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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

And that's also why authoritarian regimes always undermine them. Anti-terror laws such as that are an attack on human rights and our freedom. A justice system enforcing them is not acting in accordance with what is good and what is right. The law itself in unlawful, and if the system were healthy it would resist. It is not.

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Do you think the censorship of Mein Kampf, the anti-hate speech laws, and the illegality of Holocaust denial in some parts of Europe have authoritarian motives?

Motives? It is sometimes needed to balance rights. We need to fight nazism, therefor we need to forbid those things.

But that's not happening here, there is no balance being stuck. There is just "remove all characteristics of a legal system" (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) on the one side, and the gain is "have the means for absolute power".

Edit: I feel that question leans too much into pure politics, and was hesitant answering. The link with HN is that the story is also about criminalizing encryption. Mein Kampf, not so much linked.

Yes, it is authoritarian but it is authoritarianism that some people have justified and like.

"Some" being the key-word there. I wonder how it'll go if it were put down to a referendum on that one, singular issue. Without politics, parties, and candidates to muddy the water.

A recent poll had 40% of "millenniums" that didn't think that the 1st Amendment covered "hate speech."

Though, I'm not really sure you can remove politics from the question and I doubt candidates and parties would not be involved, even if they have to force their way into the issue.

All forms of authoritarianism are justified by some.

Of course it does. It's censorship and authoritarianism that the majority of people there seem to be ok with, and perhaps actively like, but that doesn't change what it is.

I would argue that this is the case indeed.

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