Comment by illuminati1911

The US dropped its blanket ban on anarchists and communists well over 20 years ago. I personally know people in both camps who have visited the UK and one who has permanent US residency.

I'd argue that while the US has many problems when it comes to its treatment of the left, things have moved in the opposite direction of what you indicate. E.g. the far rights attack on Obama coupled with generations now growing up who never experienced the cold war combined to make words like "socialism" far less scary.

> Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.

American citizens are perfectly free to hold those beliefs. They are also free to determine what kind of people they want to allow in their country, just like every other country on Earth can. That they choose not to allow people who openly advocate destroying all existing social institutions (which is the end goal of communism as stated by Marx in The Communist Manifesto) to enter the country does not mean that the country is not free.

> And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.

There are 100 million people who died in the 20th century who would disagree with you.

But, even if we ignore that, the US does not allow Nazis to enter the country either, for very similar reasons. As a matter of fact, if you apply for permanent residency today, you still have to sign a statement that says you're not a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party or adhere to any of its beliefs, even though that party is defunct and most of its members are dead.

>And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology.

This is a dangerous thing to say publicly! As you mention yourself, the United States has had red scares just a generation ago. Who is to say it won't happen again? And that is exactly why you should support freedom of speech and tolerance of differing ideologies. Or the next red scare will be even worse.

>statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years.

As far as I know most of the USSR world war 2 monuments are still standinding. The US is removing even monuments to soldiers that don't feature any specific general or leader. By your logic we should tear down the famous Vietnam war memorial because the US lost the war.

To be fair, anarchists didn't exactly make anyone their friends from the late 1800s forward. There was an incredible amount of political violence at the time.

Russia saw tens of millions murdered because the anarchists and communists (of that day) got exactly what they wanted in the overthrow of the old regime. It's weird how communism and fascism seem to appear out of the ether together and fight with each other.

How many states were destabilized by that combo in the last 100 years? Russia, Germany, Spain, at least, South American countries, etc. Fascists and communists are like pb & j.

There must have been a lot of normal people who just wanted to live normal lives but saw them destroyed by extremists who knew the right way to live.

The problem is for the most part very few (no?) people are calling for explicit violence, even really abstract violence. Calling for muslim bans, border walls, deportation of illegal or even legal immigrants, restricting immigration to "white" countries and honouring racist war "heroes" are all abhorrent and racist views, but they are all clearly not inciting violence in any way.

How do you restrict the speech of people who advocate for white supremacy in non-violent ways? You could specifically ban white supremacy, but such a narrowly targeted law would probably lead to more radicalization.

Inciting violence is already illegal and no one is defending it.

All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them, you create a tool for any party in power to silence their opponents.

There is no prerequisite like that in the first amendment. Go read the thing. Monarchism was a serious threat to the founders. Monarchists don't believe in many freedoms including freedom of speech. But the founders didn't specify it only applied to non-monarchs. Because they knew such a feature could be abused.

>You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.

What on Earth are you talking about? Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want? Freedom of speech is a luxury like icecream?

The First Amendment was instituted by literal slave holders. When did this requirement to (intellectually) respect the rights of others appear?

> The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first.

You just defined a thoughtcrime.

Did you never read 1984?

You must have seen my grandparents - the ones that have witnessed the real horror of nazisme/ww2 - radical to the bone. Doing all dangerous violent stuff with their walker and wheelchair. A whole life of attacking "good people" from the extreme right or whatever orange buffoons choose to describe them these days.

The notion that anybody that is anti-facisme - which for me should be natural for anybody with some minimum of values - is a radical of extreme-whatever is plain ridiculous.

I'm beginning to think that as soon as someone says the word 'agenda', you can safely ignore what they have to say. That word is never used constructively in political discussions.

Yea. Holy shit what the fuck is wrong with people.

Most ISIS content is already illegal for things like inciting violence. If the Daily Stormer is breaking the law by inciting violence, then it should be dealt with the same way. There is an existing legal process and it doesn't require the discretion of Cloudflare's CEO.

Would you argue the same for the takedown of a marihuana promoting enthusiast website?

I am not qualified to analyze the rest of the comments, but the last/first sentences strikes dear to me. In succession they were:

> > > The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.

> > The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.

> The [previous citation] is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.

The radical part of your first assertion, Akujin, is that it is hard to interpret your statement as anything else than "person A saying that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies implies that A is a Nazi sympathizer". These kind of statements are highly polarizing, hurtful and anger-inducing, because they deny A to have any rationally positive reason for their statement and instead generalize A to belong to an undesirable group. Notice how arguments structured in this way will never convince anyone that is not already of your opinion and will increase the outrage of those readers that are already of your opinion. I would call this radicalizing.

Mildly relevant video from CGP Grey "This Video Will Make You Angry": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

We have come to the point where comments in here is accusing an other HN commenter of being a shill and doing Whataboutism. Maybe we should take a step back and focus on what, if anything, the disagreement is about?

