The word parses as su, well, plus asti, being: it is well. One of the earliest examples is a 12,000-year-old carving from Mezine, Ukraine; the Vinča culture used it routinely 8,000 years ago; it persists today as a luck sign in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and appears in Navajo art. Schliemann found 1,800 instances at Troy in the 1870s, which German nationalists misread as Aryan ancestry. In 1920 Hitler's new party flag set a black swastika, rotated 45 degrees, in a white circle on red, and twelve years later the symbol's Western meaning was finished.
East and West now read the same glyph oppositely: a temple marker in Japan, a hate crime in Berlin. Asian traditions never surrendered it; Western law and custom banned it. The symbol's documented crime is not its shape but its kidnapping, and the kidnapping worked so completely that most Westerners do not know the symbol has a name in Sanskrit that means well-being, or that it ever meant anything else.
The claim: the swastika proves no symbol owns its meaning, twelve millennia of fortune lost to twelve years of horror, and the takeover mechanism, rotate, rebrand, repeat at rallies, is the general playbook for stealing any sign. Verdict: documented beyond argument. The open question is the reverse operation: no symbol has ever been successfully reclaimed at scale, which suggests meaning-theft is one-way. The archive files it under assets that cannot be recovered, beside all the words this site keeps watch on.
Can a symbol be reclaimed after the worst people in history finished with it?