There are lots of people who have suggestions as to how the rise of the German National Socialists could have been prevented. Some of these historical alternative questions concentrate on the economic competence or otherwise of the Weimar Republic, in other words could the Nazis have been headed off at the pass if Weimar had not had the economic problems it had? Other alternate histories and fantasies are much more fanciful. The most widely known of these is the perennial question of would you travel back in time to kill baby Hitler, or my favourite which is what would happen if someone had loved Hitler’s artwork so much that he was able to make a living at it? This alternative might have least kept him in the art world and out of politics?

However Nadine Strossen, formerly of the American Civil Liberties Union and Greg Lukianoff of the free speech promotion group the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have asked the question whether the Weimar Republic’s extensive hate speech laws actually helped rather than hindered the growth of the Nazis? Ms Strossen and Mr Lukianoff, writing as part of Mr Lukianoff’s multi part series on ‘bad arguments against free speech’ make the assertion that Weimar restrictions on free speech which were aimed at halting the growth of parties like the Nazis failed dismally. The restrictions made the Nazis look like put upon patriotic dissidents and the prison sentences handed out to Nazi leaders for hate speech increased the popularity of the Nazi party. Ms Strossen and Mr Lukianoff claim, and I have some sympathy for this view, that more might have been achieved to halt or slow down the advance of the Nazis if the political street violence had been forcefully tackled and the press unleashed on Hitler and in particular regarding making much more than they did with the contemporary stories about Hitler’s colourful and somewhat incestuous sex life.

Ms Strossen and Mr Lukianoff said:

Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans. As one poster explained: 

Why is Adolf Hitler not allowed to speak? Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews and their lackeys, the Democrats, Marxists, Jesuits, and Free Masons! Because he wants to free the workers from the domination of big money!

Considering the Nazi movement’s core ideology, as espoused by Hitler in “Mein Kampf,” rested on an alleged conspiracy between Jews and their sympathizers in government to politically disempower Aryan Germans, it is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them. 

Indeed, censorship that was employed ineffectively to stop the rise of the Nazis was a boon to the Nazis when it came to consolidating their power. The laws mentioned earlier that allowed Weimar authorities to shut down newspapers, and additional laws intended to limit the spread of Nazi ideology via the radio, had their reins turned over to the Nazi party when Hitler became chancellor.

So not only did the censorship laws not work in impeding the rise of the Nazis but these laws were also used by the Nazis to silence their political opponents once they gained political power. This is a double whammy of wrongness. The censorship laws passed by the Weimar government were counterproductive when it came to curtailing the power of Nazi speech but also handed Hitler a weapon he could use against his opponents once he gained power.

I’m afraid that there are lessons in this piece by Ms Strossen and Mr Lukianoff for those in politics today. Our own political classes, especially in places like Britain, are going hell for leather to shut down the speech of dissident thinkers. You only have to take a look around social media and especially the social media that occupies the more free speech end of the market, which is for obvious reasons hosted outside of the UK, to see how this is playing out. What is happening is that for every person who is arrested or imprisoned for a hate speech offence, at least two more people may start to see that persecuted person as some sort of hero. Now some of these people are genuinely heroic, such as the men and women who have suffered job losses, silencing, cancellation and sometimes have gained criminal records, because they say stuff like ‘women don’t have penises’. But there are others, often with much darker and more extreme politics who have suffered similar persecution who are also starting to be viewed as heroic by people who also feel that their viewpoint on stuff like immigration, multiculturalism and religious extremism has been silenced by the state.

Hate speech laws are bad things in and of themselves. They are ineffective in stopping groups and individuals from thinking as they do and have the capacity to make heroes out of villains if the villains are persecuted for speaking what the governing classes consider to be forbidden words.

Speech should be broadly free with the only exceptions to unfettered free speech being libel and credible and immediate incitement to violence. Speech restrictions that go beyond that would lead us into a similar territory as that found in the Weimar Republic and anyone who wants sensible governance, open debate and viewpoint diversity should be very wary when our nation’s go down the Weimar path.