Free Speech leads to Nazis!
Dr Taonui tweets that allowing free speech is what leads to the Nazis. Now such a moronic tweet shouldn’t even need responding to, but I thought people might be interested in the true history of the Weimar Republic with speech.
Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff write:
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
So the historical record is the exact opposite of what was asserted. Germany took extreme measures to suppress the speech of Hitler and the Nazis. And all it did, was make him stronger.
Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups.
Rosie Parker (and no I am not equating her with the Nazis) has had a global boost in followers and significance thanks to the idiots who used violence against her. The photo of her covered with a red liquid has become iconic to her followers.
Restrictions on speech failed to stop the Nazis and ultimately proved to be strong weapons in their hands. Ultimately, it was a permissive attitude towards violence and the degradation of the rule of law that led to the greatest atrocity in history.
Hopefully a lesson to be remembered.
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