Nazi Iconography: What Does it all Truly Mean?

In the words of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “There is one great difference between symbolism and direct knowledge. Direct experience is infallible. What you have experienced, you have experienced. But symbolism is very fallible…It is the cause of progress and the cause of error.” The fallibility of symbolism is ironically a side effect of one of its great virtues: namely, the fact that a symbol can be interpreted creatively in many diverse ways. The same symbol that can represent blessings and good luck in one context can represent hate and bigotry in another. A symbol that represents wisdom and enlightenment in one culture can, in another, represent sin and evil. This paper will argue that symbols rooted in natural phenomena can be interpreted in a great variety of ways, though this variety is also limited by the character of the phenomena themselves. Some of these uses yield insight into the nature of reality and are occasions for human beings to gain understanding of themselves and their larger environment. Symbols unite communities around sets of shared meanings and values. Symbols, though, can also divide and be used to demonize others. In exploring the ways in which symbols have been used and misused, this presentation will strive to understand visceral responses and how these create and reinterpret symbols throughout the world in the modern age.

Paper presented at Youth (Sub)cultures in Changing Societies, Centre for Lifestyles Studies, Institute for International and Social Studies, Tallinn University, Estonia, 2-4 February 2011

International ResearchScape Journal, 2020

While medieval concepts are frequently used as a means for the general public to understand emerging global political institutions around the world, they also have immense capability to be purposely misused by political groups due to the generally vague and misguided understanding of these concepts by the masses. At one core of these movements is the legacy of Vikings and the misrepresentation of their history by far-right political groups, especially in mid-20th century Europe, in order to push a fictitious agenda of a prosperous, all-white race of seafaring warriors. Through the appropriation of medieval Old Norse imagery and mythology, as well as the construction of the idea of a pure Nordic race and the spread of propaganda through media by artists like Richard Wagner, the Nazi Party was able to utilize the newfound elevation of Nordic culture to legitimize its own ideas of racial purity and culture.

Approaching Religion, 2023

This study examines the appropriation of religious symbols by the Nordic Alt-Right over the last decade, focusing on their use for völkisch identity construction around whiteness. It locates this signification historically, both before and during the Third Reich, to reveal a complex genealogy complicated by racial ideals, nationalistic agendas and magical thinking. Analysis centres around a selection of symbols – ranging from various Norse runes to the Valknut, the Sonnenrad and the swastika – used both explicitly and in more private contexts by members of the Nordic Alt-Right, with special attention focused on two groups that are active today, the Nordic Resistance Movement and the Soldiers of Odin. This opens a discussion on the semiotic range of appropriation itself, in order to expose how it is operative in different ways and on different levels, not only in terms of cultural borrowing or contestations of meaning but as an appropriation of ideological frames and systems of belief.

Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, 2019

, Making Histories (Proceedings of the Sixth International Insular Art Conference – York 2011), Jane Hawkes ed., Donnington, 2013, 291-302., 2013

It is now 20 years since the publication of Iconography at the Crossroads, the proceedings of the Colloquium at Princeton University sponsored by the Index of Christian Art. 1 Since then, art historians have taken heed of the criticism expressed: Insular Studies in particular have addressed wider audiences and themes, explored new avenues, many 'isms' and 'fragments', often with enriching results.

in: Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 2022