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Germany Cracks Down On Illegal Speech On Social Media. (smh.com.au)
ArmoredDragon writes: German police have raided 36 homes of people accused of using illegal speech on Facebook and Twitter. Much of it was aimed at political speech. According to the article, "Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, whose officers conducted home searches and interrogations. But the raids also targeted two people accused of left-wing extremist content, as well as one person accused of making threats or harassment based on someone's sexual orientation."
This comes just as a new law is being debated that can fine social media platforms $53 million for not removing 70% of illegal speech (including political, defamatory, and hateful speech) within 24 hours of it being posted, which Facebook argues will make it obligatory for them to delete posts and ban users for speech that isn't clearly illegal.
This comes just as a new law is being debated that can fine social media platforms $53 million for not removing 70% of illegal speech (including political, defamatory, and hateful speech) within 24 hours of it being posted, which Facebook argues will make it obligatory for them to delete posts and ban users for speech that isn't clearly illegal.
Thankfully, here in the US the Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with this "hate speech" BS. Letting governments censor any sort of political speech is just a bad idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The classic yelling fire in a crowded theater is a good example.
This is not illegal. Google it.
Asking someone to commit murder is another example.
The standard is - if there is a reasonable expectation of your speech directly causing harm of someone specifically, then that can be considered incitement to commit violence or murder.
That's it. That's all that should be covered. The other exception is if you are motivated by hatred for some reason or another to commit a crime, which would be a hate crime - then your words can be used against you. But they can't be used to convict you of a crime alone, they have to be coupled with another crime.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Germany's limitations on far right speech have been around for seven decades, and were born out of the Allied Occupation and Allied Denazification policies. We can argue whether those laws are justifiable now, but the intent, as with banning the Imperial form of Shinto by the US during the occupation of Japan, was to assure that the militaristic regimes that had killed hundreds of millions would not rise again.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They wereally weak socialists and strong nationalists.
Way better than the bolsjeviks.
Just to be clear here, racist speech is legal in Germany. It becomes illegal when it goes from "X are all scum" to "X should be driven from our land". In other words, it's the threat part that is illegal. Unlike some countries it doesn't have to be a specific threat against an individual, it can be against large groups.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
German here. The National Socialists were considered right wing at the time, not afterwards, and they still are. This categorization is not based on whether they were fascists or not, although most Germans still associate fascism with the radical right (and where the radical right is active in Germany today, they usually also have a fascist agenda). The Nazis were a rightist worker party with an absolutist agenda that was almost entirely based on race and national identity. Even today, after the meaning of our terms has slipped somewhat, this fingerprint cannot be considered "left" by any standard.
If I were to hazard a guess, the US' public confusion and outright denial about the Nazi-rightist connection comes from several factors: First, the Nazi ideology was strongly collectivist, and collectivism is often associated with extremist left-wing regimes, plus the American right has a strong dislike for socialism and thereby is strongly anti-collectivist. Second, and I realize this may sound a little bit mean, but sympathizing even with extreme right-wing ideas is so mainstream in the US right now, that some redefinition of words was necessary in order to clean up the image of mass-supported rightist extremism, to purge it from harmful historical associations.
It's important to keep in mind that the Nazi party is not a blueprint for whatever is happening in the world right now, and it's neither fair nor accurate to brand the mainstream rightist movements currently sweeping many Western democracies in this light. In my opinion, people should also be aware that the currently leading rightist and leftist movements both are thoroughly authoritarian ideologies. In fact, authoritarianism is so popular that it even wins over centrists. I'm pointing this out, because people seem to be lost in escalating left vs. right debates leading nowhere, while their freedoms are taken away underneath them.
You need to read a little history.
The leading Marxists in Germany were very influential in bringing in the Nazi's. And the leading progressive/socialist intelligensia here in the United States were publicly saying that Hitler was the solution to the "German problem" and that Mussolini was the right man for the job in Italy. They kept on saying it until it became absolutely undeniable that the Nazi's were killing Jews by the millions, and that Mussolini was destroying Italy.
The Marxist labor movement in Germany led most of the young German idealists and laborers into the Nazi camp. Men such as Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle, leaders in socialist thought in Europe during their day also were the ancestors of Nazism. Werner Sombart, a German Marxist Socialist professor, who was considered to be the epitome of the persecuted Socialist intelligensia, taught that war was the sacred duty of all Germans. He, and other German socialists, saw WWI as the great war of socialism against liberal thought. (Liberal as in the historic sense of liberalism that originated in England in the 1700s with men like Adam Smith, not in today's hijacked sense of the word.)
Socialism had been embedded in Germany for a long time by the time Hitler came along. It was the dominant political thought. All HItler really did was fuse nationalism and the socialism already existing in Germany together.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
They were escaping from the inability to oppress others, not from being oppressed.
The lack of education in your post is nearly unbearable, especially in combination with the fact that equally uneducated moderators have modded you up. Since when have so many people become completely ignorant? You should really read some history books.
