Adam Taylor, THE WASHINGTON POST
(The Washington Post) — As the debate about the use of the Confederate flag raged in the United States this week, many looked abroad for other symbol-based controversies. Germany, which had banned the swastika and other Nazi iconography after World War II, became an especially common reference: If the Germans had banned Nazi symbols, the logic went, why couldn’t the United States ban symbols of the Confederacy?
The German example is illuminating, if imperfect, but the swastika is not the only controversial symbol of World War II worth considering. The most infamous emblem of the horrors of wartime Japan, the Rising Sun flag, was never banned, and it still flies today.
Much like the Confederate battle flag, which was used by several Confederate army units, the Rising Sun flag was a flag of war. It was first used by warlords back in the Edo period between the 17th and 19th centuries and was officially made the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1870.
Despite its history, the Rising Sun flag remains in use. It is flown by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, which was formed following the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force uses a modified version, too, and you can spot the flag on cans of Asahi beer or in the flag of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper company. (Japan’s official national flag since 1999, which shows a sun disk and is known as the Hinomaru, also has links to Imperial Japan but is generally considered less provocative than the Rising Sun flag.)
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I have no love for the confederate flag/symbols, and I certainly have no love for the Nazi flag/symbol… but the notion that these things should be banned outright flies in the face of ostensibly liberatory ideals, not to mention constitutional freedoms of political expression. Germany has far fewer such protections than the US does… people are routinely arrested (sometimes as terrorists!) and jailed in Germany for criticizing the lsraeli government, despite the fact that the lsraeli government bears many (admittedly quite uncomfortable) glaring similarities to the LAST genocidal ethnosupremacist nationalist fascist political project that Germany endorsed/enabled/empowered/utilized. Perhaps banning symbols and open discussion of these topics does little to meaningfully address nor to innoculate against similar future projects? Germany just elected a far-right, racist, nativist party at a time when Germany has been enthusiastically supporting and meaningfully enabling genocide for three straight years. The notion that they learned much of anything substantive from the horrors of the Nazi experiment is not corroborated by the observable present realities. All such bans do is give governments carte blanche to shut down political critique and scrutiny of their actions… license to classify people whose principled activism, coverage, analysis or protest as “terrorists” doing “terrorism”. It’s an innately fascistic act, banning symbols and flags and words. Even in situations where we might be tempted to agree, because the things being banned are so distasteful/offensive. Even then.
I’d argue that inculcating (and normalizing) a clear-eyed, robust understanding of the political/social behaviors (and economic conditions) that historically lead to the ascendancy of fascist movements/parties/governments all over the world — INCLUDING the Nazis, and confederate aspirations — would have been a far more effective means of anticipating and meaningfully preventing fascism than making these topics taboo (and imbuing Nazi symbols with a kind of perverse sanctity, rather than de-sanctifying them). The bans seem counterproductive: they do the opposite of facilitating real, non-reactionary, critical analysis and public discourse about very real and very consequentially harmful recurring reactionary political and historical phenomena that need to be grappled with and overcome in good faith, rather than avoided and evaded as a matter of political or economic expediency. It’s a form of moral and political cowardice — a false and superficial posture of accountability-taking that is actually extremely lazy, that actually INCREASES the likelihood of fascism taking root once again, rather than reducing or eliminating that likelihood.
The reality, of course, is that Germany never actually de-Nazified. This is very well documented. The symbols were banned; and a small, token percentage of Nazi officials were prosecuted or driven into hiding around the world. But the Nazi business and community leaders (the only place “de-Nazification” was even attempted) were overwhelmingly left in their positions of power, allowed to retain their holdings, and subjected to a comically inadequate program of brief “re-education”, wherein they basically just learned which words they now needed to avoid whilst pursuing nearly identically malignant, genocidal, capitalist-imperialist projects. There was never any widespread de-Nazification of the public, or anything like that. Many of the worst Nazi war criminals and genocidaires found a cushy welcome in the United States, in Israel, and in many other countries… facilitated by the same interests and actors who support and enable omnicidal Zionist fascism today (with the exception of the Catholic church, which was instrumental in propping up and protecting Nazis, but which speaks out against lsrael’s atrocities today, at least). They might have learned not to use THOSE symbols, or fly THAT flag, or use THOSE words… but the symbols/flags/symbols were (very obviously) never the real issue. The issue was — and still is — a prevalence of dehumanizing attitudes, political corruption, cynical bourgeois/bourgeois-enabling lawmakers, palpable economic inequality, financial desperation, a capitalist ruling class whose material interests are thenselves fascistic: they rely on and necessitate the brutal subjugation and exploitation of the overwhelming majority of people both domestically AND all over the world… all of which provide incentives for and predict the rise of fascist movements and fascist atrocities. Unless the real logic undergirding dehumanizing political projects is adequately understood by the public/political leadership/community leadership/news media and acted on in good faith by non-reactionary legislators, these unconscionable political patterns of behavior will never be truly resolved.
Banning things has always been a bad strategy, and will always be a bad strategy. There’s simply no reason to do so, when making the critical intellectual and political arguments against movements and projects like the Nazis/confederacy is so incredible easy to do. We should all be perfectly able to make those arguments effectively, provided that the capitalist-imperialist ruling class is not given free rein (and, indeed, free reign) to destroy people’s financial security, job prospects, the health of the planet, the stability of the climate, and 99% of humankind’s ability to invest in the future.
Banning symbols/speech is what people resort to when they can’t make an effective argument on sound reasoning and historical evidence. It’s lazy, cowardly, and unlikely to succeed at anything besides moving your OWN government closer to fascism on the political repression/regression continuum.