CDR: Re: Why Free Speech Matters

[Olav]

Hey Tim, really interesting post, but...

On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, you wrote:
> At 11:55 PM +0200 9/25/00, Konrad Podloucky wrote:
---snip--- 
> As for Germany, Austria, and all of the other countries which claim 
> to be liberal democracies, open societies, but which have various 
> laws banning Nazi literature, imprisoning people for expressing their 
> view that the Holocaust was exaggerated, and so on, their policies 
> are both _wrong_ and _counterproductive_.
> 
> Nothing has made Nazism more interesting to young persons, mostly 
> young men, than the hint of illegality. "If they don't want me to 
> know about this, there must be something to it." Plus, the usual 
> flaunting of disrespect for authority.

The hint of illegality? Well, of course this is a reason, but the question
remains that if all people had legal access to nationalsocialist
propaganda such as "Mein Kampf", would the fact that that mainpart of our
society disrespect right-wing radicals not lead to the same attraction? I´m
not sure.
Disrespect of authority? Sounds funny for Nazis! :-) But I know
what you mean.

But certainly, this is not the reason that young men join the
national-socialist cause. It´s about a feeling of superority, about
finding an adventerous group of people that I fit in. And about finding a
simple answer to the question why I don´t have a job, money(, or a brain).


> Would such anti-Nazi laws have stopped Hitler's rise to power in the 
> 1930s? Maybe. Maybe it just would have been called something else, to 
> "game around" whatever the specific language of the laws might have 
> been.
> 
> And, of course, the German and Austrian governments of the time 
> changed the laws as they saw fit.
>
> Of course, the crypto relevance of all of this is that strong crypto 
> is already making it possible to distribute Nazi and neo-Nazi 
> material in these countries without any possibility that the 
> governments can halt the flow.
> 
> 
> This will make such laws moot, which is a good thing.

Agreed.

Olav Stetter,
Germany

P.S.: Please don´t mind my English. I know what you think about it when I
read it myself. :-)