Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918

There’s a Wikipedia on this apparently (to my surprise)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...

Brandenburg v Ohio

Conflating wealth with speech is another recent SCOTUS boondoggle.

• Citizens United v. FEC • Speechnow.org v. FEC • McCutcheon v. FEC

Corporate personhood with rights afforded to actual citizens but separate from actual citizens laid the groundwork for a whole mosaic of wrongheaded schools of thought.

"Amoral, effectively immortal fictional entities can be created at will with the rights and privileges of ordinary citizens. What could go wrong?"

> The Supreme Court has made many awful rulings with respect to the first amendment.

I am astounded you'd bother to qualify that "with respect to the First Amendment." They've made stacks of awful rulings, period. Some of their greatest hits: Dred Scott v. Sanford; Plessy v. Ferguson; Hammer v. Dagenhart; Bush v. Gore; Kelo v. City of New London; DC v. Heller; Dobbs v. Jackson.

The Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics but time and again proves it's a vehicle of partisan politics, and one megalomanic sociopath can slant the Court for decades.

Not arguing that, but I don't think any subsequent case has ever been judged by any court where the prevailing opinion cited Chaplinsky.

FYI, Schenck v. United States was overturned in 1969 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States):

"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)."

So we can tell other people to avoid the draft now, even in a dry bureaucratic sense. In real life of course the draft is slavery and immoral, as Ayn Rand and many others have pointed out.

Not even. The pamphlet in question opposed the draft by peaceful and legal means and further asserted that conscription is in violation of the 13th amendment. He was simply telling people that the law is unfair and unconstitutional. He didn’t even tell people to break it per se.

Well that was the whole point of the Declaration of Independence. From the British viewpoint it was breaking the law of the land. So clearly it's a very American tradition to rebel against unjust authority.

And yet they still sent him to die in prison

Using in part is perfectly fine because for the Russians, the war was completely ended due to labour action. They owe their war's end to that.

Was it the right decision, or did it end up losing more lives in the long term? Whole other discussion.

Woodrow Wilson was the worst president in US history. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time to kill Wilson, not Hitler. Hitler would be a no name artist if it weren’t for Wilson completely fucking up WWI and the peace thereafter.

Fun fact: Wilson resegregated the entire federal government and even went so far as to show a KKK propaganda film at the White House. The guy was a rabid racist.

Additionally, Wilson had a stroke that left him blind and paralyzed in 1919 and for the remainder of his presidency his second wife and doctor manipulated him so heavily that there is serious debate as to who actually was in control of the White House during those years. Some historians call Edith Wilson, his second wife, America’s first female president the manipulation was so effective.

No, we don't silence people for their own good, we silence people for our own good.

Yes and the mutiny did happen in part because the German navy planned for a Last-Hurrah-Suicide mission to "die an honorful death"

The sailors were not cool with that and decided to not be killed on the final stretch of a pointless war

That was the final straw and was used to kick of the revolution. The monarchy already had lost most of its authority by that point.

> Germany certainly has given Lenin a train ticket

This was fascinating and amazingly conniving.

The Churchill quote, saying Lenin was smuggled back into Russia "in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus" is quite the imagery.

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale covers it well.

Good point. I guess that depends on the literacy rate. I don't know how hight it was during WWI.

I guess that depends on the literacy rate around 1900.

> Incidentally, the incoming president of Brazil is also an ex-con.

The incoming president of Brazil had his convictions thrown out because the process was fraudulent. IIRC election regulators went after Bolsanaro for calling Lula an ex-con.

That aside, I don't think enough people explicitly hold popular sovereignty (expressed as democracy) over the rule of law. Law that isn't subject to popular sovereignty is obviously subject to some other kind of soverign. You shouldn't be jailing people who have a reasonable chance of being elected as the head of the executive, because if the public would elect them, the public doesn't think that they should be jailed.

What about other requirements for office and limitations, like the age and citizenship requirement and term limits for President of the United States? Should “democracy overrule” those too?

Democracy is mob rule. When one says that democracy decides what is a crime and what is not, one is then defending a long history of lynchings, miscegenation, slavery, forced medical procedures, Jim Crow laws and much much more.

One of the pillars of democracy is a functioning juridical system, separate from the political.

