> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime.

In the US, at least, the current (seemingly unsuccessful) slouch towards tyranny definitely does involve the revival symbols of a particular defeated regime: the Confederacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arreste...).

Though it might not really be a "revival," since the symbols were never really killed off in the first place. A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved removal of these symbols.

It might also be worth pointing out that those flashpoints were originally put into place deliberately, in a mostly failing attempt to bring the country back together, and then left in place until they went off.

> More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them.

Yes I think so. In fact, that's precisely what the nazis did with the swastika.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...

Symbols retain power for a long time. That's why we're not seeing a swastika revival in interior design or anything like that, even in places where the Nazis did not exist. Another good example is the U.S. confederate flag, which only existed officially for a few years and was decided against by a bloody and brutal military loss. However, it's retained enough significance that someone just pranced through the U.S. Capitol with it. If it doesn't have power as a symbol, why not pick a new flag?

Obviously banning a symbol is not going to prevent future violent movements by itself, but it also seems wise to not leave still-hot embers of symbolic power lying around for the next would-be demagogue to fan back into a fire. People trying to pick up those old symbols are giving a very strong signal about their ideology.

I agree that the main bulwark of a society against falling into fascism is its people's memory of the past and willingness to prevent recurrence of such episodes though.

> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime

It wouldn't have to. But having watched Hitler sell the idea that Germany was being unjustly punished for Jewish lies a generation earlier, they drew the conclusion that [West] Germany was quite likely to see would-be tyrants rallying around a Lost Cause narrative and that vulnerability to this was a bigger problem than a lack of diversity in holocaust historiography. Or more straightforwardly, they figured German democracy faced a more imminent threat from neo-Nazism than a slippery slope towards an Official State Version of History. A view which seems to have persisted even after reunification with the East which had considerable recent experience with the pervasive censorship involved in promoting its Official State Version of History.

That's an interesting fact that puts the issue into a light I hadn't considered. Fortunately, the literal "lost cause" language of the American Civil War has already run its course, caused its damage (up to and including a presidential assassination), and the country has survived. Would banning confederate symbols have prevented the assassination of Lincoln? Probably not, to be honest. I wonder if it would have prevented anything.

I don't see it preventing Lincoln's assassination, no. Jim Crow laws? Possibly not, and there were better ways of preventing them. But we wouldn't be seeing angry mobs fighting over statues today if they'd never been put up and we wouldn't have seen a mass membership second Klan if the first one hadn't been ruled constitutionally protected shortly after it had been forced to disband

The post Civil War US is an experiment in taking the precise opposite stance to postwar Germany: positively encouraging the losing side to romanticise their cause so long as their revisionist history downplays the slavery bit. Some northerner presidents even paid tribute to General Lee. I think it's difficult to argue reconciliation and race relations have been helped the resulting counter narrative that it was actually a pretty noble thing to defend their way of life against other states who only pretended to be concerned about negroes though.

The best example is that right after the holocaust and "never that again", half of the western political spectrum turned a blind eye to the various genocides and crimes against humanity happening in the communist block. Clearly no lesson was learnt. The two great totalitarian ideologies of the XX century have a lot in common. These laws that target one but ignore the other are I think at best misguided if not cynical. The French equivalent of those laws was proposed by the French communist party...