Dear Phanto,

It was never my intention to comment about your level of ability, but about the wrongness of this "nation-building" out of people of different values.

In any case, having that ability to swallow large bones is not a virtue: Stalin managed to subjugate people of all values, including religious, living over nearly half of Euro-Asia, forcing them to become a single nation. Would you agree with me that it was not something to be proud of?

Peter Lang, some more examples:

Using the ‘homophobic’ label to ‘silence’ anyone daring to query the LGBT cause

Silencing those who question the need to hold a referendum on recognition of Aborigines in the Constitution.

Jay of Melbourne wrote: “Locking people up for saying words really is a left wing thing, I've never heard a right winger calling for other people to be fined or incarcerated for saying things which rubbed them the wrong way.”

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005686

On the night of February 27-28, 1933, a mentally disabled Dutch citizen set fire to the German parliament building (the Reichstag). Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, presented the incident as the prelude to an armed Communist uprising and persuaded the aging President Paul von Hindenburg to establish what became a permanent state of emergency. This decree, known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspended the provisions of the German constitution that protected basic individual rights, including freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

https://freespeechfreepress.wordpress.com/spain/

Before the transition to democracy, Spain’s freedom of speech was not part of the human rights under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The term “Francoism” refers to the period of Spanish history from 1936 to 1975 when the dictatorship of Fransisco Franco took control of Spain. A time period of censorship of journalism, free speech, and political control.

Dictatorships, whether left or right, oppose free speech. Both left and right out of power may support free speech so they can be heard. Both left and right in power suppress free speech.

Hi Jay,

"Locking people up for saying words really is a left wing thing, I've never heard a right winger calling for other people to be fined or incarcerated for saying things which rubbed them the wrong way."

Then you must not have noticed the recently drafted anti-terror legislation that makes it illegal for journalists and whistle blowers to report on covert intelligence operations - they can be jailed up to 10 years. Even if people are killed by our secret services, our media can no longer report on it.

That is the beauty of censorship - it can be the omission of facts, so most of the time you don't even know when it is happening.

Our media is so tame, they hardly said a thing about everyone's right to free speech being taken away, they were mostly focused on their own loss of press freedom.

Then you have these new employment codes of conduct and confidentiality clauses that stop people from whistleblowing.

People telling the truth are now more at risk of being thrown in gaol than those who do the actual crimes.

Eg The only CIA agent to be imprisoned over the torture scandal in the US was
a) a person who who did the torturing
b) a person who designed the torture program
c) a person who authorised the use of torture
d) a person who blew the whistle

Answer is D - CIA agent John Kiriakou was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the torture program. Originally he was looking at a maximum term of 35 years but he took a plea deal.

At a more local level, the same can be said for workers and refugees at the Nauru detention centre - the Nauruan government has banned Facebook on the Island.

At the end of the day, locking up people for what they say isn't limited to the left or right - it is an authoritarian thing. When ideology (extremism of any kind) is more important than people, people start to be threatened, tortured, killed and even disappeared.

David, David, David,
We all know by now that Hitler was a full blown socialist, the "Nazis were right wingers" BS doesn't fly anymore and if you're going to invoke Godwin's law then at least do it properly, the USHMM is full of misleading nonsense.
Here's a tip, always use Sophie Scholl as your example of an anti Nazi martyr, but hey, she wasn't a lefty so she was bound to get on the wrong side of the Gestapo, sadly if she'd lived the Stasi probably would have shot her anyway.
This re-enactment of her interrogation, take from the official transcript is particularly moving:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqnD_165Ow4
Hmmm, that Gestapo man sounds like your typical lefty to me.
Do we need to have "the talk' about Colonel Stauffenberg and the Conservatives again?

Bjelly, OK, I understand the leftist logic in your post, the trick is to start at the bottom and read up to the top.
For those who aren't fluent in Newspeak the politically correct way to read Bjelly's contribution is:

-Journalists may run afoul of the anti terror laws.
-Most journalists are Left wing activists.
-Therefore the terror laws must be "right wing" and their authors and sponsors "right wingers".

Sadly mate/matette the "crimes" we're talking about here aren't anywhere near as serious as treason or sedition, the Left want to jail people for manifesting and verbalising the symptoms of phobias, "Transphobia", "Islamophobia","Homophobia" etc.

Dear Jay of Melbourne,

Hitler was a full-blown socialist? What absolute rubbish!