I had the thought, the last time I was considering one of my sometimes, and on some topics, hero Noam Chomsky's free-speech, free-press, absolutism stand, and that of one of my other heroes of that sort, the late Molly Ivins, the central position that the mathematics of probability holds in the modern, scientistic framing which, at least the likes of Chomsky hold to, along with their free speech-press dogma and their scientific ones.
If you hold there is a right to propagate Nazi propaganda, or Stalinist, or Maoist or the ideological cover-job of any group which mixes gang land aspirations and behavior with philosophical pretensions, you are maintaining that those groups which have a fully documented history of monumental slaughter and oppression have a right to the possibility that their quest for totalitarian power will, again, succeed, as it did when they were able to propagate their rise to power in the past.
If you are a "free speech-press" absolutist, you hold that such groups always have a right to try to succeed in bringing back a campaign of mass murder and oppression, wherever it has succeeded and, indeed, in places like the United States. I will anticipate what I say below by pointing out that is exactly what the American communists of the mid-20th century wanted to do, they wanted Stalinism or Leninism here. It's what the members of the American Bund and other Nazi groups wanted to do.
The "free speech - free press" doctrine, in that widely popular and simple-minded form, holds that their right to propagate their dogmas holds within it the right for them to be able to repeat the successes they have already had in some of the most appalling epochs of criminality in human history.
If you claim that their chance of success in repeating that history is a small one, small enough to be tolerated, you ignore that they were able to do it in the past so that potential is certainly present.* You ignore that they might have learned how to achieve their ends more efficiently than in the past, gangsters would seem to learn to take advantages of opportunities a lot more easily than those who practice the kind of scrupulosity of the free speech-press absolutists. Being, essentially, gangsters, they don't much bother with moral consistency, they will strike poses of such "free speech-press" piety themselves when the first thing they would do as they gained power would be to brutally suppress it for anyone who opposed their criminal rule. I remind you, the most eloquent proponents of such, these days are the neo-Nazis, the neo-fascists, the Republican-fascists, the whiny-assed Incel-Jordan Peterson misogynists, etc.
The play-lefty civil libertarian types who bemoan the suppression of their propagation of their hateful propaganda are their chumps, including dear old Noam Chomsky. Perhaps the young people on college campuses who they whine about so often can see the kind of future such propagation holds for them as the aging and elderly civil liberties champions are dead and gone, having conveniently, for them, died before those whose "rights" they champion take over.
I believe Putin, for example, has in fact found a more effective means of expanding his power, having given up the ideological features of the past centuries Russian-Soviet ideological false-front in favor of capitalism. I have compared his conversion to a show of religiosity and capitalism to Henrie IV's conversion of convenience to gain the crown of France, "Paris is worth a mass." And being far smarter and less bothered with moral consistency or inhibited by a scruple against hypocrisy, he has seen the "free speech-press" laws and court rulings in the United States and elsewhere for the golden opportunity to destroy egalitarian democracy and even liberal democracy (in the decadent European sense of "liberal") using lies and appeals to racism, envy, suspicion of "foreigners", etc. Of taking full advantage of all of the right to lie with impunity that our Supreme Court gave to the domestic billionaire-millionaire oligarchs so they could destroy egalitarian democracy, here.
The question I ask, the scientific question, after presenting this example of how one of today's most accomplished gangster-oligarch-dictators has succeeded wildly beyond any dreams he might have held as a Communist apparatchik in the KGB - he has placed his puppet in the American Presidency, certainly the crowing achievement, which previous despots would have considered their fever dream - and that he did so using "free speech-press" and the opportunities handed him by the Supreme Court in its "free speech-press" rulings, with friendly amicus briefs from the ACLU, and the help and collusion of the tech sector using their greed for money as a tool, . . .
How much of a chance of totalitarian dicatators, with their record in the modern era of being ready to kill tens, hundreds of millions and oppressing entire populations do the piously bleating, piously posing free-speechers think we need to give them to do what anyone who reads the news sees them succeeding in all over the world, today?
Do they deserve a 50% chance of success? 25%? 10%? Any percentage, taken over time makes it more likely than not that they will succeed, eventually. Sustaining that position that we owe them the chance to try again, and again, and again, in perpetuity makes it a virtual certainty that "never again" will turn out to be the hollowest slogan ever mouthed in the post-WWII period or, indeed, in human history.
I can see no reason that we should not take a far less risky chance that rational egalitarian democrats could suppress them, take away their chances of lying themselves back into power away, of making it illegal to propagate their way into power with lying propaganda and movies and TV shows that lie on their behalf. As I've pointed out, those innocent people who suffered under the worst excesses of HUAC got a couple of years in prison after an American-style judicial trial, if they had been arrested by the hero of so many of them under the Stalin regime, they would likely have been tortured into a confession and then shot, if they didn't die under torture, as so many did. Their family members, in many cases, as well, and a lot of them were murdered without any pretense of a trial under the terror regime envied by those dear old American commies, living in a safety that the common residents of the workers paradise they held the Soviet Union to be would probably have traded them any day what the Americans so bitterly bitched and moaned about from their writing desks in Hollywood, at many a university, in New York. What movies like Trumbo and all of the many other copy-cat theatrical productions using that successful franchise have falsified. They were, in every way, the moral equivalent of Nazis, their moral pretenses belied by what was known about the massive crimes of communism by then.
Even the admitted excesses of liberal democracy in the United States in such matters in the 1950s were mild as compared to what the beneficiaries of what is stupidly believed to be a right to advocate Nazism, fascism, Marxism wanted to reproduce here. It is the sheerest idiocy to believe that we owe them a chance, forever more, to do it again or the means to do it. That pose of mid-20th century ACLU style piety is either the stupidest or the most cynically hypocritical pose there is, these days. Now that we are seeing the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism using the freedom to lie in the mass media putting Putin's puppet in the White House.
* It is what the states with American Apartheid had succeeded in doing in states where that regime held sway, reimposing de-facto slavery and oppression and the denial of rights to Black and other Americans were doing at the time. To hold that the right of white-supremacists and segregationists to propagate that ideology, pretending you couldn't tell the difference between that and the advocacy for equal rights is one of the most monumentally dishonest and hypocritical poses struck by members of the "civil liberties" industry, by many lawyers, many judges and many members of the Supreme Court (I will no longer honor them with the title "justice" because they don't deliver that). While the Sullivan decision was issued as a "free press" ruling, the regime of lying with impunity it brought in has favored, mostly, the neo-segregationsts, neo-confederate and fascist oligarchs. A lot of the slogans and claims of the "free speech - free press" industry were not very well thought out.
I wonder if, at the height of lynch-law terror if you had asked its targets, the target of the terror campaign that it was if they would favor the total suppression of speech and press that encouraged lynching what their answer would have been. I'd have said, silence them. Lynchings always started with a lie told and murder being advocated.
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