There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Those are memetic viruses with established body counts and should be studied, if at all, in the manner one studies smallpox.
Or do you have a different OPINION on what's hateful?
The fundamental flaw is that you're always trying to put everyone on different levels of intellectual responsibility and whenever you do that you fall into an elitist model of governance, which is what the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent.
Sure there is.
If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.
Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education.
For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
Edit: Also this thread is full of people (including me to be fair) not providing any sources to whatever they feel is true.
(Unfortunately it also lead to me investigating other ideas which are far less popular than atheism in the modern day, so I guess you might have a point)
OTOH, one might need to read original pro-slavery propaganda to know that the myth, long adopted in many US states’ education systems as its own revisionist propaganda, that the Confederacy was not centrally about slavery and racism, was a lie.
We have schools in America, and while reading Mein Kampf added negligibly to my education, no one being able to do so would have subtracted significantly from it.
More to the point, reading Kapital and the Communist Manifesto added significantly to my education, though many people on the US would see them as at least as worthy of suppression as Mein Kampf (which I wouldn't even be able to know was a bad idea if they—or Mein Kampf—were suppressed.)
> For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
First, a cure-all doesn't stop you from getting sick, it just makes it so you can get better. So, there's not even an inconsistency there.
Second, no one here (and virtually no one anywhere) describes it as a cure-all. A necessary element of a healthy society, perhaps, but not by itself sufficient even as a cure, much less a prevention, of bad government.
But that doesn't really change anything other than some centrist nonsense arguments. I was aware of his actions, philosophy, propaganda, and approach without reading it. I was also aware of the consequences, be it through visits to one of the old Konzentrationslager sites, museums, and other cultural and educational experiences. Or simply through the aftermath and it's presence of foreign military bases that are still here to this day. I'd expect most children even today having similar experiences around here and I'm honestly baffled how those kids grow up to be in their 20s and vote for far right parties regardless of the consequences. The book would have been nothing more than yet another propaganda tool of the, already pretty strongly organized, far right.
This whole thread is a weird hill to die on, the US has entire districts of schools that are forced to teach creation as fact, banning books containing scientific facts from their libraries, and people complain that we banned a book that was actively used for recruitment to the neo-nazi scene and authored by a genocidal madman?
How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do things? Nazism, for instance, came about because the people were being oppressed as a result of losing WWI and it was a rebellion against that oppression. It wouldn't work without the oppression. The idea itself is not the problem.
Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray.
People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.
Just as one man's Freedom Fighter is another's Terrorist, this really depends on perspective.
Das Kapital is kinda negative about capital holders, after all.
> You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence.
Is it all the stuff full of racial hatred and mistreatment of women? Because you're going to have a hell of a time banning the Torah, Bible and Koran - to say nothing of other religious texts.
Would a pamphlet against abortion be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against [Islam|Christianity| Judaism|Hinduism] be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against Israel be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against affirmative action be allowed?
No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. Things are a lot more nuanced than "banning bad, because kids dumb".
I never said kids were dumb, but they absolutely are curious, and forbidden knowledge is an incredible lure. The absolute majority will realise it's messed up, but there will always be that few who become radicalised from what they see.
Rather than burying our past we should and need to teach them why it's wrong. This trend of rewriting history is extremely worrisome.
>No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people.
It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent.
Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal?
This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image.
Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.
When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread.
And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocide.
There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have any references? Truly curious, I always see these things as hard to measure/understand, so super interested to know info that would help remove that for me.
I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice.
*By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.
I'm just asking anything to provide evidence. Well rounded arguments with lots of accurate and well thought out examples (i.e. statistics, objective trends, etc) maybe books or theories supported by certain segments of the social sciences, etc.
Same goes for your statement: > our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. (censorhip)
Can you please tell me why this time it is so different than say the election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine? I'm truly interested in hearing the concrete reasons for censorship being the 'no other choice' option.
Again, not saying anyone is wrong, just interested to hear how much of what is stated is based on subjective truth vs objective truths.
You're missing my point.
Those most likely to be radicalised are already isolated.
If we scrub content about Nazi ideology from Internet Archive (and everywhere else), these people will find it elsewhere and likely be even more radicalised than they otherwise would be.
Nobody is arguing it should be mainstream politics, only that it should be archived and preserved as lessons to the future generations.