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It's only a moral dilemma if you look at the question in isolation from its consequences.

If you consider the outcomes of banning an ideology, the argument is quite clear and rational - and not hypothetical - this experiment has already been run, many hundreds of times.

In (very) short, if you limit the spectrum of political thought you achieve two major things:

1) you push the hard elements of that ideology underground. There are no good outcomes from or for an embittered, isolated group of people within a society that spurns them.

2) you eliminate an oppositional force, thus shifting the pole of political thought, and end up with a previously benign set of ideologies mutating away from previously nuanced stances towards more totalitarian approaches. In the absence of traditional reactionary forces and diametrically opposed thought, new axises are found.

Essentially, once you commit to a single ban on ideological grounds you are committed to make further bans, as concept creep occurs, and new categories are found unacceptable. This occurs geometrically, and you fairly rapidly end up sending people to gulags and building roads of bones. It is impossible to go back without capitulation of government, as your own thought police will turn on you, and your eager acolytes will happily fill your shoes. These states end up ending in the fire of war or the ice of economic collapse - there's very rarely a happy exit.

You can ban things, in the form of prohibition, at the expense of enabling organised crime and black markets, but the moment you start banning ideas, you are truly damned.

If there's a historical precedent where there's been a good outcome from banning thought and speech I'm all ears, but I'm aware of none.

In fact, the very ideologies we consider "detrimental to society", to put it lightly, e.g. Nazism, Communism, were "detrimental" because one tenet of those ideologies involved banning ideologies which it considers could lead to detrimental outcomes for society.

It doesn't really matter what the ideology believes, the only thing that matters is what the ideology advises its adherents to do, or not do, to people who do not adhere to the same ideology.

A government of egalitarians intent on censoring, torturing and quartering every racist and sexist it can find, en mass, is no different to the evil that was Nazi Germany.

I can never understand the urge to ban books, ideas, political ideologies, and similar. It strikes me as beyond bizarre. Even if you trust your government to be good and efficient as possible, how could you possibly feel that it's ok for someone else to decide what you can read, what you can say, what you can believe, and what you can espouse?

I think the people who argue for that are either in power, believe that their ideology is beyond reproach, or have not thought through the implications of it.

Is it okay to ban a book which contains the written and complete text to assemble an atomic bomb?

Okay? I'm not sure.

Effective? Definitely not. If someone wants to share information they have, they will find a way to share it.

No, it is not ok to ban that.

Why? I can’t build an atomic bomb since I don’t have the resources and the guy who has the resources probably doesn’t need a manual in the first place.

Actually building a functional nuclear weapon is hard and such a manual has been offered for sale for millions of dollars to various despotic regimes. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

Oddly this reminds me of all the people that think making an SO clone is easy, when the css alone would take days to type out.

While it is possible to design a bomb without access to knowledge the atomic powers keep secret[1], if you get it wrong it's a really costly mistake to make, both in materials and time. Documentation for a tested design seems very valuable.

[1] the US military had a pair of physics PhDs try to design a bomb sometime in the 60s, and apparently they succeeded, but that is only one data point. Not sure if there is any public knowledge about other states' nuke programs.

But that's your ideology. Isn't it? I tend to agree with you, but I understand there are places in the world they do not like this.

Freedom of expression is not a universal value it's just an "I'm American, or an American puppet state" value.

You don't think people in China or India might not want to be able to access the full breadth of human knowledge?

Also, rather condescending to call Europe, Australia, etc., American puppet states.

Australia is an American puppet state. Most of Europe is as well. Recall what happened to European airspace when they thought snowden was in the air?

I think people in China hold very different values to Americans and for the most part they don't mind their government, as shown by its continued existence.

India holds different values again... I'm not particularly familiar with so I won't comment.

Banning media is not exactly banning an ideology -- and even if the films were released, Nazism would still be banned in Germany.

The banning of ideologies is connected, more or less, to banning movements. In the 1870s, for example, the KKK was declared to be a terrorist organization and disbanded. (Though this change was not permanent.) Was their ideology banned? At least in practice it was, since any demonstration of affiliation with the KKK was essentially painting a target on oneself.

The government in practice is often corrupt; yet it often does what is in people's best interests. It contributes to public safety in many ways even as it undermines and confuses it in others -- we'll have a lot of trouble to find a government that is so clearly in either of the forms you outline. The question of whether a government should ban certain ideologies does come down, in part, to the ideologies themselves. Nazism isn't banned because it is merely "bad" but because its followers did bad things: acts of utter moral depravity. No one wants to see that organization re-emerge.

