What I'm Afraid We Are Going To Learn Through The Hardest School of Experience

Looking around the web, I found this fascinatingly disturbing map from the Southern Poverty Law Center of where known organized hate groups are to be found in the United States.  It's kind of a surprise that some states which I'd have been led to believe would be covered with them have relatively few icons specifying hate groups.  I'm gratified and slightly surprised that my state seems to have only one while our only neighboring state, New Hampshire, has far more.   It's interesting where the real centers of heavy-duty organized hatred are and the various distributions of those in other states.

[Update I clicked on the icons on the blown up map and other than one of those icons, the ones that looked like they were in New Hampshire were, actually, in Massachusetts.  Sorry, New Hampshire. ]

It is entirely insane that any of the groups mapped which have an actual, documented history of violence and an announced ideology advocating that violence are allowed to legally and openly exist in the United States.  It is one of the most insane things about the United States Constitution after the horrific experiences of. the 20th century where they held power.  They should be suppressed into extinction, their hate propaganda suppressed into silence.  Klan activity here and with the proven history of Nazism and fascism and Communism, that those anti-democratic groups which maintain ideologies which would destroy the very rights they are granted are allowed to propagate in the United States is insane and irresponsible.   Egalitarian democracy, and those who wish to benefit from its establishment,  have an overriding interest in being able to suppress a limited number of expressions aimed at destroying it held by people prepared to do that.  Doing that would extinguish none of the other rights of those who maintain those political-ideological pathologies.   As is seen this year, those hate cults can gain political power through the enabling media (including the holy New York Times) and endanger all of the rights of other people who innocently wish to live out their lives at peace with their fellow citizens.

The 18th century naivete that, somehow, by some naturalistic magic,  things would just work themselves out - something especially popular with the slave holders and land grabbers here -  has been definitively disproved by the hard history of 20th century dictatorships.   The world would be a better place if Nazism and fascism and Communism had all been effectively suppressed.  Millions, running into the hundreds of millions, would not have been murdered.  The mountain of bodies could stand as a monument to the idiocy of allowing violent, murderous ideologies their "free speech" rights, their "rights of association" and "freedom of the press" as much as it could a monument to what happens when such groups gain power and destroy all of the rights of hundreds of millions, running into the billions if you include those who aren't murdered, outright.  Only the most enormous of fools doesn't learn something from the lessons our generation and those in the recent past have been given.