For decades now Europe and other parts of the civilized world have been struggling to come up with a way to get rid of racial hatred. In recent years gains by ultra-nationalist parties in Austria, France and Belgium, as well as the killings of a politician and a filmmaker in the Netherlands, have alarmed continental leaders. Last week's anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz helped crystallize the urgency of the issue. United under the slogan "never again," Europeans want to rid the Old World of race-based hatred as it did with smallpox or any other plague.
The first goal in the campaign ostensibly would to be ban hatred's pernicious symbols 's first and foremost, the swastika. Any commonsensical person would argree that the hakenkreuz is the quintessential symbol of hatred, particularly anti-Semitism, and it conjures up images of diabolical SS officers, death camps, genocide.
However, for many in Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union, the hammer-and-sickle 's the ubiquitous symbol of communism, the 20th century's other evil 's is no less horrendous. For Balts, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and others, the serp i molot symbolizes KGB torture chambers, Siberian labor camps, nation-based oppression. Tens of millions died as a result of totalitarian communism last century, and if one counts all who perished as a result of state-sponsored famine in places such as Ukraine and China, there is no question that communism took more lives than fascism. For this very reason MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, an indefatigable critic of Russia, has proposed that, along with the swastika, European Union members ban the hammer-and-sickle as well. It is offensive and causes great grief and distress to all those who suffered from 1917 to 1991, he argues.
Unfortunately, forbidding the use or public display of either the swastika or the hammer-and-sickle 's which have vastly different origins and had vastly different uses in their heyday 's will never bring the desired result. If hatred (in the case of the swastika) cannot be banned, then it is illogical to think that banning the symbols it has manifested over the centuries will have any efficacy. The same holds true for the hammer-and-sickle: if lunatic politico-philosophical ideas can't be outlawed, then what's the purpose of prohibiting their attendant symbols?
Only rigid, persistent education can combat racism and xenophobia, not symbol-banning.
In the end, it is nevertheless admirable that Landsbergis and others are airing the hammer-and-sickle debate in EU structures. For it often seems that West Europeans have conveniently forgotten the sheer number of lives that totalitarian communism claimed. The failure of four MEPs (one from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland) to garner sufficient votes to support a declaration renouncing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is revealing of Europe's short-term memory. Perhaps that is the scariest thing of all.
