JustWonders wrote:I think he may be referring to the trampling of free speech in Europe, as referenced in recent headlines:
Quote:A senior member of the Hungarian Communist Workers' Party has received a one-year suspended sentence for wearing a red star, the communist symbol which is banned under Hungarian law. ...Sporting communist or Nazi symbols is forbidden in Hungary. The red star was banned after Hungary threw off communism in 1989.
Link
Well, look at it this way, JW.
There are still people alive, in this country (Hungary, I mean), who actually were in Recsk or other such Stalinist-era prison camps.
People were tortured in these camps. And they were tortured in the name and under the sign of the red star.
Now imagine how it feels, if you've been tortured in a camp of the red star and hammer-and-sickle, to walk down the street in every-day life and see those signs coming back, ever again?
To be sure, I am ambivalent about this myself. For one, because, unlike the swastika, the red star has been used in last century's politics in many ways, for bad but also for good (or at least in democratic fashion). It's also a bit arbitrary: why the red star and not the red flag? Where do you stop?
Not to mention that, in this same country, a techno-version of an old communist anthem became a number one hit a few years ago: people apparently do have a complicated, ambiguous relationship with their past. So not quite sure whether slapping a ban on this or that symbol is the way to go there.
But I
can also well see the point of those who do fervently propone the ban. I mean, it's perhaps just a matter of plain decency and respect to, at least for as long as the camp survivors still live, ban the symbols in whose sign they were tortured, raped, almost killed.
So I dont think "trampling of free speech" quite covers the story.