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Newton removes swastika from library basement - on a pre-war boiler purchased from a German company
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Comments
Check the other libraries.
Check the other libraries.
That strikes me as a questionable use of taxpayer's money
It was locked in a basement? And disused? Not visible to the public? Then who was it offending?
I'm sure there are things in Newton that are actually broken the money could have been spent to fix.
Maintenance Team
That's who performed the job. It wasn't contracted out, someone didn't over-charge for the work.
It's a task the maintenance crew added to their to do list. A pretty simple one, if you ask me. Their boss said, hey, move this task to the top of your priority list, and they did.
Realistically
This probably cost each Newton tax payer less than 1 cent
乁( •_• )ㄏ
On the one hand, it seems pretty silly to spend time doing anything about a symbol that no one has seen in decades that possibly didn't mean when it was made what it means now.
On the other hand, it's not like paying someone to spend at most a day taking care of it is the worst example of government waste anyone has ever seen.
It meant exactly the same thing when it was made
The Nazis were the fucking Nazis. There wasn't a time when the Nazis were cuddly little bunnies. There was never a time when there was any good Nazi other than a dead one.
Absolutely
I was not in any way trying to minimize the evil of the Nazis or imply that they weren't evil from the start.
I was just raising the possibility that it had been manufactured in Germany before the rise of the Nazis when the symbol still had positive associations.
Yes, who can forget that golden age
when swastikas were in use in Germany but not associated with Nazis?
Not Germany, but a neighbor
I visited the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. They explained the swastikas in some of the stonework, which were carved before Hitler was born and which had nothing to do with nazi ideology, and they explained the decision to keep them: “the Nazis took so much of ours and destroyed so much of ours; we thought long and hard about the swastikas and we made the decision not to let our stone carvings be one more thing ruined by naziism.”
This seems very reasonable to me.
Thanks for sharing the story.
Swastikas appear in many folk art patterns and as religious symbols all over the world and have done so forever. It’s a beautiful design. It’s a terrible shame the Nazis appropriated it.
Now the boiler needs to be
Now the boiler needs to be deported.
I have seen one of those boilers
A good friend of mine lived in a house in Cambridge that had one of those very old boilers with a swastika on it. It was a good boiler and had no political inclinations. It was an interesting novelty.
I also had a friend who lived in a Cambridge apartment building that had ceramic tiles with swastikas in the entryway to the building. I can see why that might have been problematic.
That said, I have never understood the drive to obliterate all traces of history - especially where those traces are essentially unseen.
Some here no doubt remember
Some here no doubt remember when there were swastikas (swastika?) on the front of the St. John's church in Cambridge. They were removed not long after Tip O'Neill's funeral IIRC.
Yet somehow, our awareness of history, and our knowledge of both Nazi Germany and the larger history of the swastika, has survived that obliteration.
History is not obliterated in removing symbols of evil
History is the study of the past. Statues are not history. Physical objects such as bas reliefs are not history. Removing physical objects is not obliterating history.
There are states which have passed laws that limit what materials can be used to study the past. States that ban books and ban material such as the 1619 Project are trying to obliterate history by leaving students with shallow, and sometimes absolutely false understanding of slavery. DeSantis's Orwellian attempt to pervert how we remember slavery by implying slaves benefitted from being treated as property was obliterating history.
It is important to know what is history and what is not.
We don't need to keep *every* piece of swastika-laden detritus.
Keeping a few historic items intact is wise and prudent, as museum pieces, or items in an archaeological archive.
But this seems like a great way to turn an otherwise perfectly good boiler into something that can be used in more locations, now. An upgrade.