Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 08:27:54 -0400
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: zodiac-AT-interlog.com (zodiac)
Subject: Re: Nazi,s find haven in Sweden!


At 03:48 AM 042896 +0200, Jorn Andersen wrote:

>Nazi threat in Denmark is not very big. But I think
>we should remember Hitler's words, I think from 1938:
>"If they had taken us when we were small, we wouldn't
>have had a chance" (out of my head).
>
>Free speech for all means no free speech for nazis.

State censorship merely strengthens the status quo. It is a tool of control
and marginalization of forces of change. I am always suspicious of someone
who claims to represent a force of change who invokes state censorship.
Maybe they are confused, or maybe they don't really represent change after
all...

(The ISO is, unfortunately, somewhat notorious for happily working with the
police at Canadian demonstrations, so this might be part of some curious
dialetic -- as indicated by the last line. War is peace. Slavery is freedom.
There is a sorry tale of how they split a demonstration that had encircled a
neo-Nazi concert in Ottawa in 1993, leaving their fellow demonstrators there
to get the shit kicked out of them by the suddenly more numerous boneheads
inside. But, perhaps, that is also an ISO slogan: "Freedom from neo-Nazism
means getting yer head kicked in by neo-Nazis.")

Every time the left condones the capitalist state's censorship of "bad
people" it helps build its own gallows. How long before you think those same
precedents will be used against yourself in a crisis? Don't you realize you
_are also_ bad people? How many stacks of books need be produced in
capitalist-apologist "think tanks" comparing the USSR and Nazi Germany to
give censors the "justification" for rounding up "the commie scum" the
moment you look remotely threatening?

And when you analyze fascism and communism to their cores, and what they
mean to capitalist property relations, which is the real threat to the
current capitalist interests/status quo? When taking that into
consideration, which is more likely to suffer from serious, massive
capitalist-state persecution?

Speech laws keep the strong strong and the weak weak. You yourself admit
neo-Nazis don't amount to much -- so perhaps you should get out the road
maps before starting out on this trek to strength the status quo.

I don't want Nazi ideas censored. I find it very useful (here in the Great
Lakes area, anyway) that youth being raised today have a chance to see the
unrouged face of Nazism, racism, and the Final Solution, without having to
"go underground" to find it. It sharpens the class struggle.

But then, anything that sharpens class struggle, politicizes people... and
when the proles starting getting politicized... well, we don't want that. So
let's put an end to all these sorts of things which stir people up. Let's
put troublemakers in jail.

Ken.

P.S. Re the slogan: "Free speech for all means no free speech for nazis."
I've heard this in many forms by different little sects, and I've always
disliked its formation. While I understand it is trying to be clever and
pithy, it's useless. It puts me in mind of the slogan of the Communist
League (which was originally the League of Justice back in the 1840s, before
Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain America joined), which was "People of the
world, unite!" Marx and Engels, of course, changed this to "Proletarians of
the world, unite!" which has an entirely different, far sharper, meaning.



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