Does the term "Axis" as in "Axis Lock" bear negative connotations for you?

[mumbleypeg]

I think Jimi Hendrix. Bold as Love.

 

[tnozh]

"Novus Ordo Seclorum" was on the Great Seal of the USA long before Hitler.

yep. its kind of funny to see where Hitler might have gotten his ideas either way, if my memory is correct, the Seal says "new order for the centuries" whereas Hitler spoke of a new world order. but either way - I suppose all messianic ideologies promise us a New Man for a New Order and a New World whether one speaks of the "Thousand Years Reich", "Communism" or the "End of History" in a "New World Order"... :barf:

 

[Benjamin Liu]

It could mean "New Order of the Ages" which is the more commonly used translation or "New World Order." I had a Jesuit priest who was a Latin teacher translate it for me when I was working on a term paper in high school. His translation was "New World Order."

 

[Gollnick]

Perhaps it is just a generational thing, but I was born in 1942 and raised in the aftermath of World War II. Whenever I see the term "Axis" capitalized as it is when used with BenchMade's "Axis Lock" system, it brings to mind the WWII Axis Powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Does it both you that the Earth rotates on its axis?

 

[HoB]

I own a Krupps coffee maker.

Not to be anal, but even though they sound similar "Krups" and "Krupp" (steel) are completely different companys and it is the latter that as the largest steel forge in Germany was the one heavily involved in the "war efforts". There products are easily distinguished by size. If it fits in the kitchen its a Krups, if it tears you house down while trying to get through the front door (these days they specialize in oversized digging and mining equipment) is a Krupp .

 

[tnozh]

The word "swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix.

Until the Nazis used this symbol, the swastika was used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck.

I was under the impression that Hitler reversed the rotation direction of the positive svastika making it into a negative "black sun" (at least that is what, if I remember well, Louis Powells and Jacques Bergier wrote in their "Morning of the Magicians").

Can anyone confirm/disprove this?

 

[FullerH]

I do make a distinction between "axis" and "Axis", in case none of you bothered to notice. I said that it was only in the capitalized form that the term gave me pause. And, please do not read this as any form of an attack on BenchMade or on their very fine knives. As I said, I have a Pardue and three Osborne designs made by BenchMade, all with Axis Locks. Indeed, the Switchback is one of my very most favorite knives. It was only the oddity of my reaction upon which I was commenting, a fact which nobody seems to have noticed.

 

[Benjamin Liu]

Everyone has associations to various things. Some time back someone was posting with a "420" in her name. Some people associated "420" with drugs. My first thought was 420J2. I get lots of spam on some accounts and some recent ones were about something called "MILF." My association to those initials were to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a group split off from the Moro National Liberation Front. The actual meaning in the spam was something different. Most Americans seem to think the Ku Klux Klan is the only organization with the initials "KKK" but the Katipunan, the group that started the Filipino revolution against Spain, also went by the initials "KKK." In fact the first flag of the Philippines (a revolutionary flag) is a red banner with "KKK" in white.

The important thing is to be aware of your associations. They are not really a big deal unless you or someone else inflates their importance.

 

[qqqqqqqman]

It's probably capitalized in deference to trademarking rights....a named system, or "Axis lock". You guys stare too hard at your blades, lol.

 

[KeithAM]

The term "Axis" does not conjure negative connotations with me.

 

[tnozh]

I do make a distinction between "axis" and "Axis", in case none of you bothered to notice.

Benchmade makes a distinction between "axis", "Axis" and "AXIS", in case you did not bother to notice and only the latter, all in caps, is used by them in reference to their locking mechanism

 

[Jeff Clark]

tnozh, I think that one of the reason Americans would refer to a Warsaw Pact rather than Warsaw Treaty Organization is that during the 1950's the governments of Eastern Europe were only puppet states of the Soviet Union. You can only have "treaties" between true sovereign governments. You can have "pacts" between any kind of individuals, groups, parties, or governments. You also can have pacts that cover matters that the governments don't directly control. It does not necessarily have a perjorative connotation. There are pacts that the US is involved in.

PS. I would not simply trust statements by Polish politicians. Governments have axes to grind.

