In recent years, many controversies have erupted surrounding businesses that intentionally or unintentionally made use of Nazi symbols, and now a design firm is deliberately trying to turn the swastika -- which was a 5,000-year-old Hindu symbol before the Nazis adopted it and made it synonymous with violent, racist hatred -- into a symbol of peace. However, not everyone is on board with the concept. "Considering the reactions to our campaign, we notice that people feel insecure and even offended by our products," a spokesman for KA Designs, the company behind this new effort, told British fashion magazine Dazed. "We understand every single one of these people. They don't want to break the strong bond between the symbol and the atrocities committed by Nazism. They all think we want to completely erase from the minds of everyone these facts. In reality, we want to do the opposite." The company declared that it is trying to "explore boundaries" and has designed a line of T-shirts featuring white swastikas against a colorful rainbow background. The images are captioned "peace," "love," or "zen." The design studio also put out an explanatory video explaining the reasoning behind the campaign, which some people have found offensive. The Nazis "took the swastika, rotated it 45 degrees, and turned it into a symbol of hatred, fear, war, racism, power," the video says. "They stigmatized the swastika, they won, they limited our freedom ... or maybe not? The swastika is coming back." It should be noted that the form of the swastika used by KA Designs is the distorted version of the symbol used by the Nazis.
