Summary
Australia has enacted strict anti-hate crime laws, mandating jail sentences for public Nazi salutes and other hate-related offenses.
Punishments range from 12 months for lesser crimes to six years for terrorism-related hate offenses.
The legislation follows a rise in antisemitic attacks, including synagogue vandalism and a foiled bombing plot targeting Jewish Australians.
The law builds on state-level bans, with prior convictions for individuals performing Nazi salutes in public spaces, including at sporting events and courthouses.
I don’t think this behavior should be socially tolerated; however, I don’t think it’s a good idea to police it through the use of governmental force.
Oh it absolutely is.
If you don’t think it should be socially tolerated, then great, regulations are how we enforce social tolerance in a manner that isn’t just “I don’t like you, please stop, but also I won’t do anything to you if you keep doing it.”
Furthermore, and this is something you’ll probably see brought up a lot when using that talking point, there is a paradox of tolerance that cannot be avoided when it comes to issues like Nazism. Nazi rhetoric is inherently discriminatory and intolerant. If you allow it to flourish, it kills off all other forms of tolerance until only itself is left. If you don’t tolerate Nazi rhetoric, it doesn’t come to fruition and destroy other forms of tolerance.
Any ideology that actively preaches intolerance towards non-intolerant groups must not be tolerated, otherwise tolerance elsewhere is destroyed.
(This mini comic explains the paradox well, as well.)
Do we really want to mandate jail time though? It seems like maybe fines would be effective? I’m not in favor of inventing more ways to fill up for-profit prisons with non-violent offenders.
Fines are generally not as effective as we’d like, because fines only affect the poor. If you’re wealthy, a fine is nothing to you. If a working class person espousing Nazi ideology were to be fined, say, $10,000, that could possibly make them bankrupt. If Elon Musk was fined $10,000 every time he said something directly aligned with the Nazis, he’d still be a multi-billionaire.
Now, sure, we can adjust fines as a percent of income, for instance, which helps, but generally speaking, the loss of autonomy (imprisonment) discourages bad behavior more than the loss of money, thus it tends to be a better way to prevent given behaviors from occurring.
I understand, and I agree to an extent, but I think if the problem is the for-profit prisons, we should focus on not having for-profit prisons, rather than not prosecuting what should be crimes just because the current prison system is quite bad.
Nazis are inherently violent. They may not directly harm an individual, but the ideology revolves around harm coming to other groups. (e.g. how the Nazis killed Jewish people, advocated for the death of homosexuals, etc) When someone supports Nazism, they directly support an ideology that effectively mandates the death of many.
In the same way that I believe health insurance CEOs should be considered murderers when they deliberately implement bad algorithms that deny claims for the sake of shareholder profit, even though they didn’t directly cause a death, I believe that people who support ideologies that can lead to the death of many should be treated maybe not as someone who has done a murder, but as someone who allowed the means for a murder to happen, knowingly, gladly, and deliberately.
I would like to clarify that I am not advocating for tolerance. It’s quite the contrary. I am advocating for very vocal intolerance of these groups and their behaviors. It is simply my belief that governmental force is not a necessary means to this end, not to mention that it is incompatible with the ideas of liberalism [1], which I personally espouse.
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Saying we shouldn’t police those behaviors is actively stating that you want to tolerate them, just via legal means rather than solely social ones. You say you don’t want to tolerate them socially, but when it comes to any actual legal intervention, suddenly, they should be tolerated. If saying they shouldn’t be stopped using the force of law isn’t tolerating the behavior more than saying we should stop them using the force of law, then I don’t know what is.
Then you should reconsider your ideology. If your ideology allows Nazis to face no legal consequences for being Nazis, while you simultaneously state that you don’t believe they should be tolerated, then you hold mutually contradictory views.
If you don’t think their views should be tolerated, you should support actions that prevent their views from being held and spread. If you don’t do that, then you inherently are tolerating them to an extent.
This is a loaded statement — it depends on what you mean by “being Nazis”.
Generally speaking, espousing/engaging in the support of many harmful beliefs traditionally held by Nazis, and generally fascists more broadly since Nazism is just a branch of fascism, such as:
Practically speaking, I think it would probably make the most sense to judge whether somebody is a “Nazi” legally, by requiring at least a few of these tenets to be met before any trial could take place to prevent false imprisonment and the like, but as these views are objectively harmful to society, I don’t believe they should be allowed to flourish, full stop.
If you don’t support imprisoning people who hold these views that directly lead to the death of many innocent people, the taking over of people’s land/homes, the destruction of democratic systems, and the elimination of entire races of people from populations, then you are inherently tolerating their beliefs.
