[jacquesm]

Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread. Germany learned that the hard way, I'm curious how the USA will deal with this and if they will manage to control it while keeping the free speech laws. I don't know which way it will go but I can see some problems.

I also wonder how many of the 300+ million Americans are now quiet converts waiting in the wings. Scary times.

[mortenjorck]

There is nothing magical about Nazism; it's not some kind of special Pandora's box waiting to spring upon an unsuspecting public. It's just one of many ideologies that appeal to people who feel oppressed by giving them the easy target of vulnerable populations on whom to blame their misfortunes.

That it happened to be the ideology used to horrific ends in the industrialized world last century is much more a product of its moment in history than due to anything unique about the ideology itself.

The poisonous seed isn't the problem - rather, the ground fertile to it must be tended so that it will reject such things taking root.

[jacquesm]

Well, without the seed the ground would lie fallow. It needs both, not either one or the other and while it is definitely a requisite that the ground be tended that's a hard problem revolving around education and a general idea of ones place in the world and what rights and obligations we all have. And in spite of trying for a long time we have yet to come upon an infallible way of making these things known to all.

[AnotXOR]

Are you suggesting that freedom of speech is what allowed or was necessary for the Nazi party to become what they were?

[jacquesm]

Nazism is a meme, just like stupid cat videos and the bible. It spreads from person to person seeking fertile ground in terms of an easy to identify scape-goat and an association with trouble experienced in a persons life. Allowing such memes to spread unchecked is playing roulette with open societies, the question then becomes whether you'd prefer free speech if it becomes the deciding factor in whether or not a thing like that can take root on a scale that it could cause a disaster or whether you forgo free speech to some extent in order to squelch the problem before it gets out of hand. Note that the Nazis themselves were not exactly free speech fans.

So even if it isn't a necessity it certainly will help to make it grow, and will allow it to grow faster.

[AnotXOR]

Your rationale is exactly what every dictator throughout history has used to protect their power. Every, single, one. You either have free speech and allow all to express their ideas unfettered, or you will end up in a dictatorship sooner or later, guaranteed. To be clear, i'm talking about expressing ideas like "men and women differ biologically" and not speaking about threats/fighting words. Once you start punishing people for their ideas you're on the road to dictatorship, at least if every dictatorship in history is any guide.

[jacquesm]

Right, that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships. Come on, that's not even trying. If anything the USA is more at risk of becoming a dictatorship than many other democracies.

You're not going to see any trouble anywhere - except on private property - for expressing ideas such as 'men and women differ biologically', note that no government you'd care to list here has ever suppressed speech like that.

But Nazism is on a different level, and if you're willing to go down that road protecting the free speech of Nazis you really have to be very optimistic about human nature. I keep hearing echoes of 'it can't happen here'. But I believe it can happen, and it probably can happen everywhere. The question is if we will let it and what it will take to stop it once the ball starts rolling.

[Melchizedek]

>that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships

They partly are. The USA, for all its faults, is the last bastion of free speech in the world. And I say this as a European.

[matt4077]

You seem to defend the idea that 'limitations to free speech lead to dictatorships' by defining a dictatorship as 'any government that puts limitations on free speech'.

...which is obviously tautological.

For better data, check out the democracy index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde.... It's compiled by the publisher of The Economist, which is trusted rather widely, and its methodology is public.

[jacquesm]

Well, let's just say we disagree. See 'free speech zones'.

[glenndebacker]

Since the end of WW2 we (Belgium) have laws against glorifying nazisme or racisme. After 70 years we are still a democratic country.

And we are certainly not the only democratic country that have similar laws...

[drewbuschhorn]

You could make just as a valid (and philosophers like Popper have) that allowing unfettered free speech has also led every society that tried it down the road to dictatorship.

Dictatorship is one of the easy to find local minima of human organization, that we have to fight everyday not to slip down towards. You do that by accepting the humanity of your opponents, finding reasonable compromises, and there's no reasonable compromise to be had with the Nazi ideology, just ask the dead.

[yahna]

This idea is just more narrow minded America-centric thinking.

[philwelch]

> Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread.

I have two rather distinct objections to this line of thinking. One is that this isn't especially true. To name one semi-controlled experiment: Germany has laws against using Nazi symbols, denying the Holocaust, and so forth, and yet the crypto-neo-Nazi NPD pulls down hundreds of thousands of votes every election--not enough to win anything aside from one European Parliament seat, but a significant number anyway. Meanwhile, the US has no laws against neo-Nazi expression and also doesn't seem to have very many more neo-Nazis per capita--even in Charlottesville, the neo-Nazis numbered in the high dozens to low hundreds and were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters.

