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Australia outlaws Nazi salute and hate symbols including Hamas, Hezbollah flag
(www.aljazeera.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Actual not-rhetorical question: did it become a slippery slope in Germany?
No, because slippery slope is the name of a logical fallacy, not something that actually happens.
If you made a colour gradient going from blue to green, at what point in that gradient does the transition from blue to green actually happen? It's impossible to say! It is therefore impossible to tell blue and green apart! That's the same argument the other comment is making. It suggests that because the transition point between A and B is blurry that something banning A effectively also bans B.
To quote United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked what the criteria for pornography entails, "I know it when I see it".
I suppose in this case I'm asking about a slippery slope event, not a slippery slope argument.
Your mistake is thinking the purpose of these laws is to stop "nazis." It's not. The purpose of these laws is to provide some legal backing to silence critics of the government. They will never make a law that says you can't criticize the Government. But they don't need to, all they need to do is make a law that says supporting terrorism is illegal, then it's easy to squint and say that agreeing with a terrorist organization is the same as supporting terrorism.
For example, if the green party of Australia wants to stop coal mining or whatever and ELF blows up a coal mining truck, suddenly the green party of Australia is breaking the law by existing so they have to spend all their effort defending themselves against the law, rather then attempting to ban coal mining.
That scenario is the purpose of this law, but with governmental support of Israel. Every time a public figure criticizes Israel they have bend over backwards and spend the majority of their time claiming how much they love the Jewish people and definitely aren't Nazis, and now if they don't sufficiently prove their non-naziness, they are suddenly breaking the law and now there is another avenue for people who want to silence critics to pursue. It's not a coincidence that this law was passed on Dec 8th.
That's what the slippery slope is, the silencing of dissent, not the specific verbiage of the law.
For example, ask yourself why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Workers%27_Party would be be banned under this law?
Not in exactly that way, no. There are a bunch of instances of "these groups are so violent and dangerous that we need to ban them outright from even existing" developing into "these other groups are marginalized out-groups and we can ban them politically" developing into "the opposition party is a marginalized out-group, the dominant party is the only party allowed to exist." In 1930s Germany it happened that way to the Communists for example.
Not every country without strong protections for marginal group automatically collapses into that cycle. Most wealthy countries just kind of continue on their way for the most part.
I also think neo-Nazis in Germany are a special case because they have such a unique and powerful stigma that there's no real risk that someone will use the anti-Nazi legal framework against any other group. In America, it seems sort of realistic that as soon as you start saying "you can't have a Nazi demonstration" that could become "you can't have a Palestinian demonstration" which could become "you can't have a BLM demonstration," but Germany feels like no one will generalize from the literal Nazis.