Lord Larehip

They have to have meaning to be regarded as symbols. But who calls the shots over what meaning a symbol gets? It's the mainstream and what is the mainstream? It's the official version of culture that the State wants us to adhere to. When ideas are introduced to public discourse that run counter to this official version, then the State must suppress it through trivialization or ridicule. It can then be controlled and reintroduced to public discourse in a sterile, "harmless" form so that it goes from iconoclast to pariah.

In the case of the swastika, you have a fresh idea that challenges a long held tenet of the mainstream discourse--namely, the swastika is not a symbol of evil or terror.

In our society we have these competing, safe-for-mass-consumption views that want to impose themselves over the other. This is done mainly to paralyze society into a kind of zombie state. The state where you get up, drive to work and, if you even bother to reflect on it, don't remember a damn thing about your drive into work. You're just a nameless, faceless cog in the State's machinery serving the purpose it wants you to serve. Leave the thinking to others who have the brains to navigate the quagmire.

It then becomes necessary to invent an enemy that proves how this mainstream zombie state we live in is much better than anything else. This enemy is called terrorism but it has corollaries as "Nazi" or "Hitlerian" or "anti-Semitic" for example. So this symbol of the swastika has become useful as the representative of this imagined enemy.

The mainstream brainwashing is astonishing once you start looking at it objectively instead of (falsely) believing you have a stake in this thing. I was watching the news last night and there was a kind of point-counterpoint segment between a white conservative and a Muslim who publishes a newsletter in Dearborn (called the city with the second most amount of terrorist connections by some report or other). The conservative tells the Muslim: "Your publication deserves to be called terrorist because you call Hamas freedom-fighters. You are anti-Semitic!"

He presented the mainstream view. Somebody is a terrorist not by what he's done but by what he believes about Hamas. As for being antisemitic, have you ever looked up what a Semite is? An Arab IS a Semite. Here's a white man calling a Semite an anti-Semite. Moreover, Semitic refers to a linguistic group and yet somehow we have allowed the Jews to appropriate the word as though they are the only Semites. If you are anti-Arab you too are an anti-Semite. Since most Jews are of European descent today, you are more justified to call them anti-Semitic than an Arab who hates them.

Mainstream discourse has turned the truth on its head because truth is inimical to it. Truth is an obstacle to mass consumption and mass consumption is the name of the game.

Symbols are potent tools either for mass consumption or for truth which is why the State must not be allowed to dictate the meaning but it is difficult to get this across because the mass media is so seductive.

I know this response is going to generate a bunch of "tldr" crap but your question is profound one deserving of a detailed answer and not a safe-for-online-consumption word-byte non-answer that online communities encourage.