Nearly six years ago, one of my first columns compared the Nazi swastika with the Alphabet rainbow flag. More recently, the congruence between the two symbols has only grown stronger – and more people are taking notice.
I won’t claim to be the first to make the comparison, of course: the year before, the great Australian cartoonist Bill Leak literally drew attention to the violent intolerance of the Alphabet ideologues, calling them the “Waffen-SSM”. A couple of years later, in his The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray noticed how the Alphabet movement was behaving in victory. “When the boot was on the other foot something ugly happened,” Murray wrote.
That “something ugly” makes the congruence between the swastika and the rainbow so compelling – and so disturbing.
To briefly recap my first essay on the rainbow and the swastika, I proposed a thought experiment: Imagine that ferociously dedicated ideologues instigated a government-mandated program of thorough indoctrination in schools. Let us say they are actual Nazis, preaching the latter’s odious ‘racial hygiene’ theories.
Their programme is rolled out with all the weight of the state behind it. Teachers are issued with kits, designed by the aforementioned ideologues, which encourage particular ideas about race. They are instructed to adopt a racial lexicon that emphasises ‘whites’, ‘coloureds’ and so on. It is explicitly explained that this is to foster racial awareness in students. Students are encouraged to wear swastika-branded clothing and participate in mini Nuremberg-style rallies.
The students in their turn become even more ferocious ideologues. With the encouragement of the regime, they denounce teachers and other students who express disloyalty to the ruling ideology. Any students who disagree are bullied and ostracised, while the teachers are sacked. Parents who reject the regime’s ideology are subject to investigation by the state police, with the likely possibility of their children being removed from their care by court order.
Sound horrifying? Of course it does.
But if the regime in the thought experiment seems outrageous when based around the Nazis and their revolting racial ideology, then it must be equally so when based on the “Pride” movement and its Queer Theory-derived ideology of “LGBTQIA+” identity.
Race and sexuality are, after all, intrinsic identities – especially according to the left’s own metric of ‘intersectionality’.
That particular column enraged the few leftists who read it, although none of them bothered to try to rebut its argument, beyond screeching that it was ‘offensive’. But that was back in the sunny days of 2017. In the years since, the confluence of the swastika and the rainbow has only crept asymptotically closer and closer.
And more and more people are noticing. The unacknowledged legislators of modern culture, the memers, have already noticed that if you join four copies of the latest, eye-watering incarnation of the rainbow flag, they make an ominously familiar symbol. But the ominous similarities beyond the rainbow and the swastika are more than a flippant internet joke. As journalist Tim Pool has recently said, the rainbow is the modern equivalent of the swastika.
Of course, Pool explained, he didn’t mean anything so crass and stupid as arguing that the Alphabet lobby are “literal Nazis”. Leave that sort of kindergarten name-calling to the left. What Pool is getting at is that both symbols have been corrupted in the same way, to be similarly associated with nasty, intolerant ideologies.
But, as Umberto Eco correctly noted in his otherwise often risible essay, Ur-Fascism, while there “there was only one Nazism, the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change”. Rainbow, Queer Theory ideology, is most assuredly not Nazism, nor is it even fascism, but if it is not playing exactly the same game, it’s running around the same field and kicking the ball just as hard.
That field is violently intolerant authoritarianism, and the ball is a co-opted symbol that’s been hopelessly corrupted into a new and sinister meaning.
The swastika was for thousands of years, and for millions of people outside the West still is, a fundamentally positive symbol. The running cross is an ancient variation of a sun symbol, a good luck sign. The very name is derived from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning “good fortune”. It spread across Eurasia for over 7000 years as a sacred symbol of fortune and blessing.
But, if it still has such meaning in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism today, in most of the West for the last century it has acquired an indelibly sinister meaning.
Because, in 1920, it was adopted as the symbol of the fledgling National Socialist German Worker’s Party – the Nazis. By a twisted path that descended from archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who noted it in the ruins of Troy, it became associated with an idea of an ancient Aryan culture spanning Eurasia. As German racial theorists twisted the meaning of Aryan, the Nazis adopted it as a symbol of “Aryan identity”.
