A newly proposed law in Hungary could see Heineken’s red star trademark banned.

Viktor Orban’s national conservative government introduced legislation recently that would ban the commercial use of communist and other totalitarian symbols — a move the government called a “moral obligation.”

Close

The ban would include the red star and the hammer and sickle, and other symbols as well, including the Nazi swastika and the Arrow Cross, the symbol of Hungary’s wartime collaborationist national socialist government.

Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen, who submitted the bill with Janos Lazar, Orban’s chief of staff, said Heineken’s red star was “obvious political content.”

Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen called Heineken’s red star “obvious political content.”

Heineken disagrees.

“Naturally, the red Heineken star has no political meaning whatsoever, and we use the same brand symbols across the world, in every market,” the company said in a statement. “We will closely monitor this local matter and hope and trust that this matter will be resolved soon.”

But for those millions of people who suffered under communism, the symbolism of the red star is unmistakable. Just as much a symbol of communism as the hammer and sickle, the red star was and is featured on the flag of practically every single communist country. It was also the emblem of the Soviet Red Army.

[lz_related_box id=”356338″]

And indeed, while Heineken’s use of a star logo does date back to the 1880s, it was only colored red in 1930, reported Fox News — an interesting fact considering the red star’s association with international communism had already been well established by that year.

By the end of World War II, and with the Soviet Union’s conquest of Eastern and Central Europe, the red star symbol was so controversial that Heineken changed it to white in 1951. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the company reverted back to its red star logo.