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That's true in the sense that both could make that argument.
But I don't really think the argument is equally applicable.
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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But I don't really think the argument is equally applicable.
While I understand the point you're trying to make, please do not uncritically accept nazi propoganda as being accurate
By whipping up prejudicial sentiment, dog-whistle racism, incitement to violence, and then following with plausible deniability and the freedom-of-speech defence to deflect any and all criticism. Then others take it into their hands to target the out-groups in more direct, aggressive ways.Eacaraxe said:
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And yet, more than half the population of said country would support legal punishment for the act of "desecrating" the national flag, and where there remains an ongoing political battle to introduce legislation to that effect. Honestly, I don't think your country is nearly as secular as you think it is.
But the problem here is "symbols," because that implies a specific religious view of sacredness, one rooted primarily in Protestantism. Protestantism entails a particular form of iconoclasm that is mostly unprecedented in religous history, most protestant denominations reject the idea that objects, in and of themselves, can be sacred outside of their ability to symbolize something sacred. For Protestants, destroying an image of Christ is not an injury to Christ himself but a political statement against what Christ represents, which is still capable of enormous offence but not the same as how the same act might be perceived in other religious traditions.
The problem of burning the Quran is not political. It's not that the person burning the Quran might dislike Islam. The problem is that the Quran is not a sacred symbol but a sacred object that has iconic properties, like a Torah scroll or a medieval Catholic relic or a Hindu idol or a mikoshi or an actual Orthodox icon. Most religions don't clearly separate the sacred and profane into separate worlds like Protestants do, and thus don't necessarily regard physical objects as purely symbolic.
This is a problem, because while it might seem that "we should be able to burn all religious symbols" is a neutral, secular stance, it's not. It's an explicit endorsement of a Protestant view of the sacred as the only "correct" form of religious belief. It essentially requires us to assume that only Protestantism entails a correct understanding of God and reality and thus all other religions need to be educated and corrected in order to resemble Protestantism.
Islam and Hindusim coexisted for centuries despite having radically incompatible beliefs about the nature of the sacred. It's not because Muslims went around burning Hindu idols and force feeding them beef to show the idol worshippers the error of their ways, it's because the reality of people with different beliefs living together requires a kind of peace treaty. The basis for a functioning multi-religious society is not "you have to accept that the things you care about don't actually matter because they don't matter to me", it's a mutual agreement to leave each other alone.
There is a place for provocation and satire and for beliefs to be challenged, but there is also a line at which those things intrude into the sacred, and morality aside you simply cannot expect people to ever respond nicely when things they consider sacred are profaned. That's not something people will ever learn to tolerate. It's not going to happen.
I'm not uncritically accepting shit.
After the Beer Hall Putsch the Nazi party was banned in Germany, its headquarters raided and its printing presses seized, and Volkischer Beobachter banned from publication. The Nazis shaped their propaganda to fit the reality, which made it legitimate. In other words, they exploited the Streissand effect to gain power -- and when they did, they used the same laws to suppress their opposition as the Weimar government had in its attempt to block the Nazi party's rise to power. "Propaganda" does not mean "false". The best propaganda is that founded upon a kernel of truth.
Y'all wanna talk endless shit about Nazism, the rise of Nazism, and the ideology and goals of Nazism, but y'all never, ever, want to talk about the span of time between 1926-1933 when the Nazi party was actually rising to power and how they did it.
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Oh, no doubt.
Which is why it's good to have a Bill of Rights that requires far more than a simple majority to change it.
I don't demand that they respond nicely.
I do demand that people not be murdered over it.
I value free speech, even if it causes danger and distress far more than a functioning multi-religious society where groups get to enforce their taboos on those outside their group through the threat (or use) of violence.
A hell of a lot of how the Nazis came to power involved the authorities indulging and tolerating their activities at other times. Looking the other way as they targeted out-groups and scapegoats, because they found it useful.
