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Xbox Live Enforcement — No Swastika Logo
itwbennett writes "It's one of those questions that really should never come up, but as blogger Peter Smith points out, Stephen Toulouse, the head of Xbox Live enforcement, is used to fielding all sorts of strange questions. Recently, one of those questions was apparently 'Can I use a Swastika as my logo in Call of Duty: Black Ops?' When Toulouse responded with the obvious answer ('No, of course you can't, we'll ban you.') he was met with some pushback by people he refers to as 'contrarians' and 'internet pundits' who decided to educate him on the long and storied history of the swastika as a symbol of good fortune and how just because the Nazis used it, it doesn't make the symbol itself a bad thing. Toulouse covers the topic on his blog in a post titled Context and it's an interesting read if for no other reason than to get a peek inside the day-to-day issues the Xbox Live Enforcement team deals with."
When's the last time you saw a swastika in a movie or a flier or a tattoo or a T-shirt, and it wasn't this bad boy or a reference to it?
The last time I saw a swastika, it looked something like this: http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/images/symbols/swastika-chinese-amulet-cc-rubicon-200.jpg
Let me try to list all the recent times I've seen swastikas:
- once, in a screenshot of 4chan trying to be funny
- three times, in a world history textbook, talking about the Third Reich
- at least fifty times, at the local Buddhist temple
- at least thirty times, in various good-luck charms sold at local flea markets
- once before every important exam I take in school, in a good-luck charm passed down to me from my mother (it looks a lot like the one I linked to)
- at least twice, in friends' houses, where they are said to bring good luck
Perhaps, wherever you live, swastikas aren't commonly used, and perhaps you have no interest in other cultures. There's nothing wrong with that. But to assume that your experience holds true for the entire world - and that the swastika universally no longer holds any meaning besides that which was ascribed to it by Nazi Germany - is laughable.
In Western Europe and North America, the swastika didn't have very much meaning before World War II, so after World War II, it became strongly associated with Nazism. But in Southeast Asia, the swastika has been a symbol of good fortune for thousands of years, and a fleeting decade-long regime in some far-off country did very little to change that.
Even in the West, such as in the United States, there are many immigrants from Asian countries. I am one of those people, and if someone showed me a swastika (and it wasn't enclosed in a white circle on a background of red), I would think "good luck" before I thought "Nazis", and I bet a significant number of other people in Western countries would, as well.
I'm not saying that banning swastikas in Xbox Live was a bad decision. It was probably the correct decision, especially if the majority of the Xbox Live users in question are American - though I agree with metrix007 that this guy could have had a better tone about it. I am, however, saying that the association between the swastika and nothing but Nazi Germany is far from universal.
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I guess they do this to try to keep people from spamming in different languages, but it can be annoying.
It is.
The reason, BTW, is that when Slashdot allowed all Unicode characters, trolls started using RtL markers to mess with the site's layout, so the admins
a) created a whitelist of allowed characters to prevent not just current but also future control characters from hitting the site (good)
b) made it so that pretty much no characters other than the Latin1 ones were on that list (bad)
c) never updated the list again (worse).