"Swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix.

It is a common misconception that the Swastika was first used in Germany by Hitler and his Nazi regime. It has been around in Germany long before and was only adapted by Hitler for its meaning.

In the 1800s, countries around Germany were growing much larger, forming empires; yet Germany was not a unified country until 1871. To counter the feeling of vulnerability and the stigma of youth, German nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century began to use the swastika, because it had ancient Aryan/Indian origins, to represent a long Germanic/Aryan history.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the swastika could be found on nationalist German (Volkisch) periodicals and it was also the official emblem of the German Gymnasts' League.

In 1920, Adolf Hitler decided that the Nazi Party needed its own insignia and flag.

For Hitler, the new flag had to be "a symbol of our own struggle" as well as "highly effective as a poster." - Mein Kampf, page 495

On August 7, 1920, at the Salzburg Congress, this flag became the official emblem of the Nazi Party.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the Nazis' new flag: "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika 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, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic."

That the inverted (from its ancient Hindu version) Swastika represents the letters SS (of Hitlers Schutzstaffel) is not a mere coincidence!

At a condo I used to live in here in CM, I used to take great drunken joy at ripping the swastika flags (yup, flags) off 2 students mopeds in the car park. As for Bin Laden shirts...nah, can't be arsed

Could it be that you were ripping falungong flags? Impressive.

http://www.falungong.org.uk/