For example, I am a philatelist and collector of postcards of historical interest. Over many years, as a collector of all periods of German history, I had a large collection that included the Third Reich issues and postcards of the period, which provide a fascinating study of the period and how totalitarian regimes bombard the masses and everyone else with material. The same could be applied to Mussolini's Italy, the Soviet Union, or any country that has symbols some, or many, consider offensive.
I now collect the Dominican Republic. Should we ban and burn material relating to the Trujillo dictatorship, one of the worst? Same with Paraguay of the Stroessner period. I collect Paraguay. That does not make me a militarist neo-Nazi.
Should we ban works by WB Yeats because he supported and wrote an anthem for Franco's fascists?
Do we ban stamps with Chairman Mao? Some would possibly like to ban Israeli or Islamic symbols or any flag or emblem or material of any country they oppose.
I have already had an experience with a prominent auction house in NZ which did not want to risk auctioning a Luftwaffe mug dated 1936 because it had a tiny eagle carrying a swastika on its underside. The auction house feared a backlash from zealots who are spending time trolling auction houses for anything to find offensive (on behalf of others who may not even be offended).
I even know a staunch Labour-Green supporter who, despite sending Xmas cards, said she would write to NZ Post calling for Christmas stamps not to be issued or to be less religious in case they offended our ''multicultural society''.
Zealots lobbying for bans on a selective basis to suit their narrative need to be challenged.
Crack down on those who buy Nazi regalia to parade around, maybe, although it serves to expose them. But leave genuine collectors and students of history/collectors alone. People such as myself use them for study and information and they are part of history.
I recall exchanging stamps with a collector in Kiev, USSR, now Ukraine, in the 70s and 80s. I supplied Commonwealth in exchange for USSR. It was no problem as long as you went through their special customs system for stamp exchanges.
He was a former MiG pilot working on Kiev's transport system. His parents were killed by the Germans (he was no Bandera type). He said the authorities in the USSR banned stamps of the Nazi period, but he disagreed with the ban. Despite being a member of the Communist Party, he said he could see no sense in such bans as ''stamps are like historical monuments. Things happened and banning will not change that''.
Paul Peters is a former journalist and editor, who lives in New Plymouth.
4 comments:
Bet they won't ban Masonic symbols.
OK, so what does Nazi symbolism actually symbolise? Why is it so important to ban the thing symbolised (because let's face it, a symbol has no agency of its own)?
Essentially, it stands for something like a collective of White people with a strong sense of their own culture, history and traditions mobilising against "cosmopolitan" ideas and what they conceived as the negative the influence of an alien out-group on that collective, namely the Jewish people.
That's basically what a swastika has come to stand for (even though, it is a very ancient symbol in many cultures).
What does it say about the political paradigm in 2024 that it is seen as so crucially important for these ideas never to gain a foothold and, even worse, that the ideas to be made manifest?
"Well, the Nazis killed millions of Jews" may be one common answer, to which I would say "are you referring to the thing that cannot be analysed in polite company, that other thing already subject to a ban in some places?"
It seems to me that placing Nazi symbolism in a special category that is apparently supposed to be self-evidently justified is designed to keep both White people and Jewish people in their current positions on the homicidal oppressor/blameless victim spectrum, albeit at the two opposite ends.
I find the hammer and sickle flag a lot more offensive than the hakenkreutz. Ban it? No, I believe in freedom of expression - for both.
In a democracy, you have to grow a thick skin.
No discussion of offensive symbolism in the context of New Zealand society is complete without considering gang patches. These are currently in the course of being proscribed, and if the legislation is well drafted it may well be used to go after other potentially offensive symbols like swastikas. But unfortunately for the Coalition Agreement, the Bill of Rights Act specifically guarantees the right to self-expression, and what stronger form of self-expression can there be than gang patches? Ban them and you attack what until now has been a core right of being a New Zealander. There is an override provision in the Act of course, which makes all rights "subject only to such reasonable limits as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". It will therefore be interesting to see how the limits on wearing gang patches will be "demonstrably defined" by Parliament. Because that may then form the case for banning swastikas. And what gets banned after that? Banning things is a slippery and dangerous slope for a Government to proceed down in a free society, Check out how the Republican Party is behaving at this very moment in the libraries of America. And that used to be called the land of the free!
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