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0 pointspeoplewindow8y ago0 comments

I didn't say he was, though I can see why you might have parsed it that way. I was referring to African elections where that sort of result is fairly common.

Even in the last election you label as "free" the Nazis had stormtroopers on the street, no? And a significant reason they were able to win the Enabling Act was because they simply blocked other politicians from turning up at all, and violently threatened the ones who did? Or am I misremembering history?

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pluma8y ago· 2 in thread

The turning point however was the 1930 election that made them the second largest party. The Enabling Act ultimately led to the formal dictatorship but the Reichstag Fire Decree (also post-election 1933) was what effectively ended civil liberties and political opposition.

By the time the 1933 election happened, Hitler was already chancellor and NSDAP thugs were openly assaulting political opponents. The reason I pointed it out as the "last free election" is that it was the last election that at least offered people the option to vote for someone else.

Starting with the election of 1930 the NSDAP had enough popular support to slowly force its way into dictatorship. Maybe this could have been prevented with a more stable political climate (i.e. a strong majority government and a less fragmented Reichstag) but there's no way around the fact that many millions of people voted for the NSDAP.

This is why every German who's familiar with their history is uncomfortable with the popularity of the right-wing nationalist AfD today. They may not be the NPD but they're certainly at risk of being enablers. This is also why openly anti-constitutional parties can be banned (but also why it's so difficult to do so).

EDIT: Let me reiterate my point for emphasis: While Hitler's rise to power wasn't exactly democratic, the NSDAP was only able to get him into that position because millions of people voted them into the Reichstag. How many people didn't vote for Hitler doesn't matter -- most Americans didn't vote for Trump either.

peoplewindowOP8y ago

But why do you think getting elected and then ending democracy is an exclusively Nazi pre-disposition, when it's mostly been communists doing that, and why do you think it was free speech that led to Hitler when free speech is the first thing people like him get rid of?

Democracy and freedom of speech are the primary bulwark against people like that, not the cause of it!

pluma8y ago

It's not nazis who are the problem, it's populism. Populism exploits an inherent vulnerability in democratic systems. If you value freedom of speech above all, you allow for populism to thrive.

Note that while Germany does censor specific nazi symbolism to prevent a direct repeat of its own history, the constitution is actually written in a way that is not simply aimed against nazism but to uphold human dignity.

If you allow for humans to be dehumanised in political speech, for in-group/out-group rhetoric to be pushed to such limits that other humans are portrayed as subhuman or inherently worthless or evil, it doesn't matter whether you're a nazi or a communist or an anarchist.

Saying free speech is important because Hitler got rid of free speech is a false equivalency. It's like saying free trade is important because Stalin got rid of free trade. It's not either one or the other. You don't have to allow people to incite hatred in order to protect a society's freedom.

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