The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolph Hitler, destroyed Germany — literally — in the 1940s.
World War II in Europe began because of his dreams of a 1,000-year reich, to rule the entire continent and beyond.
Following Germany’s defeat and destruction of the country — the second time in less than 40 years — the German people changed dramatically. Half the country remained ‘democratic’ and protected by NATO, while the other half was dominated by an authoritarian Soviet Union. That’s the way things remained until the USSR broke up in the early 1990s.
Once unified, Germans became more pacifistic than they’d been for centuries. Worn out by war and ready to live in peace, in the decades since Germany has become the PC capital of Europe.
Today, however, there is a growing irony throughout the country. So averse to conflict and “nationalism” the government is actually becoming more authoritarian in order to prevent and prohibit certain behaviors — and certain speech.
As reported by Infowars, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing to limit the speech of German citizens in order to … keep society free.
Not even kidding.
“For all those who claim that they can no longer express their opinion, I say this to them; If you express a pronounced opinion, you must live with the fact that you will be contradicted,” said Merkel in a recent speech to the German Parliament.
“Expressing an opinion does not come at zero cost, but freedom of expression has limits,” she added, as some in the Bundestag could be heard voicing their disagreement.
“Those limits begin where hatred is spread, they begin where the dignity of other people is violated. This house will and must oppose extreme speech otherwise our society will no longer be the free society that it was,” Merkel added. (Related: Nazi Germany and the Third Reich got their start in the racist eugenics policies of the American Left: New book reveals the evidence.)
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So there you have it: The German ‘democratic’ leader believes limiting speech is the key to protecting “free society.”
Criminalizing speech is not the way to promote democracy
How does that work?
Easy. You claim high moral ground and the ability to decide what is and isn’t “hate speech,” and viola, you can make a law that completely contradicts your alleged commitment to freedom and liberty.
This desire to curb any speech that is ‘uncomfortable’ or even legitimately hateful is a construct of the modern Left. It’s an invention by Marxists and Leninists that aims to stifle certain political viewpoints, mostly, deeming them not worthy — which really means counterproductive to Left-wing ideals.
The modern state of Germany is ‘democratic,’ for certain, especially when compared to the authoritarian nature of the Nazi regime.
But obviously, given Merkel’s comments, the modern German state does not consider free speech as vital as the American founding fathers did.
They completely understood that the concept of “free speech” mean all speech, regardless of how uncomfortable it made others, and regardless, even, if such speech made a majority of Americans uncomfortable.
We’re not talking about speech that advocates violence or criminal activity, simply speech that advocates a different philosophy, different ideals, different political standards.
Then again, this is Germany. And Germans are cognizant of their history. Of Nazism.
Hitler rose along with his vision for Germany on the power of his oratorical skills. He was capable of winning converts mostly by convincing ordinary Germans their country had been mistreated following World War I and unfairly so (but also through violence). He convinced them to not only accept his vision for Germany, but to put him in power.
And we know what happened after that.
Nazism is illegal in Germany. That’s understandable. But there is a danger in any attempt to ban or curtail certain speech in a democracy because there is a natural human tendency to overreact, to go too far. And it usually takes internal conflict to right that wrong.
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