Quote:
Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore
My point, which I have made several times at this point, is that the tendency to constantly invoke the Nazis whenever one discusses disturbing political trends betrays a lack of the imaginations and of historical consciousness.
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Except that nobody mentioned Nazis.
One poster quoted a man who (eventually) opposed the Nazis, giving a quote from him that postdates WWII and appears, from context, to refer to any and all totalitarian regimes. That wasn't invoking Nazis. That wasn't even mentioning Nazis. It wasn't even remotely like "if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi." It was a famous quote about censorship, in a thread about censorship, and I can think of no place that quote would be more apropos, nor any quote that would be more apropos to this thread. It encapsulates everything that a lot of people have been saying: outlawing thoughts, ideas, and political positions has a creeping effect, and if we don't oppose it, eventually it creeps right down to us. Reverend Niemoller said it better.
We cannot excise that period from history. We cannot say that, in a discussion of censorship, we will pretend that 12 years of increasingly extreme censorship never existed. We can't make it go away because we don't like those particular censors. If a quote is appropriate to the subject -- and there is no question in most people's minds that quote was -- it should not be suppressed because it referred (among others) to a regime whose name gets thrown around as an insult by random idiots.
How are we supposed to talk about censorship without the words of those of the past who opposed it? It can't be discussed in a vacuum, without reference to those who have endured it. Those people are naturally connected to those who censored them -- it could not be otherwise. If we are to reject all quotes from those who were ever censored, who would we have left?
I reiterate: Nobody "constantly" referred to Nazis. One person posted a famous quote about censorship. If the man quoted had survived any other time period, any other place, any other government, would the quote have been inappropriate in your eyes? If no ... then it was not wrong. And it wasn't.