It makes no difference if a person was killed for ridiculing Fuhrer, hiding Jews or refusing to serve vodka[0]. Death is death and I hope one day humanity understands no war makes sense and we stop this insanity, working together to make everybody's lives better, not just one nation we happen to be associated with.
[0] https://uarefugees.news/hot-news/in-bucha-the-invaders-shot-...
It's important to give countenance to the fact that democracy, human rights, the rule of law,... in and of itself aren't measures against populism and authoritarianism. By and large, the success of the latter is tied into resentment over key social and economic factors which determine the strength of social cohesion and a sense of equity.
If a state doesn't invest in the common interests of its citizenry, over time that will create breeding grounds for people to become resentful, distrustful, tribal, isolated,... The identity politics of populists and authoritarians by and large revolve "we against them" narratives. These are incredibly easy to understand and provide a new framework of meaning and values to disenfranchised people. Minorities become prime targets because they are visibly different and therefor easy to pick out and used as scapegoats. That's what fractures an erstwhile democratic, cohesive society.
In Germany, the NSDAP only became successful after 1932, when the effects of the Depression came into full swing in an already unstable political climate of the Weimar Republic.
You're right, though, that in a way, the remembrance of the Holocaust doesn't resolve in a clear, consistent moral framework of principles. Just think about how restitution of property and real estate is still a hotly debated topic today. The crux is that questions regarding historic responsibility and guilt and how to approach them are always framed into a backdrop of present day economical and political concerns and interests. And that's just collective behavior that can be changed with an easy silver bullet fix.
> Unfortunately I think part of the popularity of these stone today is that they are no longer provocative.
I highly doubt that. On an individual level, humans are very much capable of feeling empathy and compassion. For instance, the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial received a record 2.3 million visitors in 2019. The unspeakable atrocities that happened there still resonate to this very day. If not for countless children and grand-children still deal with a lost connection to their own shared past through the loss of their family in the camps; and the stories that are still begin shared publicly of that great sorrow.
The thing that should worry us is people either not even noticing the stones and their significance in the first place, or forgetting their significance the minute they've passed and falling back into biased thinking regarding present day state of the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...
> (2019) "The law, which obliges all citizens to know the Ukrainian language and makes it a mandatory requirement for civil servants, soldiers, doctors, and teachers, was championed by outgoing President Petro Poroshenko."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/21/ukraine-bans-s...
> (2015) "Dunja Mijatović, the representative for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe on freedom of the media, said the “broadly and vaguely defined language” in the anti-communist law “could easily lead to suppression of political, provocative and critical speech, especially in the media”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum also condemned the independence-fighter legislation."
Imagine, for comparison, if a right-wing government in Washington tried to make all Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens second-class citizens, while incorporating the KKK into the military forces of the United States, as Ukraine did with the Nazi revivalist group Azov Battalion? These are the kind of actions that led to the rise of Russian separatist movements in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and which Putin ultimately used as part of his political justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
The situation is now so completely embittered that it's hard to see a resolution where the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea would ever agree to exist under the control of a western Ukrainian government.
Russian propaganda loves pointing to the same few cases of Nazism in Ukraine. Ok, lets see that Russian propaganda misses at home - that for example is the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, one of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's favorite giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".
https://youtu.be/xkXVVcPWSU8?t=87
And for that antique Nazist paraphernalia that some Azov members supposedly had... Well, this is the Main Cathedral of Russian forces built in 2020 where they store various Hitler's "relics" (yep, exactly that term - "relikviya" - was used here by the Russian top military leadership!) including his uniform, medals, etc. and where walls and floor is made out of German's tank metal - basically they made a Hitler shrine (and can make a good money organizing pilgrimage here for the neo-Nazis across the world :).
https://images.theconversation.com/files/449001/original/fil...
Anyway, Russia is a full blown nazist state today like Germany was in 1939 and whatever Russia says, in particular about nazims, is worthless at best, and usually is just outright propaganda lie.
>the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea would ever agree
Definitely nobody is asking that population today. The Russian puppet regimes on those territories are terrorist states just like ISIS - the only difference is that ISIS preferred public beheadings while in those Donbass "republics" they kidnap and torture with fate of many unknown, though few mutilated bodies found so far of such disappeared people suggest that there is no good fate to expect.
>It's important to note that elements in Ukraine si nce 2014 pushed a series of oppressive legal restrictions on the Russian-speaking segment of the population that were designed to push that entire group into second-class citizen state.
That wasn't push against Russian speaking population. That was push against various symbols of the totalitarian regime of USSR. In particular removing names from public places of the USSR leaders who ordered/led mass killings of millions of people, ie. Lenin, Stalin, and their close associates in that, etc.
The requirement for Ukrainian usage in Ukraine is the same for Russian-speaking as for say Hungarian- or Romanian-speaking minorities.
I very much believe that this is the intention, but does it actually though? Oppressive country frequently brings up the past as a safe way to legitimize the present. Russia seems to have had an increase in this in recent years as it now started a war in Europe. Most of the western world seems to not have learned much at all from the second world war and are yet again running black sites, funneling money to regimes and fighting wars to defend some of them.
Unfortunately I think part of the popularity of these stone today is that they are no longer provocative. Their existence doesn't seem to have the effect of for example highlighting still exiting companies participation in the holocaust, current day trade policies or crimes against humanity. Putting one of these outside a company, judge or commander involved in past or present atrocities would probably result in it quickly being removed and you potentially landing in jail.
But I guess that even if few learns the bigger lesson they might still be a net positive.