<i>&gt; Or about the 34 to 49 million deaths at Stalin&#x27;s hands? Ban Communism?</i><p>No, but the Russians did go through their own cultural reaction to Stalin&#x27;s tyranny; see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;De-Stalinization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;De-Stalinization</a>.<p>Beyond that, by naming the entity doing the banning as &quot;we&quot; you&#x27;re eliding a key point, which is that in this case it&#x27;s <i>the people who were responsible for the terrible thing</i> doing the banning, not some outside entity.<p>Germans decided, through a democratically elected government, to pursue this course. It wasn&#x27;t forced on them by anybody. It has remained in law over many decades, across numerous changes of government and the reunification of East and West Germany, so it&#x27;s hard to argue that it&#x27;s somehow unrepresentative of the general desire of the German people. That&#x27;s a very different thing than it would be if &quot;we&quot; (which on HN will mean primarily Westerners, mostly Americans) were to, say, tell the Islamic world which parts of Islam they should keep and which they should discard.