[Politics] Nazis Attack LGBT Pride Parade

[TheMysteriousGX]

I learned that they should've shot the guy they convicted of treason instead of letting him publish a book

EDIT: Like, seriously? Your argument is "violence and censorship didn't work because he survived being a traitor and published a book"?

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE CENSORSHIP? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE VIOLENCE? You say they made him a martyr and the VERY CLEARLY DID NOT DO THAT.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I learned that they should've shot the guy they convicted of treason instead of letting him publish a book

Or maybe just locked the guy who tried to violently overthrow the government up for more than 9 months.

 

[Shadowstar38]

Not letting genocidal hate be 'protected free speech'. Its not complicated.

Imminent lawless action

Makes it so(if correctly enforced) all ideologies are judged by the same metric of whether or not they count as being protected. When you single out one particular group and tell the government "do more about that" you're essentially giving them more power and making the limits of what protect speech is smaller. Which in actual practice effects your black lives matters, and other LGBT or civil rights people who get a bit too passionate and threaten police officers(not getting into the argument of if the cops deserve it). So it isn't just about the genocidal maniacs. It's about the consequences of the actions you take in the process of stopping the genocidal maniacs.

So yeah, more complicated than you'd think.

Nazis are not the same as LGBT people or BLM. Stop defending Nazis, stop saying LGBT people and BLM are Nazis.


Want to talk about consequences? THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST! People not stopping the Nazis lead to it.

Okay wow. You really didn't listen to a single part of what I said.

I'm not defending Nazi's. I've made it clear in every response I don't agree with their ideology. I didn't say LGBT people were nazi's. I said in a functional democracy laws affect all people and not just the one's you're targetting. It's not as simple as making nazi ideas illegal. Our laws simply don't work like that.

Edit: And before you respond by being needlessly reductionist again. Let me make this perfectly clear.

"Nazis are bad" Fair enough. I agree with this basic idea. Stop telling me to stop defending things I'm not actually defending and proceed as if I'm not trying to prove you wrong on this main point. Cool? Cool

"People not stopping the Nazis" I personally think stopping Nazis is a good idea. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. There's zero reason to continue harping on this.

"stop saying LGBT people and BLM are Nazis" BLM is a political group. Nazis are a political group. That's what the comparison was setting up. Are you denying BLM is political? No? Okay, good.

This is what I meant earlier by projecting. There's really no way you can misconstrue words this badly unless you're already coming at this with hostility. Stop trying to make everyone who disagrees with you the enemy. It makes communicating ideas nearly impossible.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE CENSORSHIP? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE VIOLENCE? You say they made him a martyr and the VERY CLEARLY DID NOT DO THAT.

If you're going to reply to my posts, read them.

Hitler and his closest co-conspirators were thrown in jail after the Beer Hall Putsch and convicted of treason in a show trial that attracted global attention. The Nazi party was banned. The Nazi party propaganda newspapers Volkischer Beobachter and Der Sturmer were banned; the latter was actually so extreme and embarrassing Goebbels and Goring themselves tried to have it banned, in Nazi Germany well after they took power, and failed.

The Nazi party was banned. Its publications were banned. Nazi leaders and Nazis were prosecuted and jailed -- repeatedly, in fact. The Beer Hall Putsch wasn't the end of Nazi prosecutions. I fail to see how this is a point in any way unclear or particularly difficult to understand, unless by intent. But you don't have to take it from me; try this article [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-violence] on for size, from infamous Nazi rag New Yorker:

Spoiler

The horror of the Holocaust serves as the founding narrative legitimizing European integration, and it's the key motivation for hate-speech laws on the continent. The European Union has called on all its member states to pass laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.

Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der St?rmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

I have yet to be presented with evidence for the proposition that hate-speech laws are an effective instrument to prevent violence. Seen from Europe, the history of free speech in the U.S. undermines those who insist on a causal link between legalization of hate speech, on the one hand, and racist violence and killings, on the other. Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. witnessed a gradual relaxation of restrictions on speech; nonetheless, today racism and racial discrimination is less of a problem than it was a hundred years ago.

In fact, allow me to put as fine a point on this as I can stand; here's a rather famous Nazi propaganda poster from 1928 (if I remember correctly):

Spoiler

Translation: He alone in two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.

https://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/posters1.htm

Censorship and violence feed Nazism, not suppress or end it. But of the violence, you say? Well, this article [https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645] may serve as a starting reference to kindly remind you of street violence during the '20s and early '30s that enabled and strengthened nascent Nazism.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

Censorship and violence feed Nazism, not suppress or end it. But of the violence, you say? Well, this article [https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645] may serve as a starting reference to kindly remind you of street violence during the '20s and early '30s that enabled and strengthened nascent Nazism.

