General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Censorship of hate speech is an unconditional surrender to hate. [View all]True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)If all speech led to actions, there would be no reasonable distinction between speech and action. But clearly there is.
As for Hitler, Mein Kampf has never been illegal in the United States, and yet somehow it failed to resonate as it did in Germany - a society that for all of its history prior to the Weimar Republic, including as a disparate set of local tyrannies, had rigid controls of all political speech.
Perhaps the lesson in the fact is that hate speech is less powerful where all speech is respected. The fact that anti-Semitic viewpoints are far more common in Europe where they're officially illegal to express than in the US where they aren't, and that Islamic radicalism is far more prevalent in Middle Eastern countries that ban it than in countries that rigorously defend free speech is pretty strong evidence to that conclusion.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if your opinion of someone else's speech being hateful is right. If you concede the power to suppress it, you give governments the power to suppress any speech they consider remotely disruptive. And ultimately it would be used by bigots themselves to stop people from calling them bigots - the exact opposite of the intended result.