Czech president signs law criminalising communist propaganda
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
Letting insidious ideologies flourish and debating them in the marketplace of ideas doesn't work.
So how do you do it?
Most ideological death marches I have witnessed in my party have also been accompanied by lack of debate due to unilateral threats of de juro or de facto expulsion by some sort of manufactured consent that seems to come from nowhere.
Solutions however won't be wholly accepted by the ruling class favored by the current ideologies since these "insidious ideologies" oppose their position and power and "mandate of heaven". The ruling class can risk subverting themselves or surrendering power.
Aside from defending free expression as a matter of principal, yes it actually does work over time.
Except during a brief, half-baked spell of McCarthyist schizophrenia in the 50s, the United States, during the whole course of its massive cold war with the USSR, never saw fit to ban support for communism, the publication of communist literature, open talk in support of communism, or even the existence of an actual communist party inside its borders (thanks 1st amendment). Despite this, said ideology simply having to compete in the marketplace of ideas and practical reality, slowly turned into more of a running joke than any real threat in any meaningful sense to U.S society.
Bear in mind the obvious too: once you create the legal right to legally repress insidious ideas, it's a very small leap for successive administrations to also start banning "insidious" ideas, meaning anything they happen to not like out of some self-serving convenience. In the west, there has been, since 2016 in particular, an intermittent fever of force-fed fears about the so-called dangers of misinformation, one promoted by media and politicians both, only for that very same idea to be used by one robust list of real authoritarians specifically to crush disagreement with their particular variants of nonsense, mendacity and propaganda.
More people in the US take communism and socialism seriously as an ideology than ever did during the Cold War.
I also doubt that communism as an ideology was ever a "threat" in any meaningful sense. Actual communist states, sure, but collectivist ideology can be found everywhere in American culture, from social welfare programs to unions and progressive activism. The current frontrunner for mayor of New York is a self-described socialist.
And it didn't work with the Nazis - we debated and denounced that for nearly a century and white supremacist ideology is still popular. Antivax has become not just mainstream but integrated into American policy. Conspiracy theories, racial realism, UFOs, antisemitism, all of it debated and criticized ad nauseum and ad infinitum and none of it has gone away.
>Bear in mind the obvious too: once you create the legal right to legally repress insidious ideas, it's a very small leap for successive administrations to also start banning "insidious" ideas, meaning anything they happen to not like out of some self-serving convenience.
Fair, but I really don't see how letting disinformation and hate run rampant and answering it only with polite debate and criticism when the authoritarians control the means of communication and discourse is much better. Part of combating harmful ideas (after recognizing that such a thing exists and truth has value) has to be attempting to limit the rate at which such ideas propagate, and for that mere debate simply isn't enough.
Maybe the state isn't the solution but free speech alone also isn't.
Why is it necessary to name some vague adversary? Why is it not enough to punish the promotion of authoritarianism and all forms of hatred?
In any case, I don’t see the harm in naming and shaming the historical worst of the worst?
Also - law needs to be concrete enough to be enforceable.
And yet, there is some truth in ascribing a lot of violent deaths to communist circumstances, at least in the last two centuries. The fact that, as opposed to Nazism, in Communism killing others was never a direct aim, in practice human life somehow lost much of its value and people were dying in various ways, both individually in prisons etc., as well as en masse like in Holodomor.
Arguing which is worse is like arguing whether you’d rather have chlamydia or syphilis.
Also for the record, censorship is not the answer to fighting against destructive ideologies. Quite the opposite, education, is the answer.
Religion has been killing people for thousands of years, whereas Nazism and Communism haven't even existed for centuries.
There is no rational calculus by which one can justify banning Nazi and Communist ideology because of their death tolls and extremism and not also ban the practice of every major religion.
(And Fascists+Nazis are banned as well in Czechia today, so the precedent exists)
There was a whole akward year where all the comintern was ordered to praise and love hitler. True love to the idea is when you share poland over a dinner date.
As opposed to the British Empire and, essentially, everyone else who could?
That story has been heard many times. The reality is - we would never know that, so we can speculate as much as we would like.
Opening up a second front pushed the Wehrmacht too thin, ensuring Allied victory. It is entirely possible that the Soviets would have ultimately defeated Hitler, but the actions by the Western Allies hastened Nazi Germany’s demise.
The history is being rewritten all the times and "serious historians" are nothing but grifters on the runway.
Well which is it: the Soviets conquered Hitler or we would never know who conquered Hitler?