So we do nothing and the right wing gets their way, or we fight back and the right wing gets their way.

The article you link to says not to hold demonstrations within "physical presence" of them yet they actively seek confrontation. It's absolutely impossible to not be within "physical presence" of the alt-right when holding demonstrations of any kind. We hold peaceful demonstrations, they come to us. They have police protection, even, they're allowed to break the very rules the police ruthlessly enforce on any leftists demonstrating. This sure as fuck is not something we can bloody kill with kindness and if I'm to die to a fascist I'd rather die fighting than be rounded up because we're "not allowed" to put up any resistance or else we'll "lower ourselves to their level" or "we'll only legitimize them". It's too fucking late for that, they're already in the media spotlight and grabbing people's attention via mass shootings and hate crimes. They are killing people and we're supposed to just ignore them?

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Censorship and violence feed Nazism, not suppress or end it. But of the violence, you say? Well, this article [https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645] may serve as a starting reference to kindly remind you of street violence during the '20s and early '30s that enabled and strengthened nascent Nazism.

What especially helped Nazism a great deal is that the suppression of it went almost entirely unenforced. Hitler served 9 months in prison, there was no serious attempt at disbanding the NSDAP or even the brownshirts and the NSDAP could keep agitating and publishing their newspapers. So when Hitler got out of prison he could publish his book (which wasn't stopped from being published) and just resume his oration, because no one made any serious effort to ensure that Nazism remained censored. Even so, NSDAP was a fringe party with an unusually violent paramilitary wing (the Brownshirts) and would likely have remained so had it not been for the Depression.

What really allowed the NSDAP to gain power was that almost all of the traditional parties hemorrhaged voters after 1929 and these voters went to the communists and Nazis. The Nazis rose to become one of the largest parties, feeding off of the upheaval that was the Great Depression and suddenly having people listen to their ideas about how international trade was bad for Germany and how Jewish people had orchestrated the Great Depression to screw over good Aryans. This is how the Nazis managed to become the largest party in 1932, when Franz von Papen and Zentral tried to use the NSDAP as a supporting party to form a coalition government after the election. Shortly there after von Papen was forced out of office and in the new elections the Nazis came within an hairs width of gaining a majority, but instead opted for simply putting Brownshirts in the Reichstag when the vote for the Enabling Act went through in 1933.

Had the Weimar republic actually crushed the NSDAP and harshly enforced its censorship, the Nazis would have been boned. What Weimar actually did was outlaw the Nazis and then do nothing to enforce it, which gave the Nazis the best of both worlds, they were outlawed and could play the victim card but could go about their business as usual. However, what really allowed the Nazis to thrive was a socioeconomic disaster, followed by other parties thinking they could co-operate with the Nazis and control them, which allowed the NSDAP legitimacy and then an opening to coup the nation. I'll continue to argue that the real lesson from Germany in the early '30's is that you should never give Nazis an inch, never trust then and never co-operate with them.

 

[Kwak]

Cops are good at 2 things, protecting Nazis from violence and not protecting black people from violence.

There was at least this image to balance the scales a little.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

In fact, allow me to put as fine a point on this as I can stand; here's a rather famous Nazi propaganda poster from 1928 (if I remember correctly):

Spoiler

Translation: He alone in two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.

https://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/posters1.htm

Censorship and violence feed Nazism, not suppress or end it. But of the violence, you say? Well, this article [https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645] may serve as a starting reference to kindly remind you of street violence during the '20s and early '30s that enabled and strengthened nascent Nazism.

Bullshit. I can show you the exact same propaganda with modern alt right leaders that constantly decry the vile censorship they endure TO THEIR AUDIENCE OF LITERAL MILLIONS. It's almost like propaganda is LIES.

But sure, the Nazis were so banned they...could still hold rallies and get their books published, all while talking to the press constantly. So fucking censored that their literal-traitor-to-the-nation-who-attempted-and-failed-a-coup leader...published his manifesto and entered politics after being aloud to widely spread his platform at a trial that resulted in a mere 9 months in prison. For literal treason.

So fucking censored.

