this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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As a German it's completely mind boggling to me that some societies tolerate an ideology that is responsible for plunging the world into its biggest humane catastrophe (so far), for the sake of free speech. Nazi ideology wants to kill free speech. If you truly want to protect free speech, you have to at least limit it to all the things that do not threaten it.
Note that the largest Nazi groups today are in the "allied" nations that "won" WW2.
I read a piece (can't find the source now, sorry) that blamed this squarely on the lack of education and remorse given to the colonial backdrop in which WW2 was fought.
Most parts of the world view WW2 as very much a European war that was imposed on unwilling global participants. The axis powers lost and Germany has since tried its best to reinvent itself while acknowledging its chequered past (check out: Vergangenheitsbewältigung), but the allied powers failed to recognise their colonial atrocities. For example, British history textbooks will loosely allude to the British empire saying that they were once a dominating global entity, but will make absolutely no mention of the numerous massacres and genocides for which they were responsible.
When wars are framed as competitions rather than tragedies, you will see the emergence of false victors instead of acknowledging lost generations. This directly results in a poor public understanding of how bad ideas can fester and hollow out any society.
Over the decades since WW2, the popular culture of the allied countries has typically portrayed Nazis as caricatured crazy monsters. They are treated as strange, other, and non-human. This seems to have thoroughly undermined people's ability to recognize Nazism as a destructive force that lurks in people, whether they're German or American or any other nationality. Any society has the potential to fall into this. The unreflective complacency of the WW2 victors after defeating Nazis once has led to a complete lack of awareness that it's an ongoing job to keep your society from falling prey to fascists.
For a while the collective memory of those who lived through the war protected us, but when that generation died off the lessons were forgotten. Some fell into fascism without realizing it because they assumed they were by nature better than Nazis, while others failed to notice the threat until dangerously late.
It's amazing what you can accomplish when you successfully gut public education.
what on earth are you talking about?? holocaust instruction is not "gutted," it increases year over year. the people you imagine are doing this gutting of public education are consistently some of the most vicious advocates for increasing holocaust instruction.
I'm talking just WW2 history in general, but OK.
I can just speak to US public schools, but ALL education has suffered from the gutting of our public education here, and that includes "holocaust instruction."
Looking at how many countries have started to have and even elect literal nazi parties, the education has been failing very widely and for a very long time (since WW2).
And Nazis still get free public promotion via ARD Sommertalk 😔
Hey, at least the music was good.
if we are being completely honest with ourselves, most people believe in free speech only in moderation. nazism is most certainly not the only ideology that sharply reduces free speech.
Germans saying this while their government is one of the biggest advocates for the ongoing genocide in Gaza will never not look stupid.
Free speech means free speech. Otherwise you end up in a UK situation, where you can illegally enter without ID, but if you want to complain about someone illegally entering without ID you have to provide your ID to twitter