Australia recently passed a law that criminalizes all "hate symbols" (the government, of course, giving itself the power to determine what's a "hate symbol" and what isn't), including the Nazi salute, with mandatory jail time.
Margaret Brennan, the host of the CBS show "Face the Nation", recently argued on live broadcast that freedom of speech was the major contributing factor to the raise of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in Germany. (And she wasn't just making some kind of off-hand mention among other arguments. She was doing this explicitly and directly as an argument for why freedom of speech should be restricted.)
These are just the tip of the iceberg. More and more countries over the last ten or so years have either seriously considered outlawing, or have gone and actually outlawed, "hate speech" and "hate symbols". Some countries, like the United Kingdom, have taken an astonishingly inclusive interpretation of what "hate speech" is, and harassing, punishing and even jailing people for the most minor of offenses. (Among other things, they consider using the "wrong" pronoun to refer to someone in social media as punishable speech.)
The far left, in their eternal quest to gain absolute power in society, has been attacking freedom of speech for well over a decade now, and given how much power they have indeed been gaining in society, their activism is bearing fruit at an ever increasing rate.
The scariest thing about this is that the social engineering propaganda campaign that has been going on for the last 30 or so years has been so incredibly effective that the average person doesn't care and, oftentimes, even supports this erosion of free speech. Ask the average person on the streets, especially in most European countries, what their opinion is of that new Australian law criminalizing the Nazi salute with harsh punishments, and the average person will be either somewhat agreeable or even fully supportive of it, with only a small minority of people vocally opposing it in the name of free speech. I have seen this myself first-hand.
It's actually incredible to think that in the 1980's and even largely 1990's the concept of "hate speech" already existed in Europe, but the idea of criminalizing it was summarily rejected by most if not all countries, precisely because doing so would have been against the fundamental constitutional right to free speech. There are actually concrete examples of this, were such legislation had been proposed, and summarily rejected as being against constitutional rights.
Today, that sentiment is almost if not completely gone in most European countries. Free speech is being eroded and restricted at an ever increasing rate.
Anybody who thinks that these laws will be restricted to just the most extremist form of neo-Nazism and it will not affect the average person, is being utterly naive. We can already see, today, how these laws are being abused in the United Kingdom and some other countries, where the scope of the definition of "hate speech" and "hate symbols" is being widened and widened, and average people who couldn't be farther away from neo-Nazism are being punished.
If this is allowed to go on (and there's very little that's being done to stop it, in most countries), it's not going to stop. Anybody who thinks otherwise is being astonishingly naive. The amount of things that will be included in the nebulous concept of "hate speech" will be increased more and more over time, more and more quickly. Governments, ran by far-leftist activists, are giving themselves the right to determine pretty much at a whim and without any standards and restrictions what is and is not "hate speech". Do you honestly think this power will not be abused?
There is a reason why freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental civil rights that exist. The fact that it's being eroded and restricted should be extremely worrisome. The fact that the average person doesn't even care should be even more worrisome.
Most people seem completely incapable of understanding and accepting that defending someone's right to express their opinions is not the same thing as agreeing with those opinions. People tend to equate the two things, even though that's not what the principle of freedom of speech is. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall once wrote, attributing the sentiment to Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
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