It is the symbol used to identify a certain group of people by which a sign was invented and known as a sign of well-being, but later the group used it and became a symbol of hatred in certain communities; the group or party is known as the Nazis led by dictator Adolph Hitler. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayThe symbol, of South Asian origin, has existed for millennia as a sign of good fortune and well-being. By the early 20th century, Western cultures were also adopting the swastika. It has become a popular emblem on hockey jerseys; Canada was home to the Windsor Swastikas in Nova Scotia and the Fernie Swastikas in British Columbia, two teams that disbanded before World War II. In 1906, a town in northern Ontario was named Swastika, a name the provincial government attempted to rename during the Second World War. he installed a new sign for the town of “Winston”, as in Churchill. But residents resisted and put up a new swastika sign with the message: “To hell with Hitler, we found our name first.” The name has not changed to this day. The community, now part of Kirkland Lake, Ontario, is a social exception when it comes to the swastika. Today, we can no longer pronounce the words “Nazi”, “Hitler” or “Holocaust” in the West without conjuring up images of a hooked cross, and vice versa. None of these efforts were successful. “Symbols acquire cultural meaning based on their social context,” explains Christopher Todd Beer. “When Hitler's Third Reich used the swastika, it became ingrained in our collective memory to signify white supremacy. In the Western world, he continues, there is not enough memory of the swastika as a symbol with other meanings for anyone to re-appropriate it and make it widely accepted. (McIntyre, Catherine.) As Hitler was the chancellor of Germany, and his supporters had the political party or community they called Nazi. The swastika was his instrument, and not just the mark of his political party: it was his personal emblem, the substitute for man and ideology. Arguably, like any symbol, its value is as good or bad as the ideas it represents. But as an icon of Nazism, the swastika went from a neutral instrument to something heinous and criminal. When Adolph Hitler, the frustrated artist, was put in charge of propaganda for the newly formed National Socialist Party in 1920, he realized that the party needed a living symbol to distinguish it from rival groups. So he was looking for a design that would appeal to the masses. Hitler chose the swastika as an emblem of racial purity displayed on a red background “to convince the worker”. Hitler had a convenient but fallacious reason for choosing the Hakenkreuz or hooked cross. It had been used by the Aryan nomads of India in the second millennium BC. In Nazi theory, the Aryans were the ancestors of the Germans, and Hitler concluded that the swastika had been "eternally anti-Semitic." “The hooked cross,” wrote the American correspondent William. Shirer “seemed to call to action the lower and precarious middle classes who were floundering in the uncertainty of the chaotic early postwar years.” The swastika flag had a suggestive feeling of power and direction. It embodied all Nazi concepts in a simple symbol. As Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "In red we see the idea.