What I never understood about this if you follow this logic YOU'RE intolerant. Therefore others have the right to not tolerate you either. How do they make the distinction between "he's intolerant so we have to fight him" and "If I'm doing it it's different"?
e: Should've read your whole post first. You basically explain it.
The worst/best thing about contemporary Marxism (best for them, worst for anyone who has to deal with them) is that by interlinking more closely with critical theory, it means that it factors in psychology (Critical theory combined Marxist culture critique with Freud's theories). It's basic bitch psychology but psychology nonetheless. If you see "intolerant" besides "Hitler", your brain is going to link the two, even though the words "Hitler" or "Nazi" aren't explicitly mentioned anywhere. You then carry the association of "Nazi = intolerant" + "Society = tolerant, not intolerant" (embedded exception to free speech) then you introduce factors which redefine "Nazi" by making it broader*, then justify guilt via association and boom - the other half of society are now
Nazis and exist as a detriment to it.
"Society is meant to be tolerant, our enemies aren't, thus to maintain a cohesive society they need to censored/removed before they can grow in power and destroy it."
Reddit, which I think is the actual ground zero for this spreading online and not Tumblr (unless users of the latter subverted the former or there was significant overlap), spread literal mis info around the middle 2010s even before Trump started his campaign. Alongside cementing the idea that there are exceptions for free speech, they straight up falsified shit to give themselves precedent to hold to this idea even though it, frankly, has never happened. Beside the implication that Hitler rose to power because "he was allowed to speak" (even though the Weimar republic had hate speech laws, banned various newspapers and even censored Hitler himself from 1925 to 1927 yet the Nazi party grew regardless) they also justified guilt through association by making shit up by people who supposedly "lived through it". One of these infamous, made up quotes is: "If you sit at a table with 9 people, and a Nazi joins, and nobody leaves, there are 10 Nazis at the table" -
Old German saying
(
It's a faaaaaake).
As an aside: Broadening the category of who fits the definition of "enemy" is a typical practice in Marxism. Whenever a communist regime starts killing intellectuals, landowners, the middle class and so on, they are typically redefining "Bourgeoisie" or "Lumpenproletariat" to have them fit since those are the two classes of people Marx was most openly hostile to. Of course it goes in the reverse too, since a
lot of of Marxists would not be classed as proletariat, especially considering who Marx considered a Lumpenprole:
“Alongside decayed roués with questionable means of subsistence and of questionable origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term ‘la bohème’...”
"Alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie"
= Disinherited
children or LARPers of the bourgeoisie
Vagabond = unemployed.
Discharged jailbirds = repeat criminals.
Mountebanks = someone who tricks others out of money.
Lazzaroni = beggars. (Marx, in his seething, might've put beggar in here twice, just like he effectively did with "pimps" and "brothel keepers", but put it in a different language to sound clever.)
Porters = luggage carriers/attendants.
Literari = someone who is concerned with the study of literature (how many breadtubers would fit this if you included media in general?)
Gamblers =
And Bourgeoisie has also been redefined pretty much as anyone who owns an asset of appreciating value, it's entirely possible the
entire Left-wing in America would be classified as Lumpenproletariat, who Marx regarded as:
“The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society... may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
It's startling how much more accurate it can be if you remove a few words and add a couple.
“The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society... may, here and there, be swept into a movement; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of political intrigue.”
Thanks, Marx. How apt.
