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Comment by solyin | Hacker News Reader

Because you need the organization to cause change. China figured this out. If everyone wanted something to happen, say the end of Covid restrictions, even the CCP wasn't capable of stopping that uprising. But if it's just a few weirdos spouting their ideas online or off, the local police can easily handle them. Looking at the videos out of France, it's not as bad as it looks, but also, organized via group messages/texts, but they're not trying to get people to get people to pass laws in a calm, diplomatic fashion.

As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.

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Do we have any example of a "good" country that has banned political parties for holding the wrong political views? The most recent example I can remember is Russia when they prevented a anti-war party for participating in the election, but I doubt that is example that people want Germany to follow.

The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.

Spain banned parties that didn't explicitly condemn terrorism (in the context of Basque independece-related terrorism, but applies to all terrorism in Spain).

Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.

Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).

Two examples come from Germany's past - The KDP/Communist Party was banned in 1956, and by counterexample, Germany considered banning the neo-Nazi NPD party, but decided they were too politically irrelevant to bother banning them (2017). Turkey had the Welfare Party banned in 1998 but that one's a bit stickier.

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