 

[Agema]

The Weimar government had hate speech laws. The Weimar government had hate crime laws. The Weimar government had provisions to restrict political activity, up to and including the wholesale prohibition of entire parties. Some of the strongest in Europe for the time, in fact.

Hitler and his closest co-conspirators were thrown in jail after the Beer Hall Putsch and convicted of treason in a show trial that attracted global attention. The Nazi party was banned. The Nazi party propaganda newspapers Volkischer Beobachter and Der Sturmer were banned; the latter was actually so extreme and embarrassing Goebbels and Goring themselves tried to have it banned, in Nazi Germany well after they took power, and failed.

Think about that a second. Nazis managed to produce a newspaper so libelous and offensive Nazis -- not just any Nazi, but Hitler's own right and left hand men, one of which being the Nazi minister of propaganda -- tried to have it banned, in the country they ran with an iron fist, and failed.

You know what all that censorship, restriction, and prohibition by the Weimar government led to? Hitler got a global soap box for his beliefs, in both the trial and later publication of Mein Kampf. Nazis made him into a martyr. The Bavarian and German right flocked to the Nazi cause. And, once the Nazis took power, all that Weimar-era speech restriction and prohibition was immediately weaponized to brutally and decisively put down any remaining organized resistance to the Nazi party.
...
That's what caused the rise of the Nazi party, and that's what led to the Holocaust.

Bollocks, frankly.

The Nazis didn't gain significant power for years after the Beer Hall Putsch. They made their name and reputation 1929-1930 off the back of the Wall Street crash and ensuing economic collapse (with the dissatsifaction that brought on the mainstream parties), and with increasingly aggressive anti-Communist violence and headline-grabbing attempts to repudiate the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler exploited the Weimar constitution to suppress civil liberties, but not in the way you think. He effectively got the German President Hindenburg to sign a form of "state of emergency" decree that gave the government (i.e. the Nazis as the largest party) widespread powers to rule without oversight, and shortly after the "Enabling Act" that made him de facto dictator. With those under his belt, Weimar laws were all but meaningless as the Nazis had, and used, the power to do what they pleased.

 

[Saelune]

Cops are good at 2 things, protecting Nazis from violence and not protecting black people from violence.

There was at least this image to balance the scales a little.

They should have not gone to work that day.

 

[Saelune]

Not letting genocidal hate be 'protected free speech'. Its not complicated.

Imminent lawless action

Makes it so(if correctly enforced) all ideologies are judged by the same metric of whether or not they count as being protected. When you single out one particular group and tell the government "do more about that" you're essentially giving them more power and making the limits of what protect speech is smaller. Which in actual practice effects your black lives matters, and other LGBT or civil rights people who get a bit too passionate and threaten police officers(not getting into the argument of if the cops deserve it). So it isn't just about the genocidal maniacs. It's about the consequences of the actions you take in the process of stopping the genocidal maniacs.

So yeah, more complicated than you'd think.

Nazis are not the same as LGBT people or BLM. Stop defending Nazis, stop saying LGBT people and BLM are Nazis.


Want to talk about consequences? THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST! People not stopping the Nazis lead to it.

Okay wow. You really didn't listen to a single part of what I said.

I'm not defending Nazi's. I've made it clear in every response I don't agree with their ideology. I didn't say LGBT people were nazi's. I said in a functional democracy laws affect all people and not just the one's you're targetting. It's not as simple as making nazi ideas illegal. Our laws simply don't work like that.

Edit: And before you respond by being needlessly reductionist again. Let me make this perfectly clear.

"Nazis are bad" Fair enough. I agree with this basic idea. Stop telling me to stop defending things I'm not actually defending and proceed as if I'm not trying to prove you wrong on this main point. Cool? Cool

"People not stopping the Nazis" I personally think stopping Nazis is a good idea. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. There's zero reason to continue harping on this.

"stop saying LGBT people and BLM are Nazis" BLM is a political group. Nazis are a political group. That's what the comparison was setting up. Are you denying BLM is political? No? Okay, good.

This is what I meant earlier by projecting. There's really no way you can misconstrue words this badly unless you're already coming at this with hostility. Stop trying to make everyone who disagrees with you the enemy. It makes communicating ideas nearly impossible.

If you actually agreed with me you wouldn't be spending so much time telling me to stop being right.

 

[Saelune]

Censorship and violence feed Nazism, not suppress or end it. But of the violence, you say? Well, this article [https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645] may serve as a starting reference to kindly remind you of street violence during the '20s and early '30s that enabled and strengthened nascent Nazism.

