Why is banning communism symbols so hard to achieve as opposed to banning of Nazi symbols?

Question

NOTE: to narrow down the question, I will make the following narrowing:

• Nazi symbols: salute and the swastika used in clear connection to Nazi (i.e. not this one)

• Communist symbols: hammer and sickle on red background clearly associated with totalitarian communist regimes
  
  

According to this article, several countries made efforts towards banning communist symbols:

• Indonesia - "Communism alongside Marxism-Leninism are officially banned in Indonesia"
• US - "many states passed laws forbidding the display of red flags [...] United States Supreme Court held that such laws are unconstitutional.
• Moldova - "the law came into an effect in 2012. The Constitutional Court of Moldova found it unconstitutional"
• Ukraine - "the corresponding law was introduced in 2015"
• Estonia - "government signed the draft law to ban politically motivated display of Soviet and Nazi symbols in public place [...] it eventually failed the parliamentary committee on the grounds of the freedom of speech"
• Lithuania - "banned Soviet and Nazi symbols in 2008"
• Latvia - "Parliament has approved the ban of the display of Soviet and Nazi symbols at all public events"
• Albania, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Slovakia - "general bans on totalitarian ideology and its symbols"
• Poland - ban "fascist, communist or other totalitarian symbols" unless used " as part of artistic, educational, collecting or academic activity.". Constitutional Tribunal of Poland found this ban unconstitutional due to the violation of freedom of expression.
• EU - "In December 2013, a group of MEPs including Landsbergis addressed a letter to the President of the European Parliament, in which they requested a ban of symbols of totalitarian regimes."

According to this article, Nazi salute is not legal (or severely limited) in several European countries such as Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Sweden.

Regarding Nazi flags, this Wikipedia article states:

in several European countries the display of flags associated with the Nazi regime (see: Nazi flags) is subject to restriction or an outright ban.

Other arguments for the association between communism symbols and criminal acts:

1. Declaration on Crimes of Communism (source)

The Declaration on Crimes of Communism is a declaration signed on 25 February 2010 by several prominent European politicians, former political prisoners, human rights advocates and historians, which calls for the condemnation of communism.

2. Council of Europe resolution 1481 (source)

In the resolution 1481/2006 of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) issued on January 25, 2006 during its winter session, the Council of Europe "strongly condemns crimes of totalitarian communist regimes".

3. Condemning the Communist Regime in Romania (1945-1989) as Illegitimate and Criminal (unofficial report) - this report comes in response to the appeal by the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, that the communist regime in Romania should be condemned on the basis of a report elaborated by a scientifically validated commission.

4. Death toll - according to this source many people died under communist ruling in many countries: Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam and many others

Question: Given above arguments why banning of communist symbols seem to be harder to obtain than banning of Nazi symbols?

Answer 1

Nazis are a specific group of people who have committed atrocities in Europe. It is directly linked with the idea of Racial Superiority and Antisemitism.

We can agree that Nazism is morally bad. One who subscribes to being a Nazi is suggesting that the holocaust was justified.

Communism is a political and economical theory. It describes a supposedly idealistic society where all property is communally owned, among other things.

Regimes that are supposedly communist or strive to be communists have indeed committed atrocities. However, communism does not suggest that we do these atrocities.

We cannot agree that Communism is bad. We definitely cannot say that Communism is morally bad. One who subscribes to communism does not suggest that he agrees with the purges of Stalin.

Regarding the Hammer and Sickle Exclusively

1. It is indeed banned in the several countries you've mentioned. It is important to note that Nazi symbol isn't banned universally either. In many countries (USA/Canada), they are allowed.

2. Banning a Symbol is a violation of Free Speech. This article suggests that even in Germany, the ban on Nazi symbolism is soft.

3. The Hammer and Sickle is a universal symbol of the communist revolution, rather than a specific symbol. While it is associated with totalitarian regimes, it is not only used for those regimes. The flag of Japan is not banned because it was used by the Japanese during World War II.

4. To ban a symbol despite the Freedom of Speech is a show of extreme disapprobation. It suggests that any association with the symbol is an act terrible enough to be criminalized. The Soviet Union is not hated that much, despite the atrocities they've committed, especially in Russia.

5. The Hammer and Sickle is a symbol for many communist regimes. To ban this symbol is to show extreme disapprobation to all these countries. It is questionable whether many people even though some of these regimes.

