I know I'm late on this subject, but no matter.

Philip Ochieng gives
the history of the swastika.

For the swastika was a symbol of life and hope throughout the Mediterranean and up to India. The swastika is a small cross, the ends of whose arms are often bent at right angles, worn to attract good luck (from Sanskrit svasti, prosperity).

The tips of the arms of the Egypto-Nubian ankh - a swastika which literally meant "life" - were not bent but enlarged. What is significant is the ankh gave rise to two crosses that dominate the world's religious thinking today - the Star of David and the Christian crucifix.

Two names immortalise the ankh. Tutankhamen was an inimitable boy-king. The Sphinx is second only to the Great Pyramid among history's greatest monuments to human ingenuity. Tutankhamen meant "Thoth lives in Amen". Amen was the hidden aspect of the creator god. The theistic religions still pay homage to him after every prayer.

Thoth (Thot, Tut, Tauti, Dwd), to whom we owe the name "David", was the god of science and magic. Sphinx is the Hellenic corruption of sheshepankh - "the living image of ...". You complete the phrase by supplying the name of the person or thing whose image the artefact was. Its full name was Sheshepankhatum, "the living image of Atum", Atum being Amun's visible face, identified with the sun-god Ra-Osiris.

There's more. (Now all can see that my long-windedness is genetic.)

But after the explanation, my progenitor gets to the point.

But even if [Prince] Harry's [display of the swastika in a Nazi uniform at a party] were just one of those boyish foolishnesses - if he had no idea what bitter memories he might kindle by fondling with the swastika - one would still remark how amiss his royal education is.

Which is the problem I had with the young prince's outfit. It seems that nothing in his allegedly high-level education gave him a clue that such a get-up would not be the best thing to don, especially for one who is, at present, third in line to the British throne.

Many have commented that the incident was due to the notorious idiocy of many twenty-year-olds. But there are quite a few twenty-year-olds who were born without Prince Henry's (Harry's) high lineage and were not the beneficiaries of his supposedly excellent education who understand what the swastika *now* represents: fascism and genocide. They understand it better than he does, obviously.

And I must admit that,in my participation of Laurence Simon's Dead Pool, I picked Harry's older brother, William, to meet an untimely demise this year. A bit chilling to contemplate now--and not just because the death of the young is always tragic nor is it because I think that Harry is some kind of young Nazi. He just seems...dim. For leaders—even symbolic ones—it's a quality that is sometimes worse than evil.

baldilocks