Writing the law may be part of the popularity contest, but upholding the law most certainly is not.

it's possible for a candidate to run from prison in Westminster-style parliamentary systems. The fact that a candidate is imprisoned should not inhibit the electors from expressing their choice. Though once elected, they face certain practical barriers to assuming office.

I’m sure many Americans will soon become ardent supporters or opposers of this position.

> but probably reasonably frequently the case that war is the only viable choice for one side

I think this is untrue... unless your invaders are the assyrians, surrender and losing the war isn't really that bad. Even the Mongols would just collect some extra taxes.

Interesting. Though, I meant that it always seems like the only choice which makes it viable.

Hope I'm not misunderstanding your comment and over-egging the reply.

Irony isn't a particularly useful concept when dealing with speech on the internet, which is fragmented and in ambiguous contexts.

And it goes against HN guidelines to proffer the most generous and sincere writing/interpretation possible.

There's a difference between irony and sarcasm, prevalent here, and both definitions are largely abused or misunderstood these days.

Look for words like "seemed", which invokes the concept of appearance and therefore implicitly casts doubt on appearances.

What I am conveying here, by "narrative" (story/account) is that as a mature person, with some experience of the matters, I have many reservations about the way things were told to me growing up by "authority" figures from my past.

That's not really irony. More of a sceptical tone. Sceptical about the whole way that "war narratives" and public opinion is spun.

I can’t speak to Japan, but your account of Germany leaves out some major details.

Germany was allowed heavy industry after the war, but defaulted on its reparation payment in 1923. France and Belgium thought Germany was holding out on them, and decided to “confiscate” (by occupying with soldiers) German industry.

This was pretty agregious, but Germany responded by the government asking workers to passively resist, more or less triggering a general strike, with the government printing money to cover the wages of all the striking workers. Naturally, if only a few workers are still making things, but the government is paying everyone their salary, it should be no surprise that this triggered hyperinflation.

I don’t know what you mean about “the west” pushing its ideology on Germany when Germany itself is part of that intellectual and cultural group. In fact, the Weimar Republic was culturally quite rich, and relatively progressive compared to other western nations. Unless you’re talking about how the Nazis took inspiration from the segregation in the United States, but I don’t think the US was particularly interested in exporting it.

Thanks for thoughtful comments.

I do read widely and appreciate your suggestion. What do you recommend as the must-read, accessible and honest and intelligent account of civilian life in Germany during that period. Thanks.

> Similarly, the US cut off oil and resources to Japan.

The US ""cut off"" oil to Japan by having possession of the Philiphines, which was situated directly between Japan and the Dutch East Indes. The Dutch East Indes had the oil, the Dutch didn't want to sell it to Japan, and Japan intended to take it by force so they could fuel their conquest of China. The American-occupied Philippines were between the two, so Japanese military leadership decided to eliminate the American Navy first.

Japan were not victims in this. It was their imperial ambition that did them in.

This post is repugnant, and wrong as a matter of historical fact. You’re brazenly attempting to whitewash the monstrous crimes of Nazi Germany. I’ve never seen “Lost Cause of the Third Reich” historiography, and I’d never expect to see it on HN.

WW2 was an imperial war of aggression waged by a revanchist fascist state that felt entitled to land that other people were already living on, and resources other people already owned - a problem they attempted to solve by simply murdering all of them.

Boxed in? Boxed in by what, exactly? The inconvenient existence of the Czechs and Poles? Germany somehow manages to be far richer today than it was in 1933 - and it does this with less land / resources, and the overbearing influence of the Anglo-Saxon culture you openly deride. If Germany today can resist going on to murder millions of people for land and resources, it’s unclear to me why the larger and more resource-filled Germany of 1933 couldn’t similarly restrain itself. (Hint: because WW2 had nothing at all to do with any justifiable need for resources, but instead the jingoistic ambitions of a culture that saw itself as the master race, deserving of a place atop all others, and seething at its failure to secure the privileges it felt it was owed by reason of its own racial supremacy.)

Worst of all is your casual suggestion that Germany would be better off if it had retained more of its pre-1945 culture. I struggle to put this in any other way, but you’re saying you wish Germany today was culturally more like Nazi Germany, and I honestly don’t know what to say to that. As someone who would have been murdered for about three different reasons by the refined bearers of pre-1945 German culture, I have some choice words in mind.