Free Speech