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In Canada, Criminal Libel Charges Laid For Criticizing Police
BitterOak writes "A Calgary man is facing criminal charges of libel for criticizing police. According to the story, the RCMP have filed five charges against John Kelly for claiming on his website that Calgary police officers engaged in perjury, corruption, and obstruction of justice. What makes the story unusual is that the charges are criminal and not civil. Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States, it is extremely rare for people to be charged criminally with libel. It is almost always matter for civil courts."
Someone's probably going to call Godwin's law and ignore the rest of this post, but speech is the means by which the Holocaust got under way
That's a shifty and deceptive rationalization. It only makes sense if you take a cartoonish view of what happened in the build up to the Second World War.
The thing to keep in mind is that Hitler didn't rise to power because he said bad things. He rose to power because of three things. Germany had been shafted badly by the Treaty of Versailles and most of Germany had an ax to grind. The Nazis had simplistic solutions to the considerable problems of the everyday German. The Weimar Republic was toothless and weak, not all due to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, it couldn't have enforced a restriction on speech against Hitler. (We know this because they tried even to the point of imprisoning him.) Third, both the Germany military and the elite of Germany had prepared the end of the Weimar Republic. For example, the Junkers funded Hitler and the Nazi Party. Meanwhile, the German military was planning out blitzkrieg warfare (a way of using a highly mobile military with combined arms to defeat a more static force) long before they had a military with which to conduct that sort of warfare. The military ramp up following Hitler's takeover probably was planned years before Hitler took power and would have required considerable support from both military and business elites to carry it off. I can't prove it, but where did Hitler get those ideas and that kind of experience to pull off a six year transition from weak client state to first class military power?
A serious implication of your statement is that somehow regulated speech would have saved the Weimar Republic from the Nazis. I think that absurd. The average German probably despised the Weimar Republic as a puppet government imposed by military defeat and the government was being undermined by its military and elite. My view is that the Weimar Republic would have ended anyway, even if Hitler remained rotting in jail. Some dictator would have taken over. Then the military strategy of rapid build up and selective invasion via blitzkrieg would have led to the Second World War anyway.
But instead, we must assume that a healthy country is going to fall into Nazism or worse just because kooks can say mean things. That hasn't happened in the US, for example, despite our (no doubt criminally) lax laws on restricting bad speech. Or perhaps Canada is composed of potential criminals who are only kept in check by careful regulation of their speech?
When I read naive and ignorant argument like the above, I have to wonder, do you ever think about what you say? No offense, but if you're going to argue for a major restriction on Canada speech based on events leading up to the Second World War, you really should understand those events first. Similarly, if you're going to argue for such a broad restriction on Canadian speech, you really need to understand what is being lost and how these powers can be abused by government.