6. Things that affect people personally have more effects. Western Europe was not subjected to Stalin's purges. As such, they do not harbour a hatred for Stalin as much as they do for Hitler. It is telling that most bans on the Communist symbolism are in countries that were Communist.

7. Politics triumphs over justice. The Communists did not lose a major World War.

In response to "But history tells us that many communist regimes failed on multiple levels (politically, economically, morally)."

That is indeed correct. However, I would like to answer this with several arguments.

• History have shown that many communist regimes failed when implemented at a state level (a large scale). It has also worked on small scales (village level).

• History have shown that many capitalist regimes failed on several levels. It has shown that many democracies failed (and are failing) on several levels. It has shown that many of all form of government fail on several levels eventually. Communism have failed quicker than many though. Can communism work on a state level? History cannot prove that it can't. Economic and political systems continues to grow and adapt. What was considered to be the pinnacle of government 500 years ago is considered barbaric today. What is considered to be an ideal democracy today will be considered hilariously outdated in 100 years.

• It is irrelevant whether communism will ultimately lead to failure. Consider the following eco-political theory, which I will dub the Pigeon Theory:

  • All properties should be owned by a single person between the age of 50-57 who is judged to be the best at economics. When this person has reached the age of 57, we cut off one of his legs.

  The theory's symbol is a pink pigeon.

  I do not need history to tell me that the Pigeon Theory is a terrible theory, and would fail at multiple levels if implemented. However, we should most definitely not ban the symbol of the pink pigeon, or criminalize the support of the Pigeon Theory.

Answer 2

The difference is that Nazism is malicious, whereas Communism isn't. Not everything that is bad is also malicious.

For example the deaths in China's Great Leap Forward were mostly a result of sheer stupidity, and not malice. Mao declared that sparrows should be eradicated, the rationale being that sparrows eat seeds and that eradicating the sparrow "pest" would increase harvest yields. The people of China spent four years killing millions of sparrows.
Turned out that sparrows eat locusts and other insects which were now given free reign. Harvest yields dropped dramatically and tens of millions of people died. It would almost be funny if the consequences hadn't been so serious.

But these deaths are not the same as the Holocaust deaths, as the Holocaust deaths were intentional and malicious, whereas the deaths from the Great Leap Forward were accidental, which is considered to be "less bad" in the ethics of most people, which is why there is a wide and long-standing distinction between the legal concepts such as "murder", "voluntary manslaughter", "involuntary manslaughter", and "negligent homicide".

Nazism is a specific brand of fascism with core tenets such as Rassenkunde ("racial science"), Lebensraum ("living space"), and Lebensunwertes Leben ("life-unworthy life") that make it fundamentally malicious. It is important to realize that the Holocaust was not some accidental side-effect of Nazism that could have been avoided, but a logical and natural consequence of its core tenets.

Communism on the other hand is a fairly broad concept with many different installations. Some of these have been malicious in roughly the same way the Nazi regime was – the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia is probably the best example of this – but in many other Communist governments things are less clear-cut than that. There are certainly no core tenets that make Communism fundamentally malicious.

It is also important to maintain a distinction between Communism and Dictatorships. Stalin sending people to the Gulags was due to the fact that Soviet Russia was a Dictatorship, not because it was a Communist state.

That being said, it is probably true that Communism is likely to lead to dictatorships based on observational evidence, but it still doesn't make Communism fundamentally malicious in the same way that Nazism is.

Answer 3

Nazism is a belief system based around antisemitism and "race realism". It is a racist ideology which emerges when liberalism breaks down and people are unable to realistically analyse society.

Communism is a theorised political system where there is common ownership over the means of production (not all property like the other answer claims) in a stateless society which is achieved through a socialist state which eventually "withers away".

TLDR: Despite what people think of formerly Communist or Nazi governments, Nazi ideology is horrendous. The same cannot be said of Communists.

Answer 4

TL;DR: also because of Russia's influence

Today, Russia positions itself as the main contributor in the Allies' victory in WWII and as 'The Liberator of Europe'. However, many atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and its proxies before, during and after WWII, severery compromise this image, creating a villain in place of a hero in the public eye.