The Beer Hall Putsch was an effort to seize power by force. There's scarcely a country on earth that would happily let plotters of a violent coup go free.
The part where Hitler only went to prison for treason for 9 months after trying to overthrow the government instead of, you know, shot? And the Nazi Party operated as normal under a different name for all of the two years they were "banned"? That "Streisand Effect"?
Yeah, that's comparable to not letting jackasses burn holy books to troll a minority they don't like.
You don't need to pull up nazi shit to make this fucking argument, c'mon man
This post could be thought of as how you describe the best propaganda: founded upon a kernel of truth.
It had always been notionally possible to ban parties in Germany, which was a monarchy to 1918. I'm not sure any were actually banned, but the socialist party was very heavily suppressed at some point. The Nazis did not need Weimar-era laws to ban any other parties, unless you count the Enabling Act which gave them freedom to rule as they pleased. And they'd have banned the other parties anyway, irrespective of being banned themselves years before.
Thus the brief banning of the Nazi Party probably played minimal significant role in its ascent to power and their conduct when they took power. If there was a problem with the banning of the Nazi Party, it's probably more that it wasn't permanent.
This is pretty much directly relevant to the above two responses, so here's where I'll start. You want to bring up the Enabling Act, and sure. Which one? You do know there were two enabling acts relevant to the discussion, right?
I'm sure you're talking about the one in 1933, which is why I mentioned y'all need to pay attention to the decade before that one. Because the Enabling Act of 1923 was the one that allowed for the Emminger Decree, which abolished trial-by-jury in favor of judge and lay judge tribunals. Which, by the way, were stacked with far-right and pro-Nazi jurists, who gave Hitler free reign to turn the trial into a kangaroo court and use it as his personal, global, soapbox...during which he framed himself as a patriot, a political prisoner, and victim of the Weimar government, propagating the 'stab in the back' myth as excuse.
Before he was given, as pointed out, a laughable sentence from which he was allowed early release. So, yes, that Streissand effect.
Y'all are the ones talking about burning books and crosses, and trying to draw 'parallels' to some idiots burning Qurans for attention. If you don't like the taste of the sauce when it's on the gander, don't pour it on the goose. Or to put it another, more relevant, way: I'm not fighting by Marquess of Queensbury rules when you're fighting freestyle.
So... this all supports the point that it was the authorities' indulgence of the Nazis that paved their way, and not the suppression of their free speech.
Wait, so now you're implying he should've been given a harsher sentence (with which I'd agree), as opposed to your earlier implications that punishing them was counterproductive.
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If you have good evidence that there was an "Enabling Act which gave them [the Nazis] freedom to rule as they pleased" in 1923, there will be a lot of historians very keen to see it. Otherwise, it's very obvious which one was meant.
The rest is moot because there's no obvious reason to think Hitler couldn't have used pretty much any public trial to the same propaganda ends.
Okay, so you agree that the reaction doesn't reflect well on the people reacting, you agree that it says more about them than the person doing the burning, so...why are we even debating this?
I get that you're against the book burning, I get that you think it's a "shitty thing," what I've been saying is that I'm not against the book burning, and I don't think it's a "shitty thing." That's the main loggerhead that we can't get past. And even then, I would have thought that the scale of the reaction was so great that it should make discussing the book burning a moot point, but again, here we are.
And as for "alternate contexts" and "stripping away the danger, so, what, that's where you draw the line? It's fine to do X until danger is involved? There's certainly some contexts where that would apply, but again, the danger is external to the action. Dwarf's already brought up The Satanic Verses, in that case, the danger was external. You can certainly argue that it should never have been published because of said danger (like book burning), and I agree the danger exists, but in my mind, that's not an acceptable state of affairs, where the threat of violence is a constant.
More that the Weimar Republic was heavily divided against itself, and failed to craft a unified, coherent, policy response to emergent extremist political parties. The Nazis were far from the only one of those at the time, they just happened to be the one that won -- by being able to capitalize on the policy failures of their opposition.