I have a friend who escaped communist Czechoslavakia. He told me great stories about how "democratic" elections were held with open ballot boxes and secret police insuring that everyone voted and voted "correctly". When he got to the US he was appalled to see that the US textbooks described democracy in Eastern Europe by parroting the party propaganda from Eastern Europe as if it was actually true.

 

[Zeppelin]

We can start calling it a Freedom Lock. I'll use my Benchmade Freedom Lock to cut up some potatoes to make Freedom fries with.

 

[JR42]

I was under the impression that Hitler reversed the rotation direction of the positive svastika making it into a negative "black sun" (at least that is what, if I remember well, Louis Powells and Jacques Bergier wrote in their "Morning of the Magicians").

Can anyone confirm/disprove this?

I once looked this up, and the counterclockwise swastika is called a sauvastika in some cultures. There's a ton of online info on both symbols; here's a site with info on the swastika and the sauvastika.

One of the kamis (Nepalese knifemakers) who forges khukuris for Himalayan Imports uses a swastika to mark his blades. While I'm well aware of the history of the symbol, I'm not comfortable carrying a knife nearly everyone will immediately associate with the Nazi Party, so I modify it into a pinwheel.

I don't have any more problem with Axis locks than I do with Volkswagens, Mausers, Hi-Powers, Swiss banks, or any other stuff that could have Nazi ties or connotations. If it turned out that Benchmade had Nazi or Fascist implications in mind when they chose the name I'd feel differently.

Jeremy

 

[tnozh]

You can only have "treaties" between true sovereign governments.

That is, for sure, the overtone which the word "Warsaw Pact" was designed to convey. As for the *real* sovereignty of any one country in any one alliance, well, that is a little like beauty - in the beholder's eye. What is a diffenrence between a puppet state and an ally? A freedom fighter and a terrorist? Some, such as the Kosovo Albanians' KLA even manage to skip from one category (terrorist) to another (freedom fighter) in a blink of an eye. Sometimes, it is even hard to figure out who exactly is whose puppet/ally (cf. the really bizzare US-Israeli "alliance").

I would suggest that some words do not reflect anything besides our own biases (or rather, the biases of those who want to frame our thinking). I will not expland much on this here, this is supposed to be a *knife* forum after all, but I will refer you to the many excellent articles and books Noam Chomsky wrote about this (in particular about the concept of "terrorism").

Cheers!

 

[Benjamin Liu]

The book "Secret Freedom Fighter" by Jefferson Mack teaches the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist from the point of view of instructing the readers to be freedom fighters and not terrorists. It is out of print but an updated version, "Invisible Resistance to Tyranny" is available. Basically the difference lies in your choice of targets. Military and government targets are OK but civilian targets are not. The 9-11-01 attacks were terrorist acts but the attack on the USS Cole was not. Had they used a military aircraft, a truck bomb, or an infantry assault on the Pentagon it would have been an act of war, not terrorism.

 

[gorlank]

I'd think there would have been a problem if they had called it the Goebbels lock but Axis is such a generic term that I don't think it's much of an issue.

 

[Jeff Clark]

Benjamin, I like your distinction, but it still leaves us with issues of definition. When you are in an active war is the military exempt from charges of terrorism. Was the German fire bombing of London, or the allied fire bombing of Dresden, or the US fire bombing of Tokyo, or the US atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki non-terrorist since they were prosecuting a general declared war? When the Germans decimated the male population of French villages to discourage/punish partisan insurgencies was that a non-terrorist activity?

I guess that I am stuck with a definition of terrorism as "attacking a civilian population to instill terror and thereby subdue them or their government by fear". We can declare some kind of terror as "outlaw terrorism", but we can't escape realizing that there have been times in war when various governments have resorted to using military terrorism. At least we haven't seen cities fire bombed much recently. Sadam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds would qualify. I hope we avoid resorting to equivalent tactics as the "War on Terror" gets difficult.

 

[Practical Use]

I though axis was what you used to chop down trees.

The verb to axe???

I ax
You axed
We axis

What could be simpler?

 

[glockman99]

The term "Axis" does not conjure negative connotations with me, any more than the name Spyderco does...And I HATE spiders!..