A bit of historical background

After WWI, Soviet Union was formed (1922). It actively undermined the European countries as part of the 'Global Revolution Doctrine' authored by Leon Trotsky (Wikipedia references it as 'permanent revolution'). The doctrine implied that the Soviet Union backed all Communist parties (effectively militant groups) globally, guiding them to overthrow local governments by force, creating Communist governments and joining the S.U. as the Global Communist super-state (similar to the idea of the global Islamic State). Although Stalin 'officially' discarded the policy, he actively supported communist insurgents worldwide, namely in Germany and Spain (they all failed). According to some historians (namely Viktor Suvorov), the Soviet Union even planned to start a global war in order to take Europe by force.

Shortly before WWII, in 1939, the Soviet Union made a pact with the Nazi Germany to divide Europe into zones of control, which effectively meant occupation. In September 1939, USSR occupied eastern Poland, after the Germans occupied Poland from the west and took their capital city of Warsaw. In 1940, the Soviets occupied the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and failed to occupy Finland. In all occupied countries, there were mass repressions against civillians.

During and after WWII, Soviet Union occupied Eastern European countries and installed their puppets as leaders, claiming they were elected by the people. These satellite regimes held only due to Russian support, and collapsed immediately when the Soviet Union became weak.

Why was it not condemned in Russia after USSR collapse

After The Soviet Union collapse, the Russian authorities of Yeltsin administration wanted to condemn the Communism and ban its symbols nationwide. But the Communist party had quite a large number of supporters, increasing with economic problems of early 1990's, and the Government did not prevail. Decommunization of Russia was never completed.

Current affairs

The current government, while it does not endorse Communist ideology, glorifies and embellishes the Russian history to create an image of a 'Shining Knight' of the world, supporting traditional moral values and opposing the 'Greedy American capitalist pigs' or 'ZOG', or 'GayRope', or insert a conspiracy theory villain of your choice. Also, with increasing authoritarianism of Putin's regime, Stalin is being frequently used as a popular role model within the country; while abroad, communist parties (now together with far-right) still act as Russia's 'friends' in villifying the West and creating information noise that best suits Russia's interests (also here). Therefore if Communism is banned or condemned, as Nazism, Russia will lose their valuable allies and some of the reputation.

Answer 5

It is true that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler - 25+ million versus around 12 million, but Stalin didn't lose the war and have his atrocities made public.

China's current government is an extension of the Communist government put together by Mao. It hasn't been defeated in war, so the deaths during Mao's regime haven't been made fully public either. It is known that 30 million + are estimated to have died during the 1960's in China due to Mao's policies, but the current government isn't really predisposed to make a big deal out of that.

Had the nationalist Chinese government mounted a successful attack to regain the country, the deaths under Mao would probably have been given considerable publicity.

Hitler, and the symbols of the Nazis, are held up as pure evil, partially because they lost the war, and the victors were in a position to demonize them.

Answer 6

There's some false statements I saw here. It's not true that Communism is widely loved by the people in the Soviet Union or former member states. I live in the Republic of Moldova and here even many socialists/modern communists hate what Stalin did to the world and Communism itself. The real reason why commie signs aren't forbidden or looked down upon as much as the Nazi ones is because of ignorance mostly, even here. Try ctrl+f and search for "deportations", an act as terrible as the holocaust. The difference is they sent people to the other side of the globe to die and not in concentration camps in Europe. People mostly take the side of the Jews, and don't get me wrong I'm the furthest from being an anti-Semite, if anything, I want all people to be equal, but there's just so many things related to the holocaust and so few related to deportations or famine caused by the Soviets which killed off just as many or more people as the gas chambers.

Western ignorance is the real answer. Most of the westerners never felt the "real" Communism (I make commies look bad, they're just misguided, I've been one myself :p ). In Eastern Europe Communism is "bad", the only people that vote for Communists are the old people that think Capitalism is evil, and most of them only do so because they lived in the Soviet Union and they "think" they liked it more. My dad, a former state prosecutor that lived and worked in the USSR, wrote a book about the criminal acts of the leaders, politicians, soldiers of the time, sadly it's only in Romanian.

Answer 7

Because banning Nazi symbols equals banning Nazi German state symbols that was destroyed at the heights of its evilness and no one can or should argue that Germans during WWII were anything else than brutal murderers.