A more philosophical objection is that you don't want to go into the business of deciding what ideas are too dangerous to express, because there's a greater risk that any institution with the power to make and enforce that judgment call will abuse that power. This is also a lesson that Europe learned the hard way, but seems to have forgotten.

[jacquesm]

But Germany has so far managed to keep the NPD on the fringe. The number of votes they get is low enough that it can be considered a safety valve of sorts. More interesting would be to see how Germany would react if the NPD got within striking distance of control of the Reichstag.

As for your second point, ideas may be too dangerous to express and you're still free to express them. But that's no reason to hand someone a megaphone to express those ideas and I think that Europe learned that there are points in time where small changes can have large effects, and that some of those effects can get out of control. So they tried (and possibly failed, but so far so good) to put mechanisms in place to stop a re-occurrence of recent history.

Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.

[philwelch]

> Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.

Likewise, a lot of what's happened in Europe does not have a parallel in the USA. Elections have been seriously contested and sometimes won by the likes of Golden Dawn, Le Pen--both father and daughter--the BNP, Alessandra Mussolini, Jorg Haider, and so forth. Sure, in Europe you don't have a hundred white nationalists marching down the street carrying swastika flags, but you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.

[jacquesm]

> you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.

We're working on it. The last batch of elections was pretty scary but so far so good. If WWII wasn't enough to teach the world a lasting lesson you have to wonder how bad it would have to get before we will. Quite possibly it can not be done and we will occasionally revert to type.

[InitialLastName]

The scary thing is that WWII is quickly passing out of living memory. In the next 20 years, there will start to be a critical mass of voters who have never MET anyone who was an adult in WWII.

[jacquesm]

I suspect this is a large driver behind what we are seeing today.

[logfromblammo]

By constructing the mechanism by which one may deny a bad guy any platform, you now have a mechanism that may be used to deny any other kind of person a platform. Such a thing is more dangerous than any individual bad guy, and will--very ironically--eventually fall into the hands of a person as bad or worse than that bad guy you were trying to stifle in the first place.

Censorship cannot triumph over evil, because it is evil in itself. The only reasonable counter is constant vigilance and tireless opposition. Furtive, deceitful whispers in the shadows call for floodlights and truth. Open demonstrations call for larger counter-demonstrations. The effective counter to objectionable speech is not censorship, but speaking the objection.

[vkou]

Absolute free speech is fundamentally incompatible with a free and fair society.

Allowing some forms speech has an incredibly chilling effect on other forms of speech, or on the safety of people.

Even America does not have absolute free speech (Although its further on this spectrum then all other Western democracies.) See - fighting words, direct incitements to domestic violence (Indirect domestic ones of the wink wink nudge nudge ones are fine, as are direct ones that incite violence against foreign persons or nations.)

[cmiles74]

I think there must be people wrestling with this already in terms of ISIL recruitment. In some ways, these strike me as similar problems.

[drspacemonkey]

That's not quite what happened in Germany. After the Beer Hall Putsch, there was a 5 year period where the Nazis would get into violent street clashes with members of the communist party.

Reacting to the Nazis with violence was tried in Germany. And it backfired very badly.

[at-fates-hands]

Yes, because driving them underground onto the dark web, without any adult supervision is a way better idea right? You drive these groups underground and one day are going to seriously regret doing so.

We are in the midst of a cultural civil war. The funny thing is that the more you suppress their ability to protest and their speech, the more converts you're making.

Maybe we should start by asking WHY these groups are getting more popular, why they are so enraged and angry and suddenly are out front airing their frustrations. And saying this is all about Trump is simply masking something that has clearly been brewing for a long time prior to this.

[jacquesm]

Every society has a population of disenfranchised people that can be turned to the tune of the right words. That's not unique to Trump followers, or even the USA.

What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.

Pushing it underground is maybe ineffective as a sole strategy but making it seem acceptable is also not right.

Lots of these people only do this because they feel they have cover.

[at-fates-hands]

>> What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.

In that last decade, apparently not much - which is why you have the problem you have now. This idea of doing something has not been done at all, but now all the SJW's have their hammers out and now everything looks like a nail.

It doesn't work like that. In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.

[jacquesm]

> In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.

I agree with that. Until we're talking about a party whose sole purpose is to take away those rights from others. That's one rule in the democratic playbook that we should all subscribe to and that should be a prerequisite for being allowed in the sandbox.