Yes, the attempt to stop Nazism through hard power was a policy failure, which the Nazis exploited to justify their claims of victimhood.
The extent of his punishment isn't relevant; Hitler had already been allowed to turn his own treason trial into an international joke. Even if he'd been summarily executed, he almost certainly would have been made a martyr.
I did a Google search, there isn't a Nazi image until image #9. And you want to claim it's an aside, but you specifically linked an image to book burning in the post.
Maybe it's all a coincidence, maybe not, I really don't care. I don't know if you've noticed, but this thread now has to deal with Nazi nonsense rather than the actual issues at hand.
And to ask your question, yes, some hills are worth dying on, because if we have to do Nazi analogies, the Nazis are the ones burning down embassies.
I think you're meant to be responding to Eacaxe there - you've quoted him, not me.
I don't know what to tell you. These are the results for my string.
Yes, I linked to the image, and I left it at that. One offhanded mention. That doesn't even constitute an argument, much less a trump card. I would have elaborated on a trump card. One image in one sentence? That's an aside, a footnote. You just fixated on it because it upset you and that led you to ascribe more significance to it than I ever did.
Because you made it that way by fixating on that image and starting a game of "who's the real nazi", insisting "that is absolutely a false equivalance and you know it. The closest equivalent to the Nazis in this scenario would be people protesting burnings of religious texts", a game that you're still playing in this very post. This is a bed that you made, all because one image struck a nerve and you couldn't let that stand.
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There's my thread.
It might be because I have the Ecosia program installed in Google Chrome.
Fine. I'll take you at your word that you chose the Nazi one by happenstance as opposed to, say, Farenheit 451, which would be far more neutral in this case. I'll accept that your statement that the link at the end wasn't meant as a trump card, despite the fact that in most such debates, the trump card comes last, because a speech's greatest emphasis is usually at its end. I'll accept the notion that by linking an image to Nazis, you were in no way trying to insert them into the conversation. I'll even grant you the outright fact that if you do a word search, yes, I did say "Nazi" first in response to said image, so perhaps not every image is worth a thousand words.
Now, I find all of that highly skeptical, you italicized "really," you linked it to the image, you asked me whether defending book burning is a hill worth dying on in the context of said image, but sure. I'll take you at your word that all of that is coincidence.
Because there's more to the question than a competition of who's worse. Such as the best methods of preventing violence.
Whether or not an action is fine is directly related to the amount of harm caused as a result of that action, yes. That's not a controversial proposition.
In a number of cases, that would be true. I can't smoke in a plane, or speed on a road, or do any number of things that would/cause harm, absolutely. However, the "threat of harm" in this case comes not from the actions themselves but the response to them.
This isn't even confined to religion. If I'm a reporter and a mob boss says "don't publish this story or I'll kill your family," and I publish it and they're killed, does responsibility lie with me? You could argue that's technically correct, point out, correctly, that if I didn't publish the story my family would still be alive, but most people would direct their ire to the mob boss. They're the one holding the Sword of Damocles over me, they're the one inflicting violence. And if you want another example, look at North Korea's three generation punishment rule. Yes, I could end up putting my family in a camp through my own actions, that doesn't stop the rule being horrific.
There's any number of things you can do to avoid violence, but if that's because the threat of violence is hovering over you, then I'd argue that the main problem is the, well, threat of violence. I'm sure you'd agree in most scenarios that the threat of violence to dissuade action shouldn't be tolerated, yet here, you seem to give the idea credence.
Yes, but all this is just generalised description of the situation, and doesn't tie it back to (what seemed to be) your original position. Earlier you implied that efforts to censor the Nazis were counterproductive and ended up helping them, and that seemed to be part of an argument that we should not censor or crack down on extremists.
So what lessons are you trying to transpose to today? That because efforts to crack down on Hitler failed, authorities should have indulged him even more/ should indulge extremists today?