[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

So this a$$hole got punched in the face. Big whoop.

Originally Posted by ResAlien

Punching Nazis is fine by me. Give 'er.

Madness.

As time ticks along, we seem to be forgetting the lessons of history. We don't understand why we have the freedoms and laws we have. We fail to see the terrible peril in suppressing speech and and tolerating political violence.

Read about the ACLU defence of the Nazi march through Skokie, a Jewish neighbourhood full of holocaust survivors. This analysis of the court decision that upheld the right to march outlines why it's intolerable in a liberal democracy to prevent marches and meeting of that kind:

Making First Amendment rights turn on judgments about a speaker’s subjective intent is a dangerous business, because intent is very elusive and police, prosecutors and jurors are very prone to attribute evil intentions to those whose views they despise.

Third, the village argued that if the Nazis were permitted to march there would be uncontrollable violence. But is this a reason to suppress speech? Isn’t the obligation of the government to protect the speaker and to control and punish the lawbreakers, rather than to invite those who would silence the speech to use threats of violence to achieve their ends? If the village of Skokie had won on this point, then southern communities who wanted to prosecute civil rights marchers in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham could equally do so, on the plea that such demonstrations would trigger “uncontrollable violence.” Moreover, once government gives in to such threats of violence it effectively invites a “heckler’s veto,” empowering any group of people who want to silence others to do so simply by threatening to violate the law.

Too many people today fail to recognize how tolerating institutional suppression of speech they hate could (and inevitably will) be turned around to suppress their own speech. If it's okay to punch a Nazi, how about punching a Marxist? After all, they're defending an ideology responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. Their aim of mandating an even distribution of property and wealth has only ever been achieved at the end of a gun. So I guess the next time some campus Marxist opens her mouth about equality of outcome, the grandson of a Lithuanian massacred in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe should punch her in the face. That's where we're headed.

Stop being children. Read some history. The struggle of the 20th century that culminated in World War Two wasn't just a struggle between fascists and anti-fascists. It was a struggle for liberal* democracy to survive when under assault from both the far right and the far left. The left's response to fascism was as bad as the disease, and where liberal democracy was weak or failed, the war between the fascism and communism shed rivers of blood and left the victor of each struggle as a totalitarian state ruling with contempt for liberal democratic values.

Part of me wonders if subconsciously a lot of people really do want an open, violent struggle to sort out politics today. Us against Them. Left vs Right. Fight to the finish, with only one group left standing. Because that's where this type of encouragement of political violence leads us. Think polarisation and political hatred are bad today? It can get worse. Much, much worse.

* The etymological root of liberal is "freedom." Liberalism is hard. It means trading away security in exchange for freedom. It means never really getting your way. Never living in a society where everyone shares your values. It means being exposed to people and ideas and speech that you despise. It means overcoming your instincts to silence those people and figuring out a way to share a society with them. It means being strong enough to let your intellect master your emotions.

It's tremendously hard. But the alternatives are worse. We don't have speculate about that - we know what they are. If we can be bothered to remember our history.