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0 pointsnostromo3y ago0 comments

This is the exact logic used by Joseph McCarthy, and I think it's safe to say that was a failed experiment.

> Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.

This is actually how you get Nazis. You know, the real ones that existed before the internet. Not 4chan weebs trolling boomers online, but the ones that would jail or kill you for having the wrong opinion or wrong affiliation.

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ska3y ago

That seems a-historical. The way you get the real nazis is by not acting soon enough when they target/vilify/'other' marginalized groups, or attempting to get a foothold in political institutions.

bitwize3y ago

It is ahistorical. Germany outlawed Nazi ideology and went 80 years without renazifying; the danger of such was very real after WWII. Marcuse, a German Jew, was considering the real, immediate, terrifying problem of how to prevent another Holocaust.

nostromoOP3y ago

You're cherry picking.

Look at Joseph McCarthy and see a counter-example. He used the exact same logic: to prevent a Soviet-style totalitarian government in the US, we had to be intolerant of everyone left of mainstream Democrats.

It destroyed many peoples' lives, most of who were not at all sympathetic to Soviet-style communism.

Similar to your example, we could also argue that McCarthy was indeed effective at preventing Soviet-style communism in America (since the US still has free speech and there has not been another holocaust). But in both cases we don't have convincing evidence that suppressing speech was actually helpful.

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int_19h3y ago

Germany still has plenty of open Nazis for all their efforts at censorship. Something like the infamous march in Charlottesville was breaking news when it happened precisely because it's so unusual, but much larger neo-Nazi marches happen in Germany on a regular basis.

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