How would you formulate a general law which forbids only neo-nazi organizations and neo-nazi demonstrations? The first thing that comes to my mind is a law against organizations that write that they intend to use violence, but then you just end up with organizations that don't explicitly write that down anywhere but still practice it. If you applied it more flexible, like for example that any organization which members ever express an intention of violence, you would very fast find that doing a test run on history would catch a much large number of organizations than intended.

You could define it as "anything classified as a terrorist group by the state", but again many groups has been classified as such in the past, the state has occasionally change their mind, and animal right activists is an famous example that the FBI classified as "serious domestic terrorist threat". That leaves the system that Germany currently have, and leaves the details to the legal system to figure out what is nazi and what isn't.

>Whataboutism

This is not what the parent is employing. The parent commenter is saying that if you enable arbitrary lines in the sand that those in power WILL ENGAGE in Whataboutism, taking the corner case of "we're just going to ban Nazi speech" and stuffing the precedent down the throats of the courts until it sticks close enough.

As the parent commenter said, there is enough evidence to show that there are violent sects of BLM and other groups that promote equality, and that might just be enough to get the corner case precedent to hammer and crush the same freedom of assembly we just happened to carve out for white supremacists.

> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.

Not true. "hundreds of millions" implies >= 200 million. According to wikipedia, total deaths during WW2 were 70-85 million. Not all of these were to do with the actions on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, so the total bodycount for fascism would be c. 50-60 million.

This is a lot, but considerably less than your overblown claim.

>There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said.

"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups"

Can be expanded to:

"There are people in the world who disagree with me. It cannot possibly be that there is a rainbow of opinion and some people draw different lines in different places. Nay! My opinion is clearly infallible and indeed no less than the very standard of all educated men, so all who disagree must be members of organized hate groups infiltrating our pristine website."

This clearly implies the follow on sentence:

"And therefore we should gag them all to prevent their hateful agenda".

Expanding it that way makes you sound like a prat, that's my bias shining through. Take a guess on whether I agree with you on whether we're the victim of a sustained nazi infiltration conspiracy or not. That must make me an evil internet-nazi spearheading the covert assault on the hacker news psyche. Stand clear people, I'm dangerous and infectious.

Please don't accuse other users on HN of being shills.

> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.

Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.

And communists just want equality. The rsult is tens of millions of people dead.

Actions speak louder than words and BLM's are very telling.

communism is literally responsible for 100s of millions of deaths and almost all of the worst dictators in history were socialist / communist

A couple of things:

1. I was watching the news and in a picture I noticed one of the counter protesters using some sort of spray can as a flamethrower. I also saw the counter protesters beating up a spokesman for the protesters before the police saved him. So violence goes all around.

2. Arresting people just because someone like the parent here calls them violent is a really bad idea. As in, it's horrendous. If all someone has to do is call you violent to have you arrested, then boy can it be used to silence people that say things inconvenient to whoever wants to silence them. Saying "arrest their member" about a political group is extreme, ignores any legal precepts of innocent until proven guilty, and can be used by the most authoritarian groups to silence anyone they choose.

That said I do find protesters very unlikable. The counter protesters I have found a little bit more likeable but still unlikable, because they seem somewhat hypocritical and dishonest, given they have been somewhat violent as well, and have said that it doesn't matter that they were violent as well.

Amen! Wow I'd like to hug you for these words (libertarian-nerd theory world: right on the money!).

In the end it doesn't matter if it is a leftist or a rightist organization that calls for murder or other criminal or sedituous behaviour: if we can be sure that you use your means of communication to murder people and destroy society, then this has consequences. In Germany I know as well of leftist as rightist groups/activists who were prosecuted on these grounds, so this is by no means something that is just used against nazis.

However: almost all nazi-groups are concerned by this, as violence and hate are constitutive for their movement, while almost all of the leftist groups go uninvolved, since their fundamental interests are compatible with our basic humanitarian values etc.

So, to all you libertarian-nerds: stop whining (and seeming stupid thereby) that it would be sooooo hard to detect speech that is used to murder people, poison the civil society and destroy the democratic form of government. There is nothing valuable about hateful agitation, we can do fine without it. And please stop acting as if it didn't matter: the whole point of the Charlottesville-demonstration was to show that people can be motivated by hateful agitation and propaganda on the internet to go out and intimidate the rest of the world. That people can be motivated to let go of all inhibitions if they see day after day that it is okay to talk about killing jews, homosexuals and afroamericans, that other people kudo them when they deride minorities themselves.

Oh and by the way: go and check your priviledges. It is easy to act as if hateful speech wouldn't matter if you aren't affected by it (or are intelligent and eloquent enough to turn the tables). But: hateful speech harms the people that are affected by it and can make life a living hell for them. I mean: it is obviously the aim of it, isn't it? I deride and intimidate minorities, so that ... they feel derided and intimidated. It's just that simple.

What about anti-nazis that constantly cry out how every nazi is an armed, dangerous criminal that should be killed or arrested wholesale.

My opinion about those?

Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!