So we do nothing and the right wing gets their way, or we fight back and the right wing gets their way.

The article you link to says not to hold demonstrations within "physical presence" of them yet they actively seek confrontation. It's absolutely impossible to not be within "physical presence" of the alt-right when holding demonstrations of any kind. We hold peaceful demonstrations, they come to us. They have police protection, even, they're allowed to break the very rules the police ruthlessly enforce on any leftists demonstrating. This sure as fuck is not something we can bloody kill with kindness and if I'm to die to a fascist I'd rather die fighting than be rounded up because we're "not allowed" to put up any resistance or else we'll "lower ourselves to their level" or "we'll only legitimize them". It's too fucking late for that, they're already in the media spotlight and grabbing people's attention via mass shootings and hate crimes. They are killing people and we're supposed to just ignore them?

They wouldn't want those confrontations if they knew they wouldn't be rescued by the police and so called 'centrists'.

 

[Shadowstar38]

If you actually agreed with me you wouldn't be spending so much time telling me to stop being right.

You're not right about saying Nazis shouldn't have rights(you know, the thing I first responded to).

because people like YOU and Shadowstar are why we have Nazis, cause people like you would NOT stand up to them, because people like you ignored them, because people like you were silent when the SS went rounding everyone up cause 'Its not me they're taking'.

And would you mind knocking it off with this bullshit. I'd gladly stand up against Nazis. That's not the point of this discussion. I just got finished telling you I'm against Nazis. But I'm also against the ways you suggest dealing with the issue because it sounds ill thought out from a legal perspective. The moral viewpoint behind it is solid enough. Totally separate issue. Argue against the point of contention, not the points where we agree.

 

[Saelune]

If you actually agreed with me you wouldn't be spending so much time telling me to stop being right.

You're not right about saying Nazis shouldn't have rights(you know, the thing I first responded to).

They have the right to not be Nazis. Once you ascribe to terrorism, which is what Nazi ideology is, then you should be treated as a terrorist.

because people like YOU and Shadowstar are why we have Nazis, cause people like you would NOT stand up to them, because people like you ignored them, because people like you were silent when the SS went rounding everyone up cause 'Its not me they're taking'.

And would you mind knocking it off with this bullshit. I'd gladly stand up against Nazis.

THEN DO IT!

That's not the point of this discussion. I just got finished telling you I'm against Nazis.

You're not doing anything to make me believe you.

But I'm also against the ways you suggest dealing with the issue because it sounds ill thought out from a legal perspective.

When the law supports evil, then fuck the law. Slavery was legal once. Something being law does not make it ok.

The moral viewpoint behind it is solid enough.

No fucking shit.

Totally separate issue. Argue against the point of contention, not the points where we agree.

I don't think we actually agree. You have done little to ever make me think so. You make paltry claims of opposing the evil of Nazis yet everything you have done in this topic about Nazis being Nazis is defend them.

The only people on your side here are the people who keep defending Nazis. altnamejag, Thaluikhain, Dr. Thrax, Agema and myself all stand opposed to you and Eacaraxe on this. THEY have shown to oppose Nazis, oppose oppression and evil. The side they are supporting is not yours.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Representative snip of the last few posts.

Okay, let me ask you something. What exactly do you think it is the Weimar Republic could have done that they weren't already doing? That is, after all, the predominant logic being expressed here and elsewhere; the Weimar Republic simply didn't "do enough" or "didn't try", and that if efforts to suppress the Nazi party had been borne out to some hypothetical and unstated arbitrary extent, the Nazi party simply would never have risen to power.

Identify it. What could the Weimar Republic have done? Not rhetorical; identify what policy positions the Weimar Republic could have taken that weren't pursued, least of all to the extent you think might have kept the Nazis out of power.

The party was banned. People joined and turned out anyways.

Leaders were thrown in jail. They were out in months. Some of them were in and out of jail repeatedly.

Headquarters were raided and assets liquidated. Multiple times; some as late as March, 1932 [http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/651512]. They still assembled and planned in private, and printed in the underground.

When you say the Weimar Republic "didn't do enough", I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

They might have suspended due process and started summarily executing known and suspected Nazis in the street? They might have declared martial law with the army and money they didn't have thanks to the Treaty of Versailles? Perhaps they might have pulled it off by legalizing vigilante and paramilitary justice? They might have confiscated and destroyed the property of known or suspected Nazis? Smashed printing presses and burned books?

