[manfredo]

The point is not that the extremism on one end cancels out extremism on the other. The point is, it is possible to tolerate both - there is no paradox of tolerance with respect to speech.

As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this view.

The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away. Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned, and Völkischer Beobachter (a prominent Nazi publication) was repeatedly banned and had it's offices raided. It didn't stop the spread of Nationalist Socialism. Some historians believe this suppression only accelerated it's rise. It's like the Streisand effect on a political scale.

Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences (like specific threats, conspiracy to commit crimes, divulging official secrets or classified information) it is not wise to suppress it. And this doesn't even touch on people attempting to use accusations of hate speech as a political tool (e.g. the "blue lives matter" laws not-so-subtly aimed at suppression of BLM).

[claudiawerner]

>The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away.

Is there any evidence either way? I don't have the source at hand, but I believe there was some study done that found that Reddit, after removing communities which spread hate, turned out significantly better for it, with less vitriol all round. The hate literally went away.

>Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned

Here is a quote from Hitler opposing what you are saying:

"Only one thing could have broken our movement — if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement."

You say,

>Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences

But isn't the distance between speech and action shorter now than it ever was? Here is a quote from 1965; do you think, with the most recent flash riots organised over the Internet in which people have literally been killed, these words are more relevant than ever?

"The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short."

[hexane360]

A good recent example of this is Reddit banning /r/GreatAwakening. There was a migration over to Voat and a couple other forums, but total searches for Q and total influence went way down.

[watwut]

You can tolerate both, unless you are killed or injured by someone convinced on those words. Or, less dramatically, unless your salary is lower, because words convinced them that your kind is to be treated with more suspicion. You can tolerate extremism as long as you are not the target of said extremism. When you are the target, you have no choice.

The believe in Jewish control of media is reinforced by people who push for that theory. Whether there is suppression of speech or not in addition to that is not all that much relevant. Given that those very same groups are the ones that historically did suppressed a lot of speech and their fans did not minded that, I don't think the point stands.

Nazi also got comparably lower sentences then radical communists or left wing for same offenses. Right wing in Germany was treated with more lenience then left wing in Germany during that period. Hitler could be sent to jail for long, till forgotten, but was not. He could be kept there and his jail could be less of holiday then it actually was. Nazi got plenty of support and benefit of doubt on all kinds of levels which along with fear of communism and wish to build a military imperium again played more role then office sacking. It is not like only Nazi were censored at the time or that specially strict rules were applied to them.

More like the opposite - they were seen as patriots that went just a bit too far.

Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.

[manfredo]

The point in making is, the injuries you listed are the result of actions, not words. Trying to equate words with actions of a few people that act on them is a very dangerous line of thinking. It's the same logic behind people that wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country after 9/11. After all, if 11 people shot dead is sufficient to warrant suppression of speech, then surely 3 thousand does as well. And for what it's worth, many of the groups to which I belong have been and continue to be targeted by extremists. Your claim that, "When you are the target, you have no choice" is factually incorrect.

And whether or not the NSDAP would have still siezed power if the crackdown had been more onerous is speculation. Perhaps it would have further incensed the party and only made it stronger.

[watwut]

Nevertheless, you made quite a lot of untrue statements previously. You don't care about that, pushing yet another point unrelated point.

Suddenly we are talking about 9/11 through we talked about nazism before. Because apparently to you, there is equivalence between being Muslim and being Nazi. As if Nazism had many interpretations (it does not have) or as if it allowed peaceful coexistence with others in some branches. It does not, the ideology itself is closer to ISIS ideology - it demands obedience, violent masculinity, winners take all mentality and demands to conquer the world.

Note that I did not said whether and what limitations should there be on speech. But, my impression is that people who pretend to care about that are more interested in making Nazi sound better then they are.

Regardless of whether there should be limitations on speech, speech we are talking about is especially crafted and designed to make people take violent action. It is done for that purpose and synagogue shooting (or beheading) is its success as intended. Lets not lie or pretend it is otherwise.

[manfredo]

> Because apparently to you, there is equivalence between being Muslim and being Nazi.

I'm sorry but this is such a blatant fabrication that I cannot take any further words you write seriously. Any reasonable reading of my comment would recognize that references to Islam is to serve as an example of an intolerance perpetrated under the rationale of excluding the intolerant (e.g. calls to ban Muslims after 9/11). Did you ignore the part where I prefaced this as a "very dangerous line of thinking"? The whole point is that "intolerance of the intolerant is okay" often fuels intolerant thinking itself. How you concluded that my comments equated Islam with Nazism is beyond me.

[watwut]

> Any reasonable reading of my comment would recognize that references to Islam is to serve as an example of an intolerance perpetrated under the rationale of excluding the intolerant (e.g. calls to ban Muslims after 9/11).

To make that point with proper analogy, you would have to use ISIS or al-Qaeda as an example. The trouble is, that such ban would make sense to quite a lot of people. There, the discussion is whether it is ok to lock them indefinitely on island without process or torture them, generally most people are perfectly fine with America not allowing those to enter. There is an actual ban in place for suspect or admitted ISIS members.

The other possible equivalence would be all Germans ban or ban on teaching all German originated philosophies. Which is not really the topic, since the discussion up there was limited to Nazism.

[froasty]

> Nazi also got comparably lower sentences then radical communists or left wing for same offenses. Right wing in Germany was treated with more lenience then left wing in Germany during that period. Hitler could be sent to jail for long, till forgotten, but was not. He could be kept there and his jail could be less of holiday then it actually was. Nazi got plenty of support and benefit of doubt on all kinds of levels which along with fear of communism and wish to build a military imperium again played more role then office sacking. It is not like only Nazi were censored at the time or that specially strict rules were applied to them.

The precipitating issue in Weimar Germany was that a very clear social and cultural divide existed between those engaged in culture production and those involved in maintaining law and order. The former, generally, were the cosmopolitan worldly types and the latter, generally, were the Prussian law and order types.

I would say, like today in America, that there was not a homogenous treatment by society at large. I would argue instead that there was a layering of reactions by different parts of society, each of which had different reactions and frames of reference. You can make sweeping assertions about what "the media" or "the police" said, did, or thought in Weimar Germany, but that's already reducing extremely diverse portions of society to nothing more than singular unthinking mobs.

Yes, Freikorps members and National Socialists frequently received more lenient sentences in the Weimar Republic. This was because of a panoply of factors, not the least of which was that the accused were almost universally veterans of the war. Combined with the aforementioned Prussian law-and-order types that were democratized unwillingly, it's almost a guarantee that, on the whole, judges would view militant reactionaryism as less severe a crime (if a crime at all) than further perceived attempts to Sovietize the Weimar Republic. Conversely, the media tended to excoriate the judicial sectors for being too lenient against reactionaries and too harsh on communists for similar but opposite reasons.

> Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.

The Streisand effect is when an already ubiquitous public figure accidentally enlarges the scope of a minority issue by publicizing it. The Nazis could not have created a Streisand effect when they were a disempowered minority party in the same way that the KPD couldn't have created a Streisand effect pre-1933. However, the Weimar authorities and media did create Streisand effects constantly for both the KPD and the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic by patrolling and outlawing various activities of both parties, which definitely contributed to their overall growth and popularity.