It is more difficult with communism because when Soviet Union was falling in 1991 it was not a genocidal country anymore. It was a dictatorship that imprisoned thousands of people not murdered millions. The bloody soviet union ended in 1956 when its leader admitted that Stalin was criminal. You can't use soviet symbols in the same context as Germans, because its history is different.

Had soviet union changed the flag and symbols in 1956 the argument would have been different or if there were some clear symbols of Cambodian or Chinese genocide, but there are none.

Answer 8

If Nazi-ism was a philosophy or system that had taken root in a widespread way with varying implementations, actions and results, it would be much tougher to ban symbols associated with that movement.

Because there was a very narrow, specific implementation that used that moniker in a major way, under Hitler, his atrocities and actions define and have become synonymous with Nazi-ism.

While there have been horrible actions committed under the name of communism under a variety of its implementations, there have also been ruling communist regimes that have not committed wholesale purges and slaughters, and the circumstances behind the bad acts under communism are not identical and universal, so the symbols of communism are not as synonymous with specific, worst-ever actions, necessarily.

Answer 9

TL;DR -- Nazis want to kill people, commies want universal peace and harmony and individual commies have been willing to kill people to achieve those goals.

Nazis refer to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei aka NSDAP aka National Socialist German Workers Party, a very specific group. Nazis are not the National Socialist party of Italy or the US. Showing Nazi symbols can be taken as support for the group and the various crimes they committed -- accessory after the fact.

Communism on the other hand is a political philosophy, and is not specific to any one group (for instance the USSR was against the Thailand communist).

Whatever their other goals or means used to achieve those other goals, we know that Nazis had goals we find inhuman and that they used means we consider criminal in their attempt to achieve those goals.

Communism may require means we consider criminal in order to have any hope of achieving their goals, but their stated goals are not themselves inhuman.

That means that it is perfectly possible to be a communist and unwilling to advocate killing anyone, but not possible to be a nazis without advocating killing some people.

This difference between the two makes making laws against nazis symbols easier than making laws against communist symbols.

Answer 10

A lot of answers here do a good job of answering the moral and philisophical reasons why Nazi symbols are banned but not Communist ones.

But there's also the practical reason and that is that Communism is a hell of a lot more popular and widespread throughout the world than Nazism.

Answer 11

As for the banning of Nazi symbology in public in Germany, I can tell you that it is neither only affecting Nazi symbols nor does it work very well.

It is prohibited to show symbols of organizations that want to abolish or undermine the constitution. This is a legal term in Germany and has to be confirmed by the Federal Constitutional Court if an organization is centered on abolishing or undermining the constitution.

That includes the symbols of the NSDAP but also includes left extremist symbols.

As for working very well, well they abolished the Swastika flag being shown. So now the Neo-Nazi movements and parties show the imperial war ensign (Military Flag of the German Empire of 1871-1918) or the normal Flag of the German Empire from 1871-1918 or - ironic and even more ridicolous - the Wirmer-Flag which was designed by one of the people instigating the resistance of the german military against Hilter during the failed July 20 plot.

So they might be banned, but everyone knows what is meant...

Answer 12

Communism is splited into many factions, some of them even hostile to some other ones. You can´t blame communism in general for crimes 1 of its factions has comited.

There are still some countries ruled by a communist party, like China or Vietnam. Baning symbols of communism makes relation with that countries more complicated.

The West, or at least its allies have comited similar crimes like communist regimes, so baning communism for that crimes could be seen as hypocracy by the rest of the world. Blaming nazies for their crimes is much easier, as most of that crimes were uniqe.

Answer 13

Looking back at this older question today, many have attempted to distinguish the nature of Nazi and Communist ideology as to why one is more tolerable and less bannable than the other.

I'd suggest a much simpler explanation, which is that there are many extant users of the Hammer and Sickle (and have been for over 100 years), whereas the main user of the Swastika expired in 1945.

The willingness to re-use the Swastika is of course influenced by the ideology as well as events it represents, but the immediate reason why it is banned (rather than merely lesser used) is because it already has few users anywhere willing to resist such a ban.

And only the biggest war in human history was capable of putting the Swastika out of such popular use in the first place, that a ban then became achievable.

There are many who would ban the Hammer and Sickle given the opportunity, but there are also just far too many in the world (including billions of people and some nation states) who wouldn't have it.