You may not have heard, but “Poland’s president has approved legislation that allows for people to be fined or even imprisoned for possessing or buying communist symbols, two decades after communist rule ended.” That comes from this news article, and I mention the story in Impromptus today. The thinking of the Poles is that Communism is being romanticized and whitewashed, and must be clamped down on, for the sake of the present and the future. A Polish senator remarked to the press, “Communism should be treated just like Nazism.”

This business of Communist symbols is very tricky. Some of them are benign; some of them are sinister. Context matters quite a bit: A hammer and sickle in Eastern Europe has a different effect from a hammer and sickle in America. Different countries handle the matter of symbols in different ways. Not long ago, Lithuania banned Communist symbols, along with Nazi ones — and the equation, or implied equation, made the Russian government very cross.

I addressed this issue of symbols — Communist ones in particular — in an essay for NR last summer. (Go here. The essay is called “Undies, Comrade?” — because you can get hammer-and-sickle underwear.) We have a clash of values, or at least a clash of considerations: freedom of expression, intolerance of totalitarianism, and other things. Is one approach right in one country while wrong in others? Or should our principles be more universal than that?

For years, I thought that Germany’s and Austria’s ban on Nazi symbols was perfectly sensible: right for those countries. I entertain doubts, however. When they tossed the Holocaust denier David Irving in jail, I thought that made a martyr out of him, unnecessarily.

I don’t know. Maybe the way to go is to allow freedom of expression while at the same time working like hell to instill respect for freedom and democracy, and to warn against “the totalitarian temptation,” as Jean-François Revel put it. “Teach your children well.” There is wisdom in that song. At any rate, I invite members of the NR/NRO community to consider the issue for themselves, if they wish. (Hey, are we conservatives and libertarians allowed to say “community”?)