Comment by fc417fc802
7 hours ago
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis in high ranking positions and actively covering this up is very much the exception the world over.
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
I think ideally, one would nip those fascist movements in the bud before they become big enough to be problematic. There's a phrase in German antifascism - "Wehret den Anfängen!", translating to "resist the beginnings". The Nazi movement itself also became really difficult to stop once it had some serious traction, one has to really stop these movements from becoming this big in the first place.
Problem is, the German Verfassungsschutz (lit. "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution", the domestic intelligence agency) was itself infiltrated by the far-right [0] and so didn't ring the alarm in time.
I agree with you that there's probably no way to come out unscathed from trying to ban them now - their followers are already radicalized and it probably wouldn't be pretty. But that being said, what else should we do? Just do nothing and let it all happen once more? Break our promise of never again? Watch history repeat itself? No - we have to at least try.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Maa%C3%9Fen
Germany has been very bad at resisting the beginnings. The actual Nazis seemed just kinda unfriendly and not that bad until suddenly they were that bad. There was a ten year buildup until the Holocaust.