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Comment by astorgard | Hacker News Reader

Saying (as I do) that everyone should be able to express their ideas (no matter how atrocious) publicly without facing administrative punishment does *not* mean that other actions (such as keeping a close eye on them) should not be taken.

I doubt that preventing the Nazis from discussing their ideas would have stopped them. Having their ideas not suppressed from public forums at least gave the chance to others to understand what was going on in order to try to stop it (which, in this case, failed miserably).

When "explaining doesn't work" it's time to take action. But not while the only proof you have against someone is what he said (instead of what he did).

The "brain washing" power that continuous propaganda has is not under question, but still I like to hold accountable those who do, and not those who say (I know this is a very unpopular opinion, that's why I like to discuss about it!).

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If i may respond with two quotes from the Nazi Propaganda minister:

"To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall. Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin

We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem... We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we. Why Do We Want to Join the Reichstag? Der Angriff, 30 April 1928"

He seems to have been of the opinion that giving them a platform to voice their hatred even louder was beneficial for them.

Is saying things not an action? Especially when the things being said are of the genocidal-wannabe kind?

Thinking that "people are easy to manipulate, thus we must prevent lies from spreading to protect society" is too paternalist and (in my limited experience) does not reflect reality.

You are right in that propaganda is a very powerful weapon (I openly admitted that on my previous comment) but, then again, we are all adults that should be able to navigate the ocean of misinformation to find out what is true in order to form our own opinions.

Having all the Nazi propaganda available today is an invaluable tool to prevent it from happening in the future... while not having allowed it in the first place would probably not have prevented WW2 (or maybe it would, we don't know for sure).

As you say (and this might be a bit far fetched, but bear with me) in this instance, voicing their hatred was beneficial *for them*, *at that time*, but not for "genocides in general", as now (thanks to how public their whole ideology became) we have data to fight it, were something similar to happen in the future.

> Thinking that "people are easy to manipulate, thus we must prevent lies from spreading to protect society" is too paternalist and (in my limited experience) does not reflect reality

If the last few years have proven anything, it's that people are far too easy to manipulate. Otherwise we wouldn't have successful political campaigns built on outright lies.

I honestly don't have a solution for that - i don't think there's a way to filter information so that individuals susceptible to misinformation don't get anything but truth ( actual facts, not whoever's in charge today's version of it), but i also think that it's the only way to have a fully functional society ( i don't think that a society that believes the Nigel Farages, Marine Le Pens, Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros of the world is functional, it's really trivial to see through their shit and lies, yet far too many people don't).

> You are right in that propaganda is a very powerful weapon (I openly admitted that on my previous comment) but, then again, we are all adults that should be able to navigate the ocean of misinformation to find out what is true in order to form our own opinions

Ideally, yes, we should, but sadly not everybody does.

> Having all the Nazi propaganda available today is an invaluable tool to prevent it from happening in the future

In theory, but in practice most people have very vague notions of WW2, often with plenty of misinformation sprinkled in ( e.g. Holocaust deniers, people thinking the US won the war singlehandedly, people who deny there were collaborators, etc.). I absolutely think that had Nazi propaganda been limited, they wouldn't have gotten as successful. It took years of Nazi propaganda in people's homes for mass deportations and mass murder to become somewhat acceptable.

>As you say (and this might be a bit far fetched, but bear with me) in this instance, voicing their hatred was beneficial for them, at that time, but not for "genocides in general", as now (thanks to how public their whole ideology became) we have data to fight it, were something similar to happen in the future

Plenty of people have taken pages of the Nazi handbook on dehumanising, violence, exploiting democracy and freedom to sow discord, and i really don't think it has helped - if anything, the comparisons to Nazis are usually portaid as overexagerations.

After re-reading this whole thread I think I now know *why* we disagree: our level of "pragmatism" (or maybe "time scale") is different :)

You favor limiting the spread of misinformation today to prevent major issues *now* (because, as you pointed out, it has been demonstrated that people can be manipulated).

I favor open access to all type of information (even factually incorrect one) to prevent censorship and make it impossible for any particular government or group to control what citizens have access to (who decides what is good? Maybe, in 500 years, the "world government" decides that people with green eyes must be exterminated and that any opposing voice must be silenced).

You want results "now" and I aim for results in the "next hundred years".

But I can perfectly understand your point of view as other popular questions can also be reduced to a similar disjunctive (ex: "should our generation give up some commodities to leave a better world to our grand-children?").

It's a difficult question... and I think it is safe to say that it's OK for us to agree that we disagree :)

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/20/is-the-traditional-aclu-...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/14/the-aclu-would-not-...

> Indeed, Weimar Germany had on statute what we would today call hate-speech laws, and Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher were prosecuted for their vicious libels of Jews. In turn, they used the attention to promote their cause and pose as martyrs.

I recommend reading these articles on free speech.

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