The parent commenter was claiming that free speech prevents nazism, which any honest look at the history of authoritarianism shows to be categorically untrue.
This comment perfectly illustrates the need for free spreech absolutism.
First, it's just about denying speech to Nazis. Then, everyone who "argues to the contrary" is also a Nazi, and presumably doesn't deserve free speech either. And voila, when you want to deny speech to anyone in the future, you can shut down anyone defending them as well.
Yes, I read that. That massive (and likely deliberate) mischaracterisation of free speech is exactly what the comment you're replying to is objecting to.
> it's okay to promote e.g. National Socialism
Not, it's not OK. If you promote Nazism I'll point out you're an idiot and so will most right minded adults. Something being not banned in not the same thing as it being 'OK'.
(not parent throwaway)
Just because nazis used their free speech right to do their propaganda, that doesn't mean free speech caused nazism. In order to do any propaganda (whether that's for a morally good or bad cause), you need to be able to talk to people.
The first thing nazis did was to revoke free speech rights. That's an example of authoritarianism and free speech being opposites.
I don’t really think that Germany was actively suppressing anti Semitic sentiment during the time the Nazis rose to power- frankly, they were a minority party that rose to power and then started killing their competition- Nazis were anti free speech, as in they actively went out of their way to kill people expressing differing views.
It isn’t limiting free speech by not wanting to listen to or follow people whose speech you disagree with and the argument that doing so is equivalent to how Nazis came to power is entirely historically inaccurate.
> What speech laws were in place in Weimar Germany? What was Hitler advocating for before he took power? Without that this isn't the evidence you say it is.
Hitler's rise has many causes. One of those causes was that anti-semitic racism was part of everyday culture. It was a meme that was propagated across generations via speech. Then Hitler weaponized that meme (again, using speech) to rally support after the Great Depression + fears of Bolshevism + WW1 grievances made people's minds more pliable to scapegoating.
Weimar Germany did have hate speech laws, albeit not ones that were properly enforced. That's moot, though, since it's not my claim that a specific speech restriction is effective at preventing the hate speech -> genocide causal path. My only claim is that that causal path exists.
> Lone wolf terrorists seems a better example. I assume you're referring to school shooters. The problem is that's an issue of the US, not of speech laws.
I'm really referring to hate crimes perpetrated by lone wolves, of which shootings are a subset. For example, the supermarket shooter that wrote the N word on his gun barrel. I read his manifesto, and his grievances were ones that he'd adopted from online ethnonationalist forums.
Again, I'm not trying to claim that some speech law can stop hate crimes. Maybe they can, or maybe they'll backfire. I'm just claiming that this notion that speech that isn't direct incitement hasn't historically partially caused hate crimes and genocide is a fantasy. The above case is some evidence backing that position, and there are others like it.
Ideas are extremely powerful. They can inspire unhinged people to take drastic action on their own terms, when perhaps they may not have otherwise done so. They can be part of the fuel for the rise of demagogues. That's what appears to be the reality.
But being able to discuss Naziism isn't free speech absolutism. You admit that your "absolutist" views are far beyond what the US protects, and so the US today isn't a free speech absolutist nation, despite having what are probably the most significant speech protections of any nation in history. Parents point remains true.
I find it interesting that you went to "banning speech". I don't equate anything the parent said with wanting to ban speech. Further I thought the comparison to Hitler was thought provoking as many German intellectuals looked the other way when Hitler and began instituting their policies. The "First they came.."[1] poem comes to mind.
Did you read beyond the first sentence of my comment? I feel like I provided enough context for what I was getting at.
I just meant that Nazi Germany, in comparison to any other authortarian regime, weren't anything special when it came to censorship, other than the racial focus making them easy to hate.
If we are trying to justify censorship as an effort to "protect" Freedom of Speech, then logically we would need to censor the more popular anti free speech political ideologies as well, and with higher priority even! But that wouldn't be free speech anymore would it?
The reality of it is that Nazis only get censored because they are unpopular, a dead political ideology. There is no nation that supports it, and none that can defend it, it's an easy target. People who want to censor Nazis aren't doing it to protect Free Speech, they are doing it because they don't like them, the argument is fundumentally dishonest.
If you just want to censor people you don't like, then you don't support Freedom of Speech. Just like every other autoritarian regime that banned whatever they disliked. The line is very clear here.
You're being disingenuous. Nazi Germany's rise to power was a composite of many different factors. You make it seem as though free speech was the sole cause of its ascendance.
>Here in Germany it's very popular to talk about, chastise and silence "Nazis" (be it real or assumed), which sort of makes sense knowing Germany's history.
And yet it doesn't even prevent the core of the problem, which is that the supreme law of the land is easily abusable as a weapon once the Nazis get in power (and if the German economy tanks to the point where people can no longer buy bread for a day's work, which was true in the Weimar Republic, they will).
Anti-speech laws have never been about stopping Nazis. It's all about the feeling that they stop Nazis, which (especially in majoritarian-biased politics) is all that really matters.
Being a Nazi is allowed under free speech though. Suppressing Nazi speech is the same as suppressing a social justice warrior right? You can't pick and choose your free speech.
> There are historical reasons to think that curbing extremist speech protects democracy (see the Weimar Republic).
You think the Weimar Republic is a point in favor of that claim?
In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate-speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.
In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.
Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, points out that cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti-Semitic speech in the years leading up to Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933. “Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law,” he writes. “Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech…
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