I watched the beginning of the TWIT show this afternoon. There was a lengthy discussion about Chinese censorship and how much dominance China has over various U.S. businesses. Then Leo mentioned something about Hitler killing Jews.
Swanee in the IRS Chatroom wrote something about the reason that Hitler was elected in the first place and his main mission while he was in power was to try to dethrone the elites who had ruined Germany’s economy, not to systematically kill Jews. Swanee was immediately kicked out of the Chatroom.
What good is the chatroom if the moderators will only allow certain points of view?
A little study of history will show that the elites that were being blamed for ruining Germany’s economy were Jews, and that all the Nazi’s were doing was picking a target to unite Lutheran and Catholics in order to win votes.
Also keep in mind that the chatroom is to discuss the show, and even though Leo brought it up he can’t be kicked from the show, so the moderator did the correct thing to keep discussion on topic and not try to turn chat into a classroom.
It is always a fine and disastrous line to walk when picking out the ‘good’ that was done in Nazi Germany. Say want you want about the autobahn, it was not worth it.
Anyway, almost all chatrooms, forums, bulletin boards, etc run by a public-facing company (and most other types of organizations) will have moderation policies that won’t always seem fair. They have to err on the side over-moderation sometimes, and they might miss things like context.
I don’t know how the discussion played out or whether it was justified, but regardless you really can’t expect truly free discussion on moderated platforms, particularly where sensitive topics are concerned. Just the nature of the beast, and if you want more freedom you should maybe explore decentralized, unmoderated platforms.
And the Autobahn network was mainly built by forced labour - unemployed and unemployable were often forced under atrocious conditions to dig the roads by hand.
It is still a time of shame for the majority of Germans.
What “ruined” the German economy was primarily the disaster that was WW1 and the burden of reparations to Allied Powers under the Treaty of Versailles. But as Hitler knew only too well, it is far easier to invent scapegoats and even easier to just reuse old ones, than encourage a populace to responsibly deal with reality. Ironically Hitler believed his own lies so well they utterly destroyed him and laid waste to much of Europe, including his Germany.
As the old saying goes: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