I mean, all of the above is what worked for the Nazis. Perhaps you mean to say "they should have done what the Nazis did, before the Nazis had the chance to do it to anyone else"? That's what it boils down to, and I'd like to see someone advocating this point of view exercise an iota of honesty for a change and admit it. But you're not, because you don't have the fortitude to admit the only way you see to stop totalitarianism is to become totalitarian.

So, at this point it really behooves me to discuss the relevancy of this to now vis-a-vis potential responses by the American government. After all, this is about what the Weimar government might have done, versus what it did do and what it was capable of doing, and how this might inform us to how the federal and state governments might act now. Other than the fact Trump's President and at this rate will be until 2024, we have a Republican Senate, Republican-stacked SCOTUS, and over half the states in the country have Republican governors and state legislatures, anyhow. And since you seem to be quite learned about the socioeconomic state of the Weimar government during the '20s and early '30s, I believe I can more than make my point with a single, non-hypothetical question.

What's the current state of the US debt ceiling?

I can show you the exact same propaganda with modern alt right leaders that constantly decry the vile censorship they endure TO THEIR AUDIENCE OF LITERAL MILLIONS.

And I can show you three weeks ago, a Comcast employee waged a one-man war against an obnoxious, comedian-wannabe, jackass in an attempt to get him deplatformed for his dubious behavior and political statements. Not only did Maza fail to achieve his goal [https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/3k3jj5/youtubes-bungled-crackdown-on-steven-crowder-only-made-him-stronger], his efforts backfired so catastrophically that not only is Crowder bigger than ever, but the people who bore the collateral damage were progressive and history Youtubers [https://www.newsweek.com/vox-adpocalypse-twitter-youtube-steven-crowder-1442652].

That is, if you accept Maza as a good-faith actor whose goal was simply to deplatform right-wing extremists. In which case, he's merely stupid. Clearly I do not, because I recognize Vox is a Comcast subsidiary, and take note that which each successive "adpocalypse" algorithmic and recommendation preference, and accordingly ad revenue, shifts away from smaller and independent creators (left and right) and towards highly-consolidated, multi-national, oligopolist corporate media. Which means he's stupid enough to be a useful idiot, and a useful idiot he is.

And, before you invariably begin vomiting Republican talking points about free markets, the right to contract, and how corporations can do whatever they like, while ignoring the obvious cognitive dissonance inherent in that position, I'd ask you to consider if Hollywood blacklists during the Lavender scare were censorious. I'm more than happy to bring that fight in a thread about LGBTQ rights, and you don't want to go there.

It's almost like propaganda is LIES.

No. Propaganda -- well, effective propaganda -- is half truth distorted to fit a narrative and persuade listeners. That's what made the Nazis so fucking good at it. What you don't do, and what the Weimar Republic did do, is empower the propaganda by feeding delusions of oppression and victimhood. Nazis and neo-Nazis need controversy, violence, and censorship like fish need water.

Don't give it to them. Right-wing extremism -- actual right-wing extremism, not what glorified salespersons on idiot boxes like to pretend is right-wing extremism in order to sell your attention span to advertisers -- in this country was completely flatlined between Skokie and Ruby Ridge for a reason, and that reason was because we let them speak.

 

[Silvanus]

They might have suspended due process and started summarily executing known and suspected Nazis in the street? They might have declared martial law with the army and money they didn't have thanks to the Treaty of Versailles? Perhaps they might have pulled it off by legalizing vigilante and paramilitary justice? They might have confiscated and destroyed the property of known or suspected Nazis? Smashed printing presses and burned books?

I mean, all of the above is what worked for the Nazis. Perhaps you mean to say "they should have done what the Nazis did, before the Nazis had the chance to do it to anyone else"? That's what it boils down to, and I'd like to see someone advocating this point of view exercise an iota of honesty for a change and admit it. But you're not, because you don't have the fortitude to admit the only way you see to stop totalitarianism is to become totalitarian.

Perhaps, when you ask a question, you should let the other party respond before filling in the blanks with what you reckon they believe.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Perhaps, when you ask a question, you should let the other party respond before filling in the blanks with what you reckon they believe.

That'll happen when I stop being accused of Nazism for advocating against what allowed the Nazis to come to power in the first place, and advocating for what actually did stop neo-Nazism dead in its tracks for nearly twenty years in this country.

