My mom was born in Germany in 1937. She was too young to know what was going on politically, but she remembers the end of the war VIVIDLY. The war, after all, was pretty much all she had ever known as a child.

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2/ When the war was over, before the US soldiers came through her town, everyone was destroying anything that had imagery that could be construed as showing support for the Nazi government. They knew it had been a disgrace & wanted to make sure the incoming troops knew they knew.

3/ My mom, seven years old, didn’t even totally understand at the time what it all meant: tearing down and smashing pictures of Hitler, removing any symbols associated with the Nazis.

4/ Mom tells me, in retrospect, that of course part of this was probably motivated by fear of the reaction of US troops if they didn’t. (Everyone was glad it was the US and not the Russian troops, mom tells me, because the rumors were that Russian troops were worse.)

However...

5/ Both her sense at the time, and her sense from talking to people after, was that for many or most of the people it WAS primarily that the people in the town were disgusted or even ashamed at what that government did, and they wanted to show that with their actions....

6/ This story comes to mind now, because I wonder what it would have been like if they had the internet, and those inhabitants of this small German town, were being fed (day in and day out) the message: “You should NOT publicly repudiate the failed Nazi party. That’s divisive.”

7/ I wonder how things would have gone, if there had been a constant clamor of complaints: “No no no, it’s wrong to shame people. People should be understanding, and nobody should be publicly smashing pictures of Hitler because that might make people feel bad. Unity and stuff.”

/8 I don’t know the answer for sure, of course. But this came to mind. Sometimes a society has to decide what kind of society they will be: what they will accept, and what they won’t.

9/ It’s not WRONG for a society to collectively say “no, this is not ok”. There is no ethical problem with a society creating boundaries.

The ethical question is only WHERE those boundaries are drawn.
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