The “idiot’s own trade mark” as H G Wells dubbed it, “took the place of an idea in the muddled heads of the Nazis and they treated it with immense solemnity and wore it on their banners, clothes, proclamations and wherever else they could”. With the ascension of the Third Reich, the corrupted swastika became the most visible sign of adherence to the brutally intolerant Nazi regime.
Indeed, the swastika became so popular that the German market was flooded with products emblazoned with the symbol, to the point that the Nazi regime itself felt compelled to step in and pass laws strictly regulating its use by approval of the regime. Nevertheless, it being nothing if not wise to publicly assert one’s loyalty to the regime, the swastika remained near-ubiquitous in the Third Reich. Streets and houses were festooned with swastika flags. Party swastika buttons were a kind of Nazi old-school tie. Not even Christmas baubles escaped. Even as far away as Brisbane, German expatriates prior to WWII paraded with swastika regalia.
The same process has poisoned the rainbow.
Like the swastika, the rainbow has long been a common symbol of hope, “a certain cheerfulness” as Wells said of the swastika. In Judeo-Christian mythology, it’s the sign of God’s new covenant with his creation. To the pagan Vikings, it was the bridge that crossed to Valhalla. And so on.
But, once again, a formerly positive symbol has taken on a new, sinister meaning, due to it being co-opted by an intolerant, dangerous ideology.
The rainbow flag was first adopted by the gay rights movement in 1978. But, as noted earlier, the gay rights movement is not what it once was. As Douglas Murray, himself gay, says, it has become “ugly”: as intolerant and bigoted as the prejudice from which it once sought to be liberated.
A problem solved is, after all, an existential crisis for an activist. If gay rights activists were to admit that the war had been won and they had fully equal rights with the heterosexual population, what would happen? They’d have to close shop. The grants and donations would stop flowing. Their very reason for existing would cease to be. The “Pride” marches would cease to be.
The very opposite fact happened. As Murray recently observed, “Pride marches became Pride weeks, and then Pride months, and we ought to watch out because it might become Pride year quite soon, it’ll be like Chinese years — but every year will be the ‘Year of Pride’.”
Just like the Chinese regime, the rainbow regime brooks no dissent. And, like the swastika regime, it demands total, loud, public displays of loyalty. Where once gay rights activists just asked to be left alone, the rainbow activists now demand constant, unequivocal affirmation. “To demonstrate affiliation with the system people must prove their credentials and their commitment… public avowals of loyalty to the system must be volubly made,” writes Murray.
So corporations dutifully rebrand their images with rainbow symbolism. Employees wear rainbow ribbons and buttons (often at the risk of managerial censure if they dare decline). Public institutions likewise. In an eerie echo of Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, streets, town squares and public buildings are festooned with rank upon rank of rainbow flags. Military jets fly over cities, belching rainbow smoke.
In another outward sign of the metamorphosis of the gay rights movement, the rainbow flag is increasingly chimaerical. With each new letter added to the Pride alphabet, new colours proliferate on the rainbow flag. That’s because “Pride” is no longer about gay rights, but about the sinister ideology of Queer Theory. An ideology whose foundational texts almost all promote pro-paedophilia activism, and whose foundational thinkers were often active paedophiles.
Fittingly, then, the most conspicuous recent additions to the rainbow flag are the most sinister: the baby blues and pinks which outwardly supposedly symbolise the “transgender” movement, but which, like a Masonic handshake, secretly convey a very different message to the cognoscenti. Because the baby blue and pink colour scheme is also the schema of the pro-paedophile movement.
It’s both fitting and sinisterly revealing that the trans flag was designed by Robert Helms, a cross-dressing fetishist who masturbated on his mother’s underwear and wrote disturbing fiction about adult witches magicked into underage bodies. Helms explicitly acknowledges that the colours of the trans flag traditionally represent baby girls and baby boys. Worse, researcher Dr Sarah Goode notes those colours are also commonly used by pro-paedophile activists. “The pink half represents ‘girl lovers’,” she says. “And the blue half represents ‘boy lovers’.”
“The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them,” Douglas Murray writes. The manner in which the rainbow movement is behaving is revealing something very, very dark and ugly.
That ugliness is explicitly symbolised by its symbol, the rainbow flag. A symbol that is fast becoming the new swastika.