The disturbing signs of our times

If the EU has opened up once cosily protected markets, digital communications are now playing havoc with cultural boundaries.

It took only some canny mullahs with access to email and SMS to spread the news that Jyllands-Posten had committed the cardinal sin of publishing cartoons ridiculing Islam. It then took no time for the wires to inflame even further a Muslim world which does not do jokes about the Prophet.

How long, now, before the Middle East's really vile (but hitherto ignored) anti-Semitic and anti-Christian images start to seep onto our screens? The profound implications of the internet, not least legal, are only now starting to sink in. Can Yahoo, for instance, escape a $15 million (EUR 12.6m) fine in France for providing an internet market-place for Nazi memorabilia? The US federal appeals court has just come up with a scholarly (99-page) shrug of the shoulders to that one.

France has an absolute ban on selling, or even owning, Nazi propaganda. Since the successful prosecution of Yahoo, Yahoo.fr is dutifully swastika-free. But Yahoo.com remains a forum for Nazi bric-a-brac. Which for France means the stuff is still on sale in France. Which it is, in reality. Welcome to the modern world.

The passions aroused by these arguments are a reminder of the power of images of which the swastika is still the most potent of all. Swastikas stick in your mind like snuff-movies.

The find of a two-metre wide bronze eagle standing on a swastika, dredged from the sea off Uruguay last week, was greeted "with absolute silence" by the team salvaging the wartime Admiral Spee battleship, said Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist who has worked on the operation for almost 20 years: "When you look at the swastika, you are looking at the heart of darkness."

Except you are not, really. No doubt the bidders for the eagle - the head of a US hotel chain has offered EUR 25 million - expect some kind of sinister frisson, and a sound investment, for their money. What they are getting is vulgar stuff from the age of marketing make-believe, which the internet has put into over-drive.

They would get better value hunting in jumble-sales for pre-1930s books by the British poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, which were decorated with his swastika coat-of-arms. And a swastika or "Scouts' thanks badges" might turn up in the flea-markets. These should, the scouts' founder Baden-Powell decreed in 1921, be given "to anyone who does a scout a good turn".

In the early 20th century the swastika symbol was so widespread and popular that a town in Ontario was even named Swastika following a gold strike. Coca-Cola made a lucky swastika watch fob in 1925.

As late as the 1950s General de Gaulle was taken aback to be awarded a Finnish honour with a swastika - the symbol, from its foundation in 1918, of the Finnish air force. But by then the swastika was completely taboo, a testimony of sorts to Hitler's brilliance as a marketing man, perverting a popular and well-established brand and integrating it, endlessly repeated into a "look" as carefully nurtured as that of fashion brands Chanel or Louis Vuitton.

No doubt chosen for its sly reference to the Christian cross the Nazis sought to displace, it was recently the subject of a quixotic rehabilitation campaign. Gentle Swastika (2001) described its 8,000-year-old history, and the derivation of the word: Sanskrit su, good, and asti, to be.

The Native Americans decreed in 1940 that silver Navajo spoons, subject of a decades-long souvenir craze in the US, would no longer carry the swastika emblem, this "symbol of friendship among our forefathers" having been forever desecrated.

The problem is, as the Yahoo case shows, no solemn decree will rein in the internet, the ultimate expression of 'Anglo-Saxon' market freedom. It obeys no rules worth mentioning and forgets nothing, however bad or stupid or wilful. A time may come when we regret believing that 'communication' is always and invariably a good thing.

• Edward Steen is opinion editor of European Voice.

Commentary feature on the sale of items on the Internet which are banned in some place but not in others.