Yes, I agree that not using governmental force would be more legally tolerant — as you mentioned above:
(referencing your other comment for consolidation purposes)
So what we’ve established is that:
Your stance is categorically "I don’t think Nazis should be able to say the things that make them Nazis, and I’ll be mean to them about it and hope businesses shun them, but I won’t actually stop them from doing that."
So, what is your reasoning for why they should be shunned socially, but not legally? Why is it more beneficial to allow them to say specifically what they say, as opposed to preventing that by force?
It may depend on what you mean by “beneficial”, but, generally, I’m not necessarily arguing that not imprisoning those espousing nazi-rhetoric would be more “positive” than the alternative, I simply fear the risks of going the route of governmental force outweigh the benefits. I fear tyrannical overreach, and I think a liberal approach, while not perfect, may be the best means to stave off this outcome. But, at least we have experiments like Australia, which can be examined from a distance.
Philosophically, the question becomes rather uncomfortable for me to answer; I personally don’t feel that I can be certain that my views are moral, so I tend to prefer the option that ensures the largest amount of ideological freedom. I understand that the paradox of tolerance is a threat to that idea, and it should be resisted, but I’m simply not convinced that imprisonment is the best antidote.
I think this begs the question — is it certain that social intolerance wont prevent, or is likely to not prevent these ideologies from accelerating in adoption?
I support social actions that prevent their views from being held and spread.
Liberalism has proven ineffective at keeping fascists out of power I say we do something else.
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If I understand you correctly, you are saying that you think the current government (USA) is fascist. If so, would you mind describing exactly why you think that? Do note that I’m not disputing your claim — I’m simply curious what your rationale is.
I think a more forceful alternative could be being something like “I wont allow you into my place of business”. I think one could also encounter issues with finding employment, or one could lose their current employment. Social repercussions like that can be quite powerful imo. I think the type of tolerance that’s damaging is the complacent/quiet type where one simply lets them be without protest.
Ah yes, not letting Nazis buy from a business, at the business’s will, dependent on every single individual place of employment all knowing they’re a Nazi and actively choosing to deny them business and employment, as opposed to… just locking them up so they don’t have a chance of their views being spread in the world. Truly, the “more forceful alternative.”
I only meant more forceful than your only stated possibility:
Okay, let’s throw that out then, and look at this objectively. Social shunning or unemployment does not discourage something more than imprisonment, because not only does imprisonment do all of those things, it also restricts individual autonomy altogether, and is thus a more harsh punishment than just denying someone business or employment. Stating that businesses rejecting Nazis will somehow be more of a punishment than arresting them is quite irrational.
Especially when you consider that businesses look out for what will make them the most profit, not what’s socially right/wrong. If the Nazis had more money than the non-Nazis, then substantially less businesses would do anything to stop them, whereas ideally, the law doesn’t care how much money you have, and if you break it, you go to jail. Obviously the wealthy are able to skirt many regulations using money, but there are many that they can’t. If a billionaire stabs someone in broad daylight, they go to jail regardless.
Hm. Your statement “If the Nazis had more money than the non-Nazis” is an important distinction; however, I think it also crucially depends on the distribution of nazis throughout the populace (assuming the society in question in governed by a majoritarian democratic system). The statement “If the Nazis had more money than the non-Nazis”, I think, infers the potential of monopolistic behavior in that ownership of the market becomes consolidated in the hands of those who are nazi-sympathetic. In this case, assuming the nazis were a minority of the populace, the government would step in as it must prevent monopolistic market behavior to ensure fair market competition [1]; however, if the nazis were a majority of the populace, I fear the argument is moot as they likely would be the ones creating the laws in the first place [2], assuming they had a monopoly on power (as if they didn’t, it’s plausible that the minority with a monopoly on power would revolt), and I think it would be plausible that they would create a market regulating body that is favorable to nazi-sympathetic entities.
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The government rarely actually steps in, even in cases of demonstrable monopolies. This is very easy to see in our world today, and will always be the case as long as you live in a capitalist system. Capitalism grants power to the capital holders by allowing them to buy the means of productions, restricting the power of workers to mobilize against corporate action, elect representatives not favorable to capital owners, etc. It causes anti-monopolistic tendencies to waver, because in a system built on being able to buy up businesses, capital concentration is the design, not just an unintended side effect.
A group of people do not need to be the majority of the population to hold drastically more wealth, and thus a direct ability to impact the choices of businesses. See: the top 1% of wealth holders owning 30% of wealth, and the bottom 50% of wealth holders owning just a few percentage points.
Critically though, we need to look at the possibility of such a drastically negative outcome occurring in both of our possible systems. In mine, Nazism simply is not given a chance from the start. It is not given the opportunity to even attempt a power grab, because those who publicly spread the ideology are imprisoned.
