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Comment by negidius | Hacker News Reader

I think it's the opposite. It's the people who are at the greatest risk of violence who have the most to fear from censorship. If you are anywhere near powerful enough to commit genocide, you are also powerful enough to ensure that it's your opponents and not you who are censored.

Consider what kind of books are being banned from American libraries. It's books portraying trans and gender-nonconforming people in a positive or neutral light, not books calling them "groomer pedophiles". It's books telling American history from the perspective of America's exploited minorities, not books calling for ethnic genocide or pretending the US actually upheld the principles of freedom and equality it was allegedly founded on.

To support censorship, especially state censorship, is to support the powerful in imposing their version of the truth on everyone else.

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I mean, if banning Nazi'ism is considered 'state censorship' then yes, I wholeheartedly support state censorship. If that's 'imposing someone's truth on everyone else', so be it.

Even if you don't value free speech per se, you should recognize the danger of allowing the most powerful to decide what is true or acceptable. You could well find yourself on the opposite side of state censorship. There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same. Normalizing such deference to the state is inherently dangerous, and a gift to whoever aspires to take control of it in the future.

It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.

> There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same.

And that's fine. This argument keeps being brought up over and over again, but if this happened, nothing would please more because it would remove the ambiguity from the situation.

> It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.

I mean, the fact that you can look at The Holocaust or Jim Crow and think that any amount of tolerance should be shown to Nazi'ism or white supremacy is beyond incomprehensible to me. But that's the issue.

For a certain type of person, any legislation curtailing 'free speech', even if that is done to stamp out white supremacy is an existential threat to freedom in America.

But to people of color, allowing white supremacists to spout intolerance publicly with no repercussions (other than maybe getting 'cancelled') is an existential threat to THEIR freedom in America.

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