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> Well, for the more modern laws, I can only speculate that there is
> perhaps a resurgence of those ideas and that's what's prompted an
> apparent rise in political awareness of it in the country.

Yes, the 80s in Western Europe saw a rise of neonazism, Holocaust denial and 
anti-immigration parties, and not just in Germany. There was a return to 
pre-WW2 hate rhetorics that was (and still is) bothering.
The other factor was that Holocaust scholarship only began in the 60s and 
became mature in the 80s. Only then we had a comprehensive, detailed 
understanding of the mechanics of genocide and the work is still ongoing due 
to the mountains of archives now available in Russia and other ex-communist 
countries. Particularly, studies of the perpetrators' motives (i.e. what 
turned decent, ordinary people motives into killers) date from the 90s. 
Unfortunately, we saw these mechanics in action in the Balkans, in Rwanda 
and other parts of the world. All of this informed the more restrictive 
policies relative to hate speech and hate activities taken in Europe in the 
past 20 years.

> Yes, but from what I understand in Germany, outlawing some of the symbols
> has slowed any serious movement down.

I guess the main point is to create social taboos strong enough so that they 
don't break easily whenever there's a crisis. In that sense they have been 
relatively successful as a containment policy: small groups still use hate 
rhetorics and engage in hate activities but their ideas don't spill over to 
the general population. These taboos didn't exist in pre-WW2 Europe, where 
part of the population was quite receptive to such ideas and turned against 
their neighbours.

G.

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