In yours, they are given the ability to spread their ideology, still get employment and buy goods at sympathetic businesses, can gain functional societal acceptance by accumulating wealth, and so on. Your system does less to stop Nazi ideology from spreading than mine does. It is fundamentally less hostile to Nazis.
Now, I’m going to try consolidating my responses to all your other replies in this one comment, since I want to try and keep this tidy.
They can do so, but they are less effective. We as a society, generally, hold distaste for people who do murders. If we lived in a society where nobody was ever imprisoned for murder, would we see less murder? Of course not, because the only consequence to doing so would be social shunning, but you would still be free to do whatever else you please in your life, and if you’re a person that doesn’t care what people think of you, or can surround yourself in a community of like-minded murderers, then social shunning does nothing to disincentivize you from murdering more people. Imprisonment exists for a reason, that being it is more effective than other means of preventing behavior, such as social shunning.
The exact same logic applies to Nazism. The ideology, after spreading far enough and gaining power, inevitably leads to outcomes that most of us would find highly undesirable, such as the genocide of entire groups of individuals, and thus should be treated as such, with the strongest force possible to reduce the chance of it spreading by as much as possible.
Sorry if I was unclear by what I meant here. I meant specifically that imprisonment isolates you from the rest of society, by locking you up either in a cell block with very few other people to communicate with (relatively speaking) or by putting you in solitary, with no people to communicate with. You objectively have less ability to interact with other human beings, and have been “shunned” as a result. Or at least, you experience similar effects. (Social deprivation, being placed in situations only involving other people rejected from the common populace, etc) Again, apologies if I was unclear.
I understand this point a lot, and I do think it’s a quite justified opinion to have. If we can’t be certain our views are moral, we want to do what requires the least harm to come to people, in case we’re wrong.
This
is a good fear to have, but if this logic was applied consistently, then we wouldn’t imprison anybody, for any offense, because we can’t actually be 100% confident that we were making the right choice in imprisoning them. As I mentioned earlier, we already know what Nazi ideology leads to in the end, we’ve seen its effects before, and with the rise of fascism in America with Trump’s second term, we’re seeing it begin again.
Just like how we could observe that murder negatively impacts the wellbeing of local communities, and societies as a whole, we can observe that what tends to arise from Nazi rhetoric also produces those same outcomes. For instance, Trump’s new executive orders are doing things like cutting billions in aid that currently keep many people alive in struggling countries, who are now likely to die from a lack of aid. His policies will be resulting in a significant shortfall in spending on critical programs people need to stay alive, like Medicare/Medicaid, are cutting funding for research that develops critical cures for people’s health problems, he’s actively stripping policies that level the playing field for disadvantaged groups which will only result in their overall relative share of wealth going down over time, not to mention his billionaire supporting policy that’s actively funneling more of the few percentage points of wealth everyone not in the top 50% of people has to the top 1%, which will only make their lives harder.
We see the outcomes, more concrete moral biases we can often feel more confident in (e.g. less death is usually ideal, people should ideally be healthy and happy, etc) back up why those outcomes are wrong, so we can then feel confident in saying the thing that caused those outcomes should be legislated against.
If you believe Nazis are a harm to society, and we have all our concrete understanding of their misdeeds to back that up, then it is no different from any action we take against any other bad action to say that they should be imprisoned for the harm we know they do to society.
I understand it’s difficult to support something that you could end up being wrong on, that ends up overreaching, but if you do nothing more than the social shunning that already happened just recently right up through when Trump entered the Oval Office, then you get fascism, and we’re seeing, yet again, the harm that fascism causes.
I don’t agree that this is necessarily true. For example, what of the case of a tyrannical government? Society may be accepting of a behavior, yet the behavior may be an imprisonable offense. Therefore something being an imprisonable offense doesn’t necessitate that it be a socially shunned behavior (by the majority).
well put. i still thoroughly disagree with you, mind, but this comment clicked my understanding of this argument.
Would you mind outlining why?
My thoughts exactly. I have absolutely no sympathy for Nazis, or anyone else who thinks mass murder and genocide were good policy. But one of the things that makes a free society different from Nazi Germany, is free expression. If we limit free expression to only things the people in charge want expressed, no matter how noble the intent that starts us down a very dark path very quickly.
The way we fight Nazis and racism is not by beating them up or jailing them. It’s by teaching each other and our children why they are wrong, by learning and understanding what it is like to have racism directed against you. And thus, we defeat racism not with force but with empathy.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the sort of policy that would make Hitler proud. It’s the sort of policy that would be enacted in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia.
How well did that work out for us this time? We have concrete evidence that this is not enough and that we need to try something else at this point.
There was a lot more going on in Germany leading up to WW2.
Neo-nazis don’t have to deal with the Treaty of Versailles in 2025, for example.