On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgement in the case of Vajnai vs Hungary. This case concerned a man, Vajnai, vice-president of the Workers' Party, who was arrested at a demonstration for wearing a red five-pointed star, and convicted (though not punished further). That symbol is banned in Hungary (and several other former communist states) for its association with totalitarianism.
The ECHR found that Vajnai's freedom of expression had been violated, as the restriction was not "necessary in a democratic society". This means in effect that Hungary's law - and those of other countries - banning that symbol can't be enforced and should be revoked. (Though in theory a country demonstrating that it suffered even more under Soviet influence, or facing a live 'totalitarian communist' movement dedicated to seizing power, could get away with a ban.)
Several European states, including Germany, Austria and France, have similar bans on Nazi symbols; after Henry Mountbatten-Windsor wore a swastika armband at a posh-idiots-only colonials and natives themed party, Germany moved to have a ban on the swastika covering the whole EU. Several former-communist states insisted such a ban should cover the red star and the hammer and sickle as well. Needless to say, it didn't pass, partly due to major Hindu opposition.
This ruling is relevant, but I don't think it will affect the bans existing on the swastika. The court clearly accepted that the red star is more than just the symbol of the USSR /advocating totalitarian rule, which is obviously true; in the ruling it is described as "a symbol of the international workers' movement". The swastika, by contrast, is much narrower and less ambiguous, partly due to its restricted use in (European) history (please ignore Hinduism and Latvian traditional knitwear).
I don't think banning symbols is an appropriate way of dealing with the threats associated with them, and obviously shouldn't be done for fear of causing offence. But this does raise a question about the relative western perceptions of the Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes, which I think has left Europe a bit deformed. Speaking for myself, but I think reflecting the tone used in western education/media/normal leftist view, the obviously important points about childcare and poverty obscure the suffering caused by the communists.
Even attached to their respective regimes, the swastika is far more offensive than the red star, right? Hitler-holocaust-dead Jews (and gypsies etc), incarnation of evil... Well, yes and no - it's hard to top the industrial slaughter of an entire race of people for 'badness'. But people suffered massively under communism: famine, large scale routine torture and execution of largely meaningless victims ('40s-'60s, smaller scale thereafter), and the moral-mental pain of the identification of society with the party and the destruction of trust and intellectual life and the scary arbitrariness of it.
Having a hot war with one lot and a cold war with the others makes a difference, and the German regime didn't survive long enough to become part of the furniture and get its belly lodged confortably under the table of international relations. But it's the war that was fought, rather than the holocaust, which means Nazi Germany keeps such a legendary status in english-speaking discourse - the intense dislike, coming from war propaganda largely unconcerned with the holocaust, has been kept up over decades, its basis morphing from existential threat in war to moral shock at genocide. In the UK at least, that kind of anger was never sustained (or developed?) regarding communism, and that over Nazism is a bit false.
Anyway, many leftist groups in the west (democratic and not) failed to judge the socialist regimes by any critical standard. The UK Labour government in the seventies even gave an honourary kinghthood to Nicolai Ceasescu! So when those regimes collapsed, the ambiguous sentiments of the centre-left meant the post-communist folk found the open arms of the market fundmentalist parties and politicians.
And this has its effects. One little one is the contribution to the further meaninglessness of political parties and their naming in Europe: no mainstream party in an ex-socialist country was going to join the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament, so instead of renaming the EP group to the European Social Democrats or something equally bland (as it is called in German), parties fitting with PES (especially a PES which includes all these highly capitalist socialist parties from western Europe) are instead members of the European People's Party with the Tories. But there are exceptions, and Serbia's Democratic Party is aligned with PES. (Not that any of this really matters, or detracts from the damage which political parties to to democracy.) The PES is left with the renamed ruling communist parties. Which might from where UK Labour is getting its liberty-squishing zeal and intellectual nullness.
PS: Interesting to see that the ECHR ruling was unanimous, even with judges from Georgia, Hungary and Lithuania among the panel. (And Turkey, a country also quite into banning symbols.) But this reflects the fact that judges in the ECHR tend to be legal professionals in service of the convention, in contrast to their nationalist lackey equivalents at the International Court of Justice.
PPS: Aside on legal procedure: the Hungarian courts initially referred the case to the European Court of Justice, the highest EU court, for a judgement on whether the principle of non-discrimination prevents one member state from banning a symbol which would not be banned in another state. (The ECHR is a court of the Council of Europe, not the EU.) This looks like a rather strange move - as would be expected, the ECJ found this was totally not in their field of competence; but if it had been able to rule on it, the court would have almost certainly found that such measures do not contravene the principle of non-discrimination. This would maybe have strengthened the hand of the Hungarian government when the case came, inevitably, to the ECHR.
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3 comments:
Banning Symbols makes them stronger, just as banning the BNP from speaking in public gives increases their support.
But you know this.
Nazism verses Communism though IS not as simple as you present it. The symbols of communism don't carry the same negative weight because:
1. Communism was based on interlectual principals that were, if not sound, well intentioned. Nazism was not (take it from someone who has read both The Communist Manifesto and Meine Kampf, although admittedly in a rather skimming sort of way.)
2. Communism became more and more perverted even from what it began as. Stalin being its worst point. But then after this (and during the cold war) the communists became less terrible encreasingly until they admitted they were capitalists and began the process (still underway) of becoming very terrible capitalists. Nazism began bad and where it has continued it remains bad, it doesn't have the nuances and different interpretations. It's like Christianity, it spawned its own equivilants of the Inquisition but also the Quakers.
3. Communist art is much better than Nazi art. Shallow and irrelevent perhaps. But perhaps not.
4. Many in the left in this country became reactionary and right because of the collapse of communism. They felt betrayed because they believed and supported something that turned out to be totalitarian and terrible. Communism in some ways created the right that we know today as much as the weankness of the left. See Kingsley Amis and all that lot.
I don't deny that the communism (or perhaps totalitarianism perpertrated by people calling themselves communists, because you can't really say communism ever actually happened. Mind you arguably it never really can happen since its a utopian ideal that never took into account human nature. As my dad puts it Marxism is a fantastic tool kit to critique the world rather than a blueprint in how the world can be made.)
It's precisely because of the different focus of its genesis and the logeivity of its reign that communism is more complicated in terms of signals and signifiers and you are right that there are very different attitudes it creates.
I once got into a discussion with a bloke on the womens hour notice board, he was from eastern eurpop, a former soviet occupied state, and he became livid about the term capitalist and the ideas of working class and middle class and class struggle. For him all these things were over, a bright new day had arisen, and more than that the terms were the terms of the oppressor. He pretty much said that for me to use these terms and to think these terms was for me to support totalitarianism. Not rational perhaps but understandable. If someone sliced your face with a kitchen knife the next time you would perhaps always shudder when you saw cookery programmes for the rest of your life. It's the way we are!
I wrote a big long blog about an issue that you might be interested in, this terrible recent ruling that a christian registrar has the right to refuse to marry gay couples, and is being discriminated against if told by her employers that she is being homophobic and is refusing to carry out her actual job description. Anyway I am sure your oppinion on the issue will be interesting. I am currently completely discusted about the whole thing.
Yes, good. See the sixth and seventh paragraphs - I was focusing on something else, didn't mean to simplify. (And I don't quite have your stamina ;) )
I'll read your post now, and make there the comment I was going to make on this case.
Stamina spamina! I just can't access very much these days at work, so when it's quiet I lap up anything I can that appears on your blog.
;-)
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