 

[Armadox]

The problem, is that we've set up a system where one side can abuse the system to create a means to punish the other side regardless of the terms. Ignore them, and they grow stronger until they can dismantle the rights of others. Build laws against them, and they'll add you to the law to criminalize both sides. And, I do not think there is or can be a work around for this. I think, for this system to work, for there to be no rabbit hole to go down, the government itself has to unfortunately stand aside and do nothing. The alt right, Nazism, whatever... As long as it's not branded terrorism, it's allowed to fester. But those groups are useful idiots, a small cog in a bigger hate machine. As long as their views aid in voting for the desires of other, lesser problematic forces. They're allowed to juuuuust skirt the law. To bloom up in opposition, to cause trouble and oppress by show of force, by threat, by malice.

Free speech is a tenuous thing. It's got it's limits, and the people here who try to justify it by saying the only way to truly have it is by having no limits on it. Also are advocating non-violence. That the law'll do the job, but the law can't in this situation. It's reactionary , and the police know if they step up they're only reinforcing the problem. Giving the Nazi the means to declare the police the enemy, their rights being stepped on, etc etc...

By now we've went round the circle a few times.

But, when is speech a violence? Those that advocate on free speech as such separate it from physical violence. So, where is your line in the sand? When does what you say become hate speech? When does it become racist? When does the words become coercion? At what point is it psychological abuse? The whole argument comes down to the sticks and stones defense, and we're passed that nonsense. We're passed the point where people have to "man up" cause it's only words. Right? Fucking right? We understand that words have power, and can cut. That the LGBT community has an unusually high suicide rate. That when it comes to the LGBT community, there is way to many of them that spend their lives being talked down to, insulted, raged at, pushed out of homes, out of communities. Discriminated against and washed out out of the conversation as a means to cripple their rights. Fucking DeSantis omitted the LGBT when discussing PULSE originally. That was on purpose. If you don't recognize them, you don't have to defend them.

We can't do this anymore. We can't. And shit, you can't just arm the gays, everyone gets guns and make it a stalemate, because what do you think the news will do? What do you think the headlines will read if that happens. Do you think for a god damn moment that the LGBT community would be allowed to stand up like that without it becoming a, at the least, political bloodbath? Without the other using it as a means to say that they're terrorists themselves, and just make things so much worse?

Laws can not be changed to help(save in the discrimination laws being built up now, that are always on the cusp of crumbling). Debates are meaningless to use, because the other side is not here, at all, in good faith. We have to accept that. So, it's not to the government to fix this, it's to the citizenry. When I said the only way to fix this is by not giving them a soapbox as individuals, I stand by that. There has to be a breaking point. I'm not one of them who things we should shoot Nazis in the street, because that only makes them martyrs. I've seen Fight Club. I know giving them a name to hold up to others is giving them power. And, think we should have a legit discussion on the merits of physical confrontations. Every time the Nazis show up, it's as a show of force. It's to hold up their shields, and show their guns, and proclaim that THEY hold the power and the others should crawl into the shadows. And the police walk with them because they know they're a threat and can't do a damn thing about it or they'll give them the chance to decry them as peacemakers. So, the only way, I think, to defang them is by giving them what they want. By getting in their face, letting them escalate it to an argument. Let them be recorded saying hate speech and death threats. Let them draw first, and have the police arrest them. And that sucks. It really, absolutely fucking does. It is putting people at risk, but they're already at risk. The god damn Nazi with a gun is ALREADY there. And for their platform to work, they NEED to be viewed as powerful. They need pictures taken of them with arm raised, and shield at the ready surrounded by the police so others can get the sense of their strength. And no, killing them. Killing them also gives them leverage and strength. But see...

Images of Nazis being kicked in by twenty twinks in rainbow thongs? That deflates every ounce of power from them. That makes them a laughingstock. That gets blown up and shown on late night funnyman shows where they have to defend how the gays beat their ass. And yes, there will be arrests on both sides. But standing up and showing you won't be the victims over and over again in this same stupid cycle. That's becoming more important every year. I'm really having a hard time seeing an alternative right now.

And... And I have to many dead friends to simply accept this is how the world will be.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Okay, let me ask you something. What exactly do you think it is the Weimar Republic could have done that they weren't already doing? That is, after all, the predominant logic being expressed here and elsewhere; the Weimar Republic simply didn't "do enough" or "didn't try", and that if efforts to suppress the Nazi party had been borne out to some hypothetical and unstated arbitrary extent, the Nazi party simply would never have risen to power.

