Fear of a name

Fear of a name? Associating everyone who has that name, subconsciously, with a particular example from history (not matter how bad)? Sounds more like prejudice than anything else.

I can also never understand the "ban the swastika" rubbish. Promoting fear and "badness" for a symbol with six strokes in it seems incredibly stupid, especially if other people want to gather under its banner in the future and that it's been used perfectly peacefully in the past. More sensible would be to, well, just ignore it and carry on doing what everyone does (incidentally: best way to deal with terrorists, from the point of view of the general populace: "Al Qaeda made my bus late again" is infinitely preferable to "Oh no! Al Qaeda! We're all going to die!"). No fear of the word "Nazi", no fear of a logo, but still promoting disincentive for a repeat of history. It's like not referring to yourself as British (or using it as a surname) because someone from a former British colony might be offended.

Fear of the name, and the logo, is ridiculous scaremongering. Nobody wants another WW2 and the atrocities that occurred during and before, but equally no-one *really* wants to be living in a world where six strokes of a brush, or mentioning a four-letter word, could lead to universal hatred and condemnation. Similarly, there are thousands of Hitler families in the world, and thousands of Adolf's.

Don't be scared of the name. Be scared of the thing that's actually scary - killing people. Best thing we could (and should) have done? Nick-name all the toilets "Nazis" and mark them using a swastika symbol as the universal symbol for toilet. Would have done *infinitely* more for disregard of the whole Nazi regime than going "ARGH! AN ASSOCIATION WITH NAZIS! OH MY GOD! REMOVE IT NOW! PEOPLE WILL THINK WE'RE COLD-BLOODED KILLERS!". Would extremist groups be using the swastika or calling themselves Nazi's if we'd all done that?