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by nerdponx 1937 days ago
If you can sell Nazi memorabilia on Ebay, you should be able to sell a Dr. Seuss book that happens to contain an offensive stereotype on Ebay.
2 comments

You cannot sell Nazi memorabilia on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

While there is a grey area around general German WW2 artifacts, including those associated with the Nazi government, eBay explicitly disallows Nazi propaganda. It has a blanket ban on any item with a swastika that was made after 1933.

While some are going around to “point out” Mein Kampf can be bought on eBay, eBay only allows critically-annotated copies designed for scholars.

In fact, in many countries it's illegal to sell Nazi memorabilia. Good if you ask me.
> Good if you ask me.

Why, exactly? I wouldn't buy any such a thing, but I know several institutions that have good reasons to.

People in general have some obsession with the Nazi and the last war. As if WWI never happened, and great wars before it. Because of this obsession, many people seem to think that the cause of a future war would be a kind of Nazism, completely disregarding the fact that it wasn't the cause of WWI and other earlier wars. Paradoxically, they also seem to forget what were the actual reasons of the rise of Nazism in post-WWI Germany (huge WWI retributions, enormous inflation and omnipresent poverty - basically people were very unhappy, and this very unhappiness was abused by Hitler; the ideology came afterwards).

-> Why? To prevent glorification of the ideology.

But I was factually wrong ; It is not illegal to sell them, at least in the countries I had in mind (France & Germany).

However in France it is forbidden to exhibit them. So in order to be sold they must only be described but not shown.

Yahoo & eBay do ban the sell of such items, notably since being sued for that.