Identify it. What could the Weimar Republic have done? Not rhetorical; identify what policy positions the Weimar Republic could have taken that weren't pursued, least of all to the extent you think might have kept the Nazis out of power.

The party was banned. People joined and turned out anyways.

Here's an easy one: Keep the leader of the NSDAP in prison for longer then 9 months after finding him guilty of an attempted coup and treason.
* A few other easy ones: Forbid the printing of Volkische Beobachter and Der Sturmer and bring printers to justice for doing so. Forbid the printing of Mein Kampf. Enforce these bans.
* Clamp down harder and more frequently on the SA (and other "free corps"), who were allowed to roam the streets quite freely a lot of the time because the prevailing attitude was that they weren't an issue as long as they beat up Communists and other people the aristocratic, conservative establishment labelled undesirable (such as Jewish people and Roma).

My main point, however, wasn't that Weimar didn't clamp down hard enough in a policiary or juridical fashion. My main point was that there was a naivete, especially in right wing circles in general and nationalist and conservative circles in particular, when it came to dealing with the Nazis. Franz von Papen was open with his belief that he could control Hitler and the NSDAP if they were in a coalition government with him, and ended up legitimizing Hitler (whom Hindenburg hated but was forced to recognize due to von Papen's play) and giving Hitler the in he needed to seize power. The right wing considered the Communists worse then the NSDAP and had a general attitude that all the talk of racial purification, revenge for WW1 and Drang Nach Osten was all just bluster and tough guy talk and not serious policy positions of the NSDAP.

That's the lesson we need to draw from the Weimar Republic. That condoning, excusing or ameliorating the beliefs, actions and intentions of Nazis ends up with the Nazis all the stronger for it, especially if all the hand wringing is done for real political gains. The best way to ensure that Nazis do not gain power is to mercilessly cordon them off from power and refute their rhetoric wherever it appears. This is what happened in Sweden, where the Nazi party never rose to any prominence, because no established party wanted to touch them, despite the Swedish conservative party being big fans of the NSDAP and Germany in general.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I can show you the exact same propaganda with modern alt right leaders that constantly decry the vile censorship they endure TO THEIR AUDIENCE OF LITERAL MILLIONS.

And I can show you three weeks ago, a Comcast employee waged a one-man war against an obnoxious, comedian-wannabe, jackass in an attempt to get him deplatformed for his dubious behavior and political statements. Not only did Maza fail to achieve his goal [https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/3k3jj5/youtubes-bungled-crackdown-on-steven-crowder-only-made-him-stronger], his efforts backfired so catastrophically that not only is Crowder bigger than ever, but the people who bore the collateral damage were progressive and history Youtubers [https://www.newsweek.com/vox-adpocalypse-twitter-youtube-steven-crowder-1442652]

Yeah man, algorithms are shit and YouTube's attempt at enforcing its own TOS was pathetic. It's almost like when the Weimar Republic "banned" the Nazi party and then did jack and shit actually enforcing it, letting their CONVICTED TRAITOR, FAILED REBEL LEADER publish his manifesto instead of, I dunno, shooting the fucker for treason.

Crowder is a white supremacist who pals around with his white supremacist pals and flagrantly breaks the TOS of the website he publishes on. Maza is not at fault for pointing that out.
Weak reactions to this bullshit is the root of the problem, both now and 90 years ago.

It's almost like propaganda is LIES.

No. Propaganda -- well, effective propaganda -- is half truth distorted to fit a narrative and persuade listeners. That's what made the Nazis so fucking good at it. What you don't do, and what the Weimar Republic did do, is empower the propaganda by feeding delusions of oppression and victimhood. Nazis and neo-Nazis need controversy, violence, and censorship like fish need water.

Don't give it to them. Right-wing extremism -- actual right-wing extremism, not what glorified salespersons on idiot boxes like to pretend is right-wing extremism in order to sell your attention span to advertisers -- in this country was completely flatlined between Skokie and Ruby Ridge for a reason, and that reason was because we let them speak.

No, that reason was the leader of the American noe-Nazis was arrested for child pornography and the subsequent leader was arrested for gathering up a bunch of Nazi fuckwits to assault brown people in bars. The Gavin McInnes of the '90s. Turns out, actually arresting people for crimes and then not letting them constantly rant IN THE MEDIA about how CENSORED they are, actually works.