Austrian bakery sells Nazi-cakes, owner faces prison

[Insula Dei]

Good to see that they're still fascist down in Austria.

How are Nazi cakes freedom of speech? They're not.

Why do only our (American) Libertarians seem to think they do? The idea Nazi cakes should be allowed is personally offensive (dare I say: repulsive?) to me. Anyone who's got even the faintest understanding of what this about will know the feeling.

[Insula Dei]

I don't believe in someone's right to bake Nazi cakes, sorry. Some things should never be trivialized or dealed with lightly. Freedom of speech is on my priority scale way less important than to make sure that something like that could never happen again and that it will never be forgotten.

[Insula Dei]

No, no, you see problems where there aren't. What matters above all other things is that this sort of thing is not tolerated. There is no way to prevent them from happening, but they have to be utterly unacceptable when they do. There'll always be idiots and scum, that doesn't mean we have to just let them be. One doesn't argue that murder might just as well be legal because 3 millenia of ilegality haven't made it go away either.

[Insula Dei]

To behave as these people behave is intolerable. You think there's no damage being done here? I can't think of a crime more heinous (so to speak). The things that are being trivialized here are among the most pivotal events of the whole of human history. You say that this is not an act but 'just' speech. I must confess that I'm always baffled at how banal libertarians seem to think 'speech' and 'ideas' are. Why bother having free speech if it doesn't even have any consequences anyway? And if it does have consequences, how is this not an act? How is this not a direct insult to the 5.5 million victims of the Holocaust? How is this not an insult to the very core of humanity?

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It's intolerable that the righteous should always be out there to prevent this evil from finding a place to grow. The only correct response is to destroy it systematically when it pops up and be as harsh as humanely possible in doing so.

[Insula Dei]

To behave as these people behave is intolerable. You think there's no damage being done here? I can't think of a crime more heinous (so to speak). The things that are being trivialized here are  among the most pivotal events of the whole of human history. You say that this is not an act but 'just' speech. I must confess that I'm always baffled at how banal libertarians seem to think 'speech' and 'ideas' are. Why bother having free speech if it doesn't even have any consequences anyway? And if it does have consequences, how is this not an act? How is this not a direct insult to the 5.5 million victims of the Holocaust? How is this not an insult to the very core of humanity?

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It's intolerable that the righteous should always be out there to prevent this evil from finding a place to grow. The only correct response is to destroy it systematically when it pops up and be as harsh as humanely possible in doing so.

     Why should people not be allowed to insult "the very core of humanity"? It's called free speech for a reason, after all.

Why shouldn't I go round drowning kittens? Some moral imperatives are of a nature that exceeds my capacities to give them arational foundation. I don't think murder is okay because of that. WHy should it be okay to play pretend the Holocaust wasn't a big deal? I don'tv see how some petty little idea like 'freedom of speech' weighs up against the trivialization of pure evil.

[Insula Dei]

I don't know whether Gustaf is right about the degree to which contemporary Austria still has a significant deal of anti-semitism (I'd imagine they have all evolved to hating the Mulims with their evil religion), but the point that Austria once was a Nazi country is also important to take into account here. If there's any place on the surface of the earth where this shouldn't be able to happen, it's those area's in central Europe where this evil erupted.

Suppose a gang would kill your entire family in the most gruesome way imaginable. Now suppose that when you return to your hometown some years later you find some people 'tagging' your house (or their own house across the street from yours) with the logo of the gang in question. Does speech really not constitute action here?

[Insula Dei]

Suppose a gang would kill your entire family in the most gruesome way imaginable. Now suppose that when you return to your hometown some years later you find some people 'tagging' your house (or their own house across the street from yours) with the logo of the gang in question. Does speech really not constitute action here?

That would be vandalism, and so not exactly comparable, but if you don't like the free exercise of speech somewhere, you can always leave.

Thank god those Jews had the decency to leave Austria and Europe in general! Just imagine they'd have chosen to stick around with their intolerance to our Freedom of Speech!

[Insula Dei]

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Has any of your ancestors been exterminated by Evangelical christians? I assume the answer is no.

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If there's anyone who does have a right to speak ont his stuff, it's the victims of the shoah themselves, no?

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No, I don't like it that you seem to think that those who aren't evil should pay for the idiocy of people without anything ressembling basic decency and spend all their life trying to prevent another Holocaust.

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Baking Nazi cakes in a place with Austria's history IS an act of harrasment. It IS an outright threatening move. Remember that Austria got off lightly in 1945.

[Insula Dei]

On the WWII and education part of this thread:

In my own school experience we didn't spend too much time on WWII and the Holocaust in History class. This was partly because our teacher for the last year of 'Highschool' wasn't very interested in actually teaching the pre-approved material (Great guy though, knew a lot about graphic novels and obscure Metal acts and often would just put up an Internet documentary about the approaching apocalypse rather than teach), partly because we were supposed to cover that ground in Religion class (which was more of a 'Heavy problems' class also covering homosexuality or AIDS,...) or part of it in every year from primary school onwards.

We did spend a lot of time on WWI and did make the obligatory 'In Flanders fields' excursion. Honestly if you're a Flemish schoolkid who went trough 12 years of education and you can't recite the poem (or some of Siegfried Sassoon's better work), something went horribly wrong.

Of course the Holocaust is a theme that is never far away in pop culture, with the second chain of the public broadcaster often jokingly referred to as the 'WWII channel'. I imagine that many of the posters here calling a ban on Nazi symbolism 'fascism' never really have has experience with wath the Holocaust actually means. I don't think anyone not functionally retarded in Flanders doesn't know about, say, the camp at Breendonk. The collaboration of course is another issue.

[Insula Dei]

Oh, and BK's post here captures entirely what this is about if you ask me. Very simple point, really.