January 10, 2024

We need fanatics silenced, not fanatics silencing us

There has been some play on the net about Nazis being allowed to maintain web sites. It is focused on Substack, which has refused to take down some allegedly Nazi blog sites. I publish on Substack along with other blog platforms.

Lately I have been getting called a Nazi because of posts I have done pointing out the implausibility of the enforced narrative on the Hitler Holocaust of world war two. I hammer the point that this has led directly to the holocaust of 1948 against the Palestinian people, which has led to the present one against Gaza.

Anyone who has read my stuff for awhile knows what my view is of real Nazis. I am offended when people throw around the word ‘Nazi’ as an epithet or insult, who have no idea what actual Naziism is about. Often there is about ten cents worth of difference between these people’s own believes and that of actual Nazis.

I have been interested enough to look into Nazi ideology and how it developed. Just talking about that got me accused of being a Nazi by people who refused to listen to what I was actually saying. This, while real Nazis had been allowed to immigrate freely into Canada and gain influence here.

Some ancestors of mine spent their youth in Europe during the last war, putting their lives on the line to defeat that generation of Nazis. They dealt with real, goose stepping Seig Heilers from the Waffen SS, at places like Falais, the Scheldt, and the Hochwald. They sent a good number of them off to Valhalla.

There is a simple explanation for old style European Nazism. It is a more intense form of fascism, which itself developed from the reactionism of European elites who were terrified of the communism on the rise at the time. Its basic ideas were a distillation of the bad ideas developed in Europe from the nineteenth century.

I will not get into these ideas in any detail here. First was the “blood and soil” nationalism, then eugenic, darwinist ideas. Finally, the ‘leader principle’ which was about the desires of many people for a ‘stern father’ state which protected and provided in exchange for obedience.

These ideas never translated well to the new world, to settler societies like Canada. Fascist movements developed here but they had a different character. They tended more to aggressive individualism and autonomy, rather than toxic nationalism and group identity.

Nonetheless, many more people than we needed, with European style fascistic and Nazi ideas, arrived in North America after the war. They seemed to have passed their ideas on to their progeny. They have gained a lot of influence. However, they are generally cunning enough not to draw attention to their real ideas.

There are not so many domestically produced Nazis. Mostly such people are losers calling themselves ‘Nazi’ as an act of defiance and contempt toward the world which they see rejecting them. They have no clue about real Nazi ideology.

Fascism is different in North America. The fascism we see rising again in Europe still has the ‘march in lock step’ and ‘the leader speaks’ mentality. In this hemisphere, fascism is split into a million flavours, though all have most of the same basic ingredients.

An American intellectual of the 1930s was asked if that country would ever develop a fascist movement. He replied that indeed it could, but they would call themselves ‘antifascists’. Almost a century on, we have ‘Antifa’.

These are crazies who think they are part of the ‘left’. They call anything within the right wing populist tendency ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’. Yet they are also screaming about the terrible Russians, who are ‘invading’ Ukraine, which is ruled by second generation real Nazis who took over in a coup in 2014.

Down in the states we now have the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) crowd. Some people in Canada are attracted to that but notice they are in Canada, so they want to make Canada great again. Their problem is, the only things Canada has been great at are exactly the things they do not like; peace, order, and good government, with adequate government services.

So we have all shapes and shades of people who fit the description of Fascists, who really should be denied any platform for their nonsense. Which ones get taken down from various platforms seems to depend mostly on the propensities of the platform’s owners, and the way the political winds are blowing. This is not a good way of applying censorship.

We do need censorship. More people are noticing that the dear old liberal ideal of ‘freedom of speech’ does not work in the real world. It is not something necessary to a democracy, but rather makes one almost impossible.

As one of the chief Nazi propagandists said, propaganda will always work if it cannot be silenced. There are storms of destructive ideas blowing through the net which are very damaging to society. Needed public initiatives, even efforts to control the pandemic, are destroyed by sophisticated disinformation and perception management techniques.

There are no alternate realities, truth is what it is, and no individual or country can function successfully in the world outside of truth and reality. Thus, no society can function without an effective censorship system. Proper censorship means to moderate public discussion toward identification of, and solutions for, real problems.

