[Mo3]

I am not quite sure what you’re trying to argue about. The Swastika has been around for a long time, the Hakenkreuz may or may not be inspired by it, however the Nazis not once used the term Swastika, or referred to it. The common mistranslation of Hakenkreuz to Swastika in the English speaking world is a deliberate mistranslation propagated by a British Christian priest.

[chimeracoder]

> The Swastika has been around for a long time, the Hakenkreuz may or may not be inspired by it

Adolf Hitler literally explains his use of the symbol, and its origins, in Mein Kampf. There is no "may or may not", unless you are somehow trying to argue that Adolf Hitler is not an authoritative primary source on Nazism.

> the Nazis not once used the term Swastika

I don't know if this is true (and I'm disinclined to take this claim at face value), but even if it is, it's besides the point. The fact that the Nazis openly took a symbol from another source, admitted that they did so because of the connection to that other source, and then appropriated it for a different purpose is what's relevant, not the fact that they chose a German descriptor when talking about that symbol instead of using a loanword.

[Mo3]

You mean this part in Mein Kampf?

> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."

> "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."

Nowhere, in the whole book, is the Swastika and its symbolic meaning mentioned as a direct inspiration for the Hakenkreuz. Instead, the Nazis attributed their own ideology to the symbol, but not even to the Swastika itself, but to it's form, and furthermore that doesn't change anything about the Swastika itself.

Wikipedia states;

> The swastika was also understood as "the symbol of the creating, effecting life" and as "race emblem of Germanism"

You know what, I'm going to attribute huge penises to the McDonalds symbol, so any big penis is from now on Ronald McDonald.

[skrtskrt]

So you're simultaneously saying that

1. the Swastika symbol has been around a long time, been used by many cultures and countries, is basically universally recognized

2. but when the Nazis used it, it's not Swastika, because they called it something different, so there's no way to know if they were influenced by the identical symbol that everyone already knew about

[Mo3]

1) Yes

2) No, it might have been influenced in some way, but it's still not the same symbol. Neither symbolic nor visually.

[chimeracoder]

> 2) No, it might have been influenced in some way

Again, just to be clear, it's not that "it might have been influenced in some way". It's that Adolf Hitler specifically talked about his reasons for using the swastika in his manifesto.

> Neither symbolic nor visually.

As explained at length elsewhere in this thread, the two symbols are not visually distinguishable without additional context. You can easily find religious uses of a swastika which are literally visually identical to Nazi uses of a swastika.