> It was completely unthinkable and taboo to voice nazi positions in public in post WW2-Germany, it is even forbidden by law. But this did not irradicate Nazi thought, it just pushed it underground.
That is precisely the point of these laws. Certain hate speech and anti constitutional propaganda is marginalized in order to not allow further recruiting and preventing these stances from becoming part of a mainstream debate again.
It's an institutionalized (and therefore controversial) form of social control. The social control of ostracizing certain type of speech is present in all societies, though. If you're among ardent Christians, cursing and blasphemy is going to be 'prohibited', namely sanctioned. If you're among communists, other types of speech are prohibited. In many societies, you are not allowed to talk about certain taboo topics like sex, death, badmouthing someone's parents, etc.
Certainly nobody has ever thought that German anti hate speech laws would make Nazis go away. They were invented to prevent a new Nazi party from rising again (together with other mechanisms like party prohibition by the Supreme Court) - and also, on behalf of the allied occupation forces - to prevent further embarrassment of West Germany abroad.
On a side note, it was never "completely unthinkable and taboo to voice nazi positions in public in post WW2-Germany." It wasn't done in the GDR because of Gulags, whereas in West Germany this was always pretty common. There was even a successor party to the NSDAP that was promptly prohibited. There were right wing terrorists ("Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann") and plenty of old school Nazis who talked and still talk about nazi positions. We even have our own "Nazi grandma", the holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, aged 89, who was sentenced 10 month in prison but never went there.
That is precisely the point of these laws. Certain hate speech and anti constitutional propaganda is marginalized in order to not allow further recruiting and preventing these stances from becoming part of a mainstream debate again.
It's an institutionalized (and therefore controversial) form of social control. The social control of ostracizing certain type of speech is present in all societies, though. If you're among ardent Christians, cursing and blasphemy is going to be 'prohibited', namely sanctioned. If you're among communists, other types of speech are prohibited. In many societies, you are not allowed to talk about certain taboo topics like sex, death, badmouthing someone's parents, etc.
Certainly nobody has ever thought that German anti hate speech laws would make Nazis go away. They were invented to prevent a new Nazi party from rising again (together with other mechanisms like party prohibition by the Supreme Court) - and also, on behalf of the allied occupation forces - to prevent further embarrassment of West Germany abroad.
On a side note, it was never "completely unthinkable and taboo to voice nazi positions in public in post WW2-Germany." It wasn't done in the GDR because of Gulags, whereas in West Germany this was always pretty common. There was even a successor party to the NSDAP that was promptly prohibited. There were right wing terrorists ("Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann") and plenty of old school Nazis who talked and still talk about nazi positions. We even have our own "Nazi grandma", the holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, aged 89, who was sentenced 10 month in prison but never went there.