National socialism is and always has been a right-wing movement, both in their own terms and according to every reasonable description that has ever been made of them. They were fighting socialists and communists and put them in Concentration Camps. Not only that, nearly every fascist right-wing movement in modern times has claimed to help workers and has mimicked false concern about the working class. That's why people have expressed so many fears about Trump, because he uses exactly this far right-wing rhetoric.
Like many people you're confusing a mixture of classical liberalism (e.g. Smith, Locke), utilitarianism and democratic conservatism with the rantings of the far right, which have nearly always been "pro workers class and for the rights of the 'small people" just like socialism and communism. The far right and the far left are similar in many respects, since they are both promoting different forms of totalitarianism, but they are based on different principles. Both of them have few things to do with moderate democratic positions like left- and right-wing liberalism, conservatives in general (who can be leaning left or right), those who are called 'progressives' in the US (i.e., mostly center left conservatives and left-wing liberals), or social democrats.
Also, your statements are way too general. For example, both the Franco regime in Spain and the Salazar regime in Portugal were certainly fascist, but they were neither left-wing like communists nor radical right-wing in the sense of Nazis, they were rather conservative, catholic right-wing fascist movements (though of course not 'fascism' in the sense of its Italian origins). No offense, but these two examples alone illustrate how mistaken you are.
You need to get away from your limited partisan views and take a look at the actual ideologies that were defended, and then you will quite quickly find out that blanket statements are simply false. Neither is Italian fascism a pure worker's movement, not does being pro workers indicate a left-wing position, nor is e.g. Italian fascism on a par with Nazis. And let's not even get started that you seem to be unwilling to even distinguish different forms of left-wing traditions such as anarchism, socialism, democratic socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as if they were all the same.
In countries like Portugal communists were tortured or died fighting against fascism. That doesn't mean you need to become a communist, but you should at least show some respect by getting a hint of an education before opening your uninformed mouth.
You dont get to change the facts of history buddy.
You're claiming a monopoly on that, yeah?
The redefinition that came afterwards ... the one that labeled the Nazi's as "right wing"
Yup, and we've always been at war with Eastasia ...
The NSDAP, despite it's name (by the time it came to power it was as "Socialist" as the German Democratic Republic was "democratic"), was clearly understood to be a party of the right, at the time. It is true that at it's inception the NSDAP did include Socialistic aspects, as their pre-Hitler era policy reveals. However, by the time Hitler rose to power the party was explicitly both anti-leftists and anti-semetic, in the extreme. Indeed it took most of it's votes from the old arch-conservative DNVP. Even more tellingly, the NSDAP was part of an ever changing, and often bitterly infighting, right-wing coalition united only by their common aim in the first place to undermine Mueller's Grand Coalition, and then post 1930 to keep the SPD, (still then the largest party in the Reichstag) out of power. Thus, aided and abetted by Hindenburg, the governments of minority party leaders came and (except for the last) went at a furious pace, slipping ever rightwards, from Bruening, von Pappen, von Schleicher and finally Hitler. In direct contradistinction to your Orwellian re-writing of history, it was unambiguous at the time that Hitler stood far to the right on the political spectrum.
Mussolini - Rose to power via PSI
While it is true that Mussolini rose to prominence in the PSI, it is a simple falsehood to claim that he rose to political power in it. Quite the opposite, he rose to political power in the PNF (The National Fascist Party), a party explicitly and very visibly opposed with the PSI. It's also true that the ambiguity of where Italian fascism stood on the political spectrum persisted for longer (even for Mussolini himself). It is fair to say, I think, that the PNF did begin as a pro-militarist, but none the less leftist offshoot (it was, for instance, strongly syndicalist). In the event the PNF was taken to the right, not so much by its founders as by a swelling membership of anti-Socialists. It was seen as the party actively taking the Socialists on, and thus attracted anti-Socialists looking for action. Thus when Mussolini attempted to call off the war with the PSI, the membership revolted, forcing Mussolini to relinquish for a short time the leadership of the PNF.
But again, by the time it came to power, as with the NSDAP, it's alignment was obvious. Unlike the luke-warm contemporary leftist, the aim of Socialists at the time was clear: remove the "means of production" from the "bourgeoisie" and hand them over the the "workers" (which is to say those socialists who control the state apparatus ... ahem). Both the NSDAP and the PNF were clearly on the side of industrialists who benefited greatly from their rule. Not only their ideology the, but their actions regarding this central question once in power, mark them out as being anti-left.
As to international appraisal of Italian Fascism at the time, the foreword the Mussolini's English language My Autobiography in the original 1928 edition, by the erstwhile US Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, ought to disabuse you regarding your mistaken beliefs as to the political alignment of Fascism.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Yeah, damn those progressives and their hatred of immigrants, unwillingness to deal with members of minority religions, hatred of homosexuals amd cripples, authoritarian leanings and appeals to religious authority... oh wait, that's a conservative I just described. Now are you going to complain to me about safe spaces and the war on christmas?