Even Hitler Knew You Can't Repress Ideas by Force

submitted by [deleted] from reason.com

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[–]twolanterns 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Night and Fog ....

[–]Gaslov 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

You can, absolutely. But the fervor to enforce the suppression efforts wanes over generations and those ideas will inevitably make a comeback for a time.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

No, you really can't. You can control people's actions, to some extent, with a lot of resource expenditure. But you can never get it out of the mind of anyone who can think for themselves, who happen to be the people who will lie to the government without hesitation. And even if you kill everyone who believes a thing, it's all almost always rebirth itself because ideas and human interests follow regular grooves. The only way to really eliminate an idea would be to kill everyone, yourself included.

If everyone who ever believed in communism were shot and all communist literature burned, someone would just invent a variant.

[–]Gaslov 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Take drug control. Singapore has an extremely low usage rate. It will never be zero, but it's low. They harshly enforce not just punishing drug users and sellers but even the discussion of using drugs. Now look at America. We hardly enforce our drug laws and unsurprisingly our use is much higher. You can suppress an idea, but people forget why an idea or behavior is suppressed and we have to experience the ravages of those ideas until it becomes bad enough to suppress again.

You can never eliminate an idea or behavior. That I agree.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The USA has the largest political concentration camps in the world because of its drug laws, so your claim they're not enforced is objectively false. It's also clear the state not enforcing it didn't cause drug use, discontent and technology have. Furthermore, you clearly lack a grasp of the economics and politics of the drug war.

Finally, the USA is a continent empire with vast, sparsely populated locations and huge native industrial capacity to produce exotic drugs by private persons, whereas Singapore is AN ISLAND METROPOLIS FULL OF CHINKS.

I do not take your opinions on this seriously.

[–]Gaslov 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

If the US wanted to stop drug use, it could do it. But then who would work the shit jobs for low pay? More immigrants?

[–]Tom_Bombadil 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The books the Nazis were burning were The Frankfurt School trash.
Porn, and filth, which has subverted our societies. Pedo thought, and trans madness.

The media owners of today are advocates of that trash for our children in schools.

Their lies have hijacked the actual facts of history.

[–]carn0ld03 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

And yet the Nazi's demonstrated no less determination to do so.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

No, they weren't trying to repress ideas by force. Book burning was a group activity to invite people to publicly reject certain ideas. Burning books itself is clearly stupid, it's not hard to get more of the same, even illegally. Printing presses are a thing. It's like bra burning: a public ritual.

National Socialists did want to control the narrative because they considered the masses mostly passive, and this susceptible to 'bad ideas', but they knew they couldn't actually eliminate those ideas from the world, at least not without destroying the appeal of them.

[–]carn0ld03 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

  • Plato, "The Republic"

Which only confirms that the Nazi's indeed repressed ideas by force and it is only coincidence that many of those ideas were spiritually destructive. However, given the naturally chaotic state of democracy, as embodied in post-great war Wiemar Germany, and it's many similarities to what is occurring across the western world today, it's no mystery to me as to why they came to power.

"Even a broken clock is right twice a day"

  • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Charles L. Dodgson

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I don't give a shit what some dead faggot who believes in floating abstractions thinks, that's a shit argument with no evidence, go fuck your sister.

[–]carn0ld03 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

"Who are you, that you do not know your history?"

— written by John Gonzalez and performed by Roger Cross as "Ulysses", Fallout: New Vegas (2010)