect the public interest that such controversial abuse arouses.

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Reading the Holocaust: Reading the Symbol

That anyone in his senses would argue that the Holocaust did not occur, despite the simply overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that it did, is a sign of just how deeply the Holocaust has entered into the consciousness of the West.

(Rubinstein, 2004: 173) It is a truth universally acknowledged that some wrongful acts are more wrongful than others.

(Lang, 2005: 52)

The literature on genocide in history and the Nazi Holocaust in particular is vast. Controversies surrounding how the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ and the extermination of some six million Jews, is to be understood or deconstructed abound. As Lang (2005: ix) reports: ‘Representations of the Holocaust have at times been moved by extraneous social or political or religious purposes in ways that skew or distort that event’s historical and moral boundaries’. Again – and the purpose here is not to review the literature nor to rehearse familiar or not-so-familiar Holocaust controversies – but to stress the significance of this body of scholarship for the present discussion. That said, it must surely be acknowledged that, to cite Rubinstein (2004: 306): ‘The experience of the Jewish Holocaust changed everything and, it is likely, will for ever determine and delimit all discussion of genocide and all attempts to define and penalise the crime’. It was not until the late 1940s that the concept of genocide entered the Western consciousness. The atrocities that marked the end of that century reawakened the discourses on the Holocaust ‘now’, according to Rubinstein (2004: 309), ‘universally internalised as the essence of evil’. Without minimising those later crimes – not to mention those that preceded the “Final Solution” – the Holocaust was in a sense unique. Mao, who Chang and Halliday (2005: 3) note ‘was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader’ terrorised his own population. Likewise Stalin, persecuted ‘only’ his own people, overseeing the deaths of some 50 million Russians. Hitler’s tally may be much smaller – some six million Jews (not to mention other identified groups) were exterminated – but the extermination was exported well beyond the frontiers of the German Republic. The ideological gulf between Stalin and Hitler, Overy (2004: 632-633) explains, was immense. Whereas Stalin ‘wanted the Soviet people to construct a socialist future’ where they would enjoy equality and happiness, Hitler ‘was bent on creating the empire of the master race’, to be constructed from the ‘carnage of war’. The Nazis pursued a deliberate policy of genocide, ‘the creation of a continent-wide killing machine and the single-minded pursuit of extermination as policy’ (Rubinstein, 2004: 312). It is precisely this machine that the swastika has come to represent and to embody.

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Conclusion The underlying concern of this paper has been to demonstrate the validity and explanatory power of using a contextual approach in the discussion of a symbol whose incarnation renders it coherent it with a range of interlocking and powerful discourses – the contextual triggers and contextual drivers we have identified in our analysis. A certain amount of our argumentation has involved conjecture: how could one possibly know if the Izzue.com design team did purposefully adopt the shockvertising technique used by the likes of Benetton? What is known, however, and what we have taken pains to explain, are the discourse practices and controversies which surround the swastika and come into force once that symbol is invoked. Of course, in the end, symbols do not mean by themselves; they are made to mean by those who design, adopt, and use them. The Nazis appropriated and made the swastika their own. As Quinn (1994: 138) concludes: ‘The Nazi swastika is a monument both to the immoral and violent actions which accompany racist thought and also to the corruption of meaning in an act of collective self-representation’. If, as Thomas Carlyle (1831) once observed ‘It is in and through symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works and has his being’, there can be no place for the reincarnation of this beguiling yet ultimately appalling symbol.

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