There's a key difference in this case though, namely that it's not a case of a government trying to look forward and anticipate whether an ideology will cause damage, but instead a government looking back on an ideology that actually did cause damage.

Nazism cost millions of Germans their lives, led to one of the biggest campaigns of genocide in history and wrecked the economy, social structures and world perception of Germany for decades. So the question about it isn't so much "is this thing dangerous?" as "how can we best keep this dangerous thing from getting loose again?"

(Which isn't to say that banning it is necessarily the right way to do that; many have argued that banning it just gives it an air of uniqueness that makes it more attractive, rather than less. But nobody making that argument would go from there to say that Nazism is somehow morally neutral.)

So what we are going to do about the Crusades? Ban Christianity?

Or what about the 34 to 49 million deaths at Stalin's hands? Ban Communism?

Or what about terrorism? Ban Islam?

This is a ridiculous position to argue.

> Or about the 34 to 49 million deaths at Stalin's hands? Ban Communism?

No, but the Russians did go through their own cultural reaction to Stalin's tyranny; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Stalinization.

Beyond that, by naming the entity doing the banning as "we" you're eliding a key point, which is that in this case it's the people who were responsible for the terrible thing doing the banning, not some outside entity.

Germans decided, through a democratically elected government, to pursue this course. It wasn't forced on them by anybody. It has remained in law over many decades, across numerous changes of government and the reunification of East and West Germany, so it's hard to argue that it's somehow unrepresentative of the general desire of the German people. That's a very different thing than it would be if "we" (which on HN will mean primarily Westerners, mostly Americans) were to, say, tell the Islamic world which parts of Islam they should keep and which they should discard.

De-Stalinization was a good thing, because the man and his ideology were fundamentally and absolutely wrong.

From the wikipedia headers: Improved prison conditions, Re-naming of places and buildings, Destruction of monuments, Re-location of Stalin's body.

Notice that no part of that included banning ideas. It was the cession of government endorsement and a de facto fall from popularity. No one will fine or jail you for making a complimentary movie about Stalin. They just won't go see it.

Note that many works (e.g. Mein Kampf and many of the "banned" Nazi movies) are not actually banned by law, but via copyright rules.

You can sue against the ban of a brutal movie if you think the ban decision was wrong. You can't sue against the de-facto ban of the movies, and our parliament couldn't lift the ban by changing a law. A more-or-less private entity controls them, and many argue that some of not-banned movies are actually worse.

There are laws against Nazi propaganda etc, but for quite a few things they aren't even applied and tested.

Christianity is about the New Testament and anybody that has ever read it knows that its teachings invite to tolerance and can never justify the crusades. That the crusades happened in the name of Christianity, that's what usually happens when you have an uneducated population that would believe anything. There is however a huge difference between the New Testament and Main Kampf.

Should we ban Islam? I don't know, I know nothing of Islam. But on communism / Stalinism I think it's a disgrace that we conduct business with communist countries that are guilty of repeatedly violating human rights and yes I'm talking about China. It's a spit in the face of all those that have suffered under communism.

I'm unsure how one would find the numbers but aren't Islamism an ideology that affects the world in a very much the same way.

And as for countries, doesn't Turkey have something of a track record when it comes to getting rid of unwanted groups, nowadays focusing on Kurds as I recall it? Or is this just some form of propaganda?

> So the real question in the article boils down to a moral dilema: Should a government ban ideologies which it considers could lead to detrimental outcomes for society, when said ideologies do not directly cause physical damage on anyone or thing? I think the critical part of that question is how you define goverment.

We need to recognize that social media is now a form of government. Every day Twitter, Facebook, and other arms of social make moderation decisions not based on imminent harm but ideology. They censor based on what is liable to cause offense within their worldview and what will reduce the amount of blowback. This moderation is largely silent. Social media is neither transparent nor a democracy.

> If you believe governments are ligitimate non-corrupt institutions that are representative of the people and have the citizens - and all the citizens - best interests at heart, then you will likely think banning "bad" ideologies is a good idea.

I believe governments are legitimate non-corrupt institutions that are representative of the people.

But your conclusion doesn't follow.

I don't want people telling other people what ideas to have.