I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed symbols for propaganda purposes, they'd draw from legal symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...) More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them.
The point being, it's not clear whether German speech laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if they're stopping anything. The real bar against the collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people living in those countries don't want it to happen, and understand why it would be bad for them.
> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime.
Though it might not really be a "revival," since the symbols were never really killed off in the first place. A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved removal of these symbols.
It might also be worth pointing out that those flashpoints were originally put into place deliberately, in a mostly failing attempt to bring the country back together, and then left in place until they went off.
Symbols retain power for a long time. That's why we're not seeing a swastika revival in interior design or anything like that, even in places where the Nazis did not exist. Another good example is the U.S. confederate flag, which only existed officially for a few years and was decided against by a bloody and brutal military loss. However, it's retained enough significance that someone just pranced through the U.S. Capitol with it. If it doesn't have power as a symbol, why not pick a new flag?
Obviously banning a symbol is not going to prevent future violent movements by itself, but it also seems wise to not leave still-hot embers of symbolic power lying around for the next would-be demagogue to fan back into a fire. People trying to pick up those old symbols are giving a very strong signal about their ideology.
I agree that the main bulwark of a society against falling into fascism is its people's memory of the past and willingness to prevent recurrence of such episodes though.
> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime
It wouldn't have to. But having watched Hitler sell the idea that Germany was being unjustly punished for Jewish lies a generation earlier, they drew the conclusion that [West] Germany was quite likely to see would-be tyrants rallying around a Lost Cause narrative and that vulnerability to this was a bigger problem than a lack of diversity in holocaust historiography. Or more straightforwardly, they figured German democracy faced a more imminent threat from neo-Nazism than a slippery slope towards an Official State Version of History. A view which seems to have persisted even after reunification with the East which had considerable recent experience with the pervasive censorship involved in promoting its Official State Version of History.
That's an interesting fact that puts the issue into a light I hadn't considered. Fortunately, the literal "lost cause" language of the American Civil War has already run its course, caused its damage (up to and including a presidential assassination), and the country has survived. Would banning confederate symbols have prevented the assassination of Lincoln? Probably not, to be honest. I wonder if it would have prevented anything.
I don't see it preventing Lincoln's assassination, no. Jim Crow laws? Possibly not, and there were better ways of preventing them. But we wouldn't be seeing angry mobs fighting over statues today if they'd never been put up and we wouldn't have seen a mass membership second Klan if the first one hadn't been ruled constitutionally protected shortly after it had been forced to disband
The post Civil War US is an experiment in taking the precise opposite stance to postwar Germany: positively encouraging the losing side to romanticise their cause so long as their revisionist history downplays the slavery bit. Some northerner presidents even paid tribute to General Lee. I think it's difficult to argue reconciliation and race relations have been helped the resulting counter narrative that it was actually a pretty noble thing to defend their way of life against other states who only pretended to be concerned about negroes though.
The best example is that right after the holocaust and "never that again", half of the western political spectrum turned a blind eye to the various genocides and crimes against humanity happening in the communist block. Clearly no lesson was learnt. The two great totalitarian ideologies of the XX century have a lot in common. These laws that target one but ignore the other are I think at best misguided if not cynical. The French equivalent of those laws was proposed by the French communist party...
I guess my question is really what the effect of such laws was? Obviously there has been general prosperity and peace between the Western European countries but this may have been due to other reasons.
There doesn’t seem to be much more resilience in the population to the kind rhetoric we’ve seen recently in America. Indeed, there seem to be many parallels. Maybe the laws helped but we see less difference now as Europe after the war started “further behind”?
It’s certainly true that holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. It isn’t, for example, illegal in the U.K. (there was a libel case lost by David Irving against someone who called him a Holocaust denier where he tried to prove he was a legitimate historian however), and there are surveys showing that some percentage of the population don’t really believe it (but maybe this is the fact that for even seemingly trivial survey questions, some proportion of people give the wrong answer). I suppose here I would just point out that Europe is a big place.
