If We Are Banning the Nazi Symbol, Why Not the Hammer and Sickle?

Protesters burn the Chinese Communist Party flag in front of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles on the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre June 4, 2023. (Courtesy of Jie Lijian)

Commentary

The Australian federal government is proceeding with plans to ban Nazi symbols. That’s fair enough, I suppose, if the ban is confined to just two images—the swastika and the double lightning bolt SS.

Such a prohibition might be unwelcome news to a few extremist motorcycle groups, but most of us share a reasoned detestation of those unambiguous marks of hatred.

But it could also be bad news for sociologists and historians unless the legislation is very meticulously and sensitively drafted.

The swastika has a long history in many diverse world cultures (including Hinduism and Buddhism) as a token of auspiciousness and good luck.

Some will tell you that the arms of the “good” swastika bend to the left, while Hitler chose a right-facing form, but it’s not as simple as that. The fact is that you can find both patterns in use among people who have not the slightest link with Nazism.

An example of a piece of pottery that bears the swastika resides in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. (Neli Magdalini Sfigopoulou/The Epoch Times)

The SS symbol, on the other hand, is much more explicit and easier to deal with—there is no ambiguity about its origins or its vile history.

There has also been talk of banning the so-called “Heil Hitler” salute, but that is a bridge too far for framers of law, and they appear to have backed off, at least for the moment.

That particular straight-armed form of greeting seems to have a long pedigree in many cultures beyond Germany. We can’t be certain that the Roman army employed it, but Hollywood thought it did, and classic old movies like “Quo Vadis” and “The Robe” would have to go the way of “Gone with the Wind” if a ban were to be applied.

It’s a Start

On balance, then, while we might deplore our woke society’s increasingly rampant impulse to ban things it doesn’t approve of, most of us could sympathise with a restriction on the display of signs and symbols that don’t merely offend but actually twist the knife in the wounds of those (not only Jews but many others as well) who directly endured the unspeakable horrors of persecution.

For there can be no apologia for Nazism.

Anthony Giambrone, in his preface to Theodor Haecker’s “Vergil, Father of the West,” writes of “the whole gang of clownish thugs brutishly plundering the museums of the world ... and basking in an elegant and self-flattering sophistication ... on the whole below-average students who had humiliatingly failed in the humanistic gymnasium.”

Could there be a better description of that gang of jumped-up louts? Prone to describe others as sub-human Untermenschen, their own claim to humanity lagged behind almost everybody else’s.

Hitler and his cronies strutted around the world stage and performed unspeakable acts of cruelty for just 15 years before they were soundly crushed, and most of their leaders brought to justice.

On the face of it, then, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s determination is laudable:

“We need to make a start. This may not be the end of what we do to criminalise hate speech, this kind of conduct—we need to make it absolutely clear that there’s no place in Australia for Nazi symbols that glorify the horrors of the Holocaust.”

White roses left by visitors stand among train tracks prior to a commemoration of the anniversary of the deportation of Berlin's Jews to concentration camps in Berlin, Germany, on Oct. 19, 2016. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Here’s the thing, though, while Nazism is rightly held accountable for its horrors. The horrors of Marxist-Leninism that erupted like the curses from Pandora’s box in the Russian Revolution in 1917 have never been fully avenged or properly punished.

Many of the older generation on the left of Australian politics cut their teeth on the policies of Lenin, admired Stalin in the face of so much clear evidence of his ruthless brutality, and turned their backs on the sufferings of oppressed people such as the Tibetans.

Their successors today seem content to cosy up to the Chinese Communist Party and to mock and vilify those who suggest that the current aggressive Chinese regime might actually be a threat to Australia’s sovereignty.

Damage From Marxism

When you consider the enormity of communist criminality throughout the world over a period of not just 15 years but many decades—think of the secret police, the closed borders, the massacres, the gulags—is it unreasonable to ask why there is no movement to ban another heinous emblem of merciless dictatorship?

I’m talking about the hammer and sickle, of course, as odious a symbol of brutish tyranny as any other.

Whole generations of humans have lived their lives and met their deaths under the heel of Marxist governments, never experiencing the freedoms of assembly and of the press that we in the West take for granted.

They are constantly spied upon and betrayed even by their own families, poorly nourished or, in some cases (think of Ukraine), systematically starved to death.

This evil movement (for it is certainly that) may have taken root in Russia, but its infection spread to many nations of Eastern Europe, to China and Korea, to South America and Africa, and even to Western nations like our own.

The West was for many years white-anted by small numbers of active, dedicated communists, as well as by much larger numbers of “useful idiots” who bought the whole foolish, delusional narrative of a workers’ utopia.

To speak of banning the symbols of communism is not to play a petty game of tit for tat. Nor does it in any way ameliorate the ghastly memory of the Nazis.

But it is a cry for justice on behalf of all those millions worldwide who suffered at the hands of ultra-leftist governments, whose crying went unheard or was ignored or justified as expedient by so many in the privileged and pampered societies of the West.

This has a special piquancy now: Thomas Mayo, the main figure behind the Yes campaign for The Voice, praised “the elders of the communist party who played a very important role in our activism.”

Yes, it’s right there on YouTube.

Banning the symbols of one form of barbarism while ignoring and even lauding another look like social dysphoria.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.