By John Lopez, Durango CO (jhlopez@earthlink.net) The Durango Herald, our local leftist rag, had several days of breathless nonstop coverage of a tempest in a teapot regarding a subdivision in Pagosa Springs that first asked, and then demanded with threatened sanctions that a doozy resident take down her peace symbol wreath as an inappropriate holiday decoration under local subdivision covenants. First Amendment conniptions of course broke loose -- you might have thought that some right wing fundamentalist had dared to question Islamic Awareness Day at the local grade school. [The Denver dailies took much the same line. - Editor]
The Herald’s coverage of the Peace Symbol controversy in Pagosa indicated that they anticipated another journalism award. It also displayed an obvious delight in persecuting Christians during Christmas, with the paper's baying leftist readership sharing in the joy. All letters printed were pro-symbol and several were aggressively anti-Christian. However there are at least two obvious reasons to oppose the Peace Symbol as a Christmas decoration. First, it is a lie. The dove is a generally accepted sign of peace. The design used in Pagosa and by the hippie left in the sixties is a design that was previously the Nazi SS Death Rune* and was later promoted by the Soviet KGB for use by several of its fronts during the Cold War.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Vietnam Vets Against the War, et al. were front organizations instigated and funded by Communists in support of Soviet policy, which was that everybody in the West should disarm and leave the Soviet empire intact with a nuclear monopoly. The KGB term for those who supported their aims was “useful idiots.” Since history is no longer studied in most of the West, these idiots still abound today. Otherwise, the Ward Churchills and Cornell Wests would merely be nuisances panhandling to clean your windshield at a stoplight -- rather than tenured professors at actual universities.
The second reason for objecting is that the use of such a symbol in this season is profoundly insulting to Christian believers. To put it in a context that even the politically correct can fathom, it would be like putting a swastika in your window as a Chanukah decoration. To celebrate the KGB, Soviet totalitarianism and militant atheism at Christmas makes that sort of a statement.
This country is full of refugees from Communist dictatorships, many of them Christians, all of them mourning the scores of millions of Stalinist victims. If that is the message you wish to send to them by displaying this symbol, go ahead, it is a free country. But do not be surprised if you are scorned and despised as a consequence. ------------------ Note: The Death Rune, (identical to the peace symbol design) which has Old German and Norse origins, was used on SS grave markers and as a shoulder patch for the SS Women’s Brigades who enthusiastically served at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auchwitz, and other Nazi extermination camps. It's also a matter of record that Anton La Vey, High Priest and Anti-Christ of the Church of Satan used the same symbol as an altar cloth and backdrop for his Black Masses in the 1960s. I doubt he intended it to be a peace symbol.