I completely, 100%, disagree with your last paragraph, Kweassa. Freedom of speech should apply to all, no matter how disgusting you or I personally think their views are.
You must remember, somewhere out there, someone thinks the same about yours.
Vudak, what you're saying is essentially the same thing as saying
"I will not shoot someone who is pointing a gun at me and about to pull the trigger, because, he has a right to live". In the legal sense, the above case is of course, treated as a matter of self-defense, where even the worst of crimes - namely taking another person's life - is considered an action with no alternative as any other would comprimise one's very own life. Therefore, it is treated as neither murder nor manslaughter. It is literally,
self-defense.
Essentially, what I've stated can be considred is a self-defense of democracy. As mentioned earlier, liberal democracy before the Second World War bordered dangerously close to absolute relativism, where every aspect of social struggle would one way or another be justified as freedom of thought, speech, and political action. The problem arose when a political idea, that in pure,
"laissez-faire" version of liberal democracy, was supposed to be theoretically impossible to gain foothold among masses, instead gained national power through means of democracy and the masses and then proceeded to undermine democracy itself.
This was never supposed to happen, since in liberal democracy, the public was supposed to naturally prevent such ideas and political parties from emgerging and gaining power in the first place. However, the unimaginible did happen. Some people took power, completely through democraitic means, and then proceeded to destroy democracy itself with that power gained. Many things could have, might have stopped it from ever happening. Legal possibilities, political action, political alliances against Fascism, etc etc.. and yet, nobody stood up to the Nazi party and directly confronted it, and took measures to stop it because, idealistically,
"democracy ensures the freedom of speech to all".
These course of events are essentially the same as the earliest capitalist ideal - everything was to be "controlled" by the "invisible hand", thus no intervention or action should be required to fine tune economy. Ofcourse, modern capitalist economy, no matter how market-oriented it is, doesn't work quite that way, and it always requires some sort of management to keep the market system from killing itself.
Political ideas aren't at an absolute relative distance from each other. Despite the different ideas and methods, from the far right to the far left, many of such ideas share an equal political basis in that the ultimate goal - through means of freedom and equality - is to make life better for people.
Remember why such freedom is ensured within democracy in the first place: people believe it is better for many different ideas to circulate in society, and thus, through contest of ideas a consensus can be reached in determining which course of action will further promote democracy, and through it a better life for people believing in the system. Freedom, is not the objective - it is a means to reach the objective.
However, when someone willingly abuses the loopholes in the system, to use that freedom to gain power, and to use that power to destroy the system itself, then through his maliceful intent he loses his right of freedom, since his freedom will willfully hurt others. It's essentially the same thing as not granting anyone a freedom of a killing spree - the law prohibits his freedom to do so, because ensuring his freedom to kill and hurt others, is basically denying the freedom of many others to live and to exist in this world.
Ideas that oppose the fundamental ideals of democracy itself, such as the racist notions of the KKK or the Fascists and Neo-Nazis, is, like a gun. Even the NRA wouldn't grant a madman the right to bear arms, and some ideas, unlike guns, do not kill one or two people, but kill one million or two million people. And just as it would be a social duty for a free man to stop a madman from toting guns at innocent people, if he had the power to do so, it is as much a duty for a democratic society to aggressively defend itself from ideas that would undermine the freedom and equality of other people. If we can't do that, because we're supposed to recognize
"the freedom of speech" no matter how evil the idea is, then we might as well get rid of the police.
Why do we have police in the first place? Why do we allow them to cease certain freedoms from people, arrest people and rob their freedom? Put people in jail and take away their freedom? Because we all recognize the possibility that some people can abuse their freedom, and use it to break the law and hurt people. Thus, through the law we put a limiting clause on freedom, that we cannot exercise our freedom to intentionally disrupt society, disrupt order and peace, and hurt other people.
Every different idea, in the democratic system, is treated relatively and equally
so long as they respect the fundamental basics of democracy where their freedom to express theior ideas comes from, in the first place.