Good censorship is a core function of any real democracy. It enables good decisions to be made. It prevents breakdown of well grounded public consensus by malevolent actors.

Thus, good censorship is what is done in a real democracy. The problem, of course, is we do not live in a democracy. In fact, most of the world’s people live under oligarchy.

Oligarchies are noted for deteriorating over time into outright tyrannies. Different oligarchic factions demand that their interests take precedence over anyone else’s. They start using propaganda to create factions in the population, to weaponize against their rivals.

That is what Fascism is really about. This is a large part of what goes on by way of public discussion these days, especially over the internet. This is why we badly need a strict system of censorship, especially on the net.

We are not going to get one. To have a proper system of censorship, we need a proper government which can institute one, as part of laying the basis for a real democracy. We are going to live in some exciting times before such a government can come about.

Until then, we have the worst kind of censorship. It is probably worse even than living in outright totalitarianism where truth is decided by some sort of ‘party line’. We have ad hoc censorship by whoever is in control of different pieces of the media and internet.

This system is utterly ineffective at controlling really destructive forms of disinformation. It is much more effective at silencing the truth. Mostly, it just blots out the truth in a storm of bad noise.

But this is what we live in these days. Right now there is a storm on Substack about Nazis. The proprietors of Substack to not want to remove them but finally took down five sites.

It seems these sites had under one hundred subscribers combined. Some people are insisting there are more. Someone claims to have found 75 sites. What exactly is ‘Nazi’ about these sites is not clear.

One of these could be mine, for all I know. To repeat, I have already been called ‘nazi’ for questioning some aspects of the officialized history of the world war. Of course I do not think real Nazi talk should be tolerated in public.

I keep hearing about Nazis on the net. I look for them on various platforms. What I find are mostly not actual Nazis. They are people somebody does not like, and who is throwing “Nazi” at him/her as an epithet, without knowing or caring what that is really about.

I have met a few people really claiming to be Nazis. They also had little idea what Naziism is about. They also seem to be throwing the word around without really understanding it, for shock effect, the way adolescent boys used to spray paint swastikas on things. 

However, as I say, we have a new generation of Nazis on the rise, because the conditions are right for them. Of course, they do not call themselves Nazis. They label everyone they do not like as “Nazi”.

Again, I do not think serious Nazi type beliefs should be tolerated. I am a big proponent of censorship. My issue is with private organizations like Substack doing the censoring.

I am concerned about private people, especially ones who keep their own identities secret, setting up ‘cancel’ and ‘outing’ campaigns against other people. This is a big problem, mostly because we do not have very good laws regarding defamation and harassment. The biggest reason we do not have good legal protections from this is because we have people in control of government who find this kind of anonymous censorship and intimidation to be a useful means of social control.

Censorship is something to be done by government. That is, a really democratic government after we have cleared out the present pathocracy. Censorship must be done by offices or specialized courts who are able to identify what is to be censored and can explain exactly why it is to be censored.

Also, to determine what kind of speech should not only not be free, but subject to criminal penalties. Again, I say Nazi talk is something which should not be tolerated. However, people must understand exactly what it is.

As for the way censorship should be organized, private platforms like Substack need to be given strict guidelines. These are more about what they do not censor and deplatform, than what they do. People who keep making unjustified complaints need to be given restrictions.

No one should care about losers in basements with a few dozen followers, if they are not doing anything actually criminal, just talking among themselves. Government in a real democracy would go after real disinformation operations. That is, ones which are funded and directed to promote antisocial behaviour, to disrupt government functions, and to create social disruption and discord.

This is not about ‘police state’ or ‘tyranny’. This is about how real government in a real democracy goes about protecting real freedom. People demanding unrestricted free speech are trying to create breakdown so they can gain power for themselves. They are the enemies of freedom and humanity.

We do not at present have such a legitimate system of public discourse and proper censorship. The enemies of society try to apply their own censorship and often get away with it. However, it is still possible to speak the truth, even if it is hard to be heard.

Thus, I do not want to see private censorship. It is better to have things as they are now, with all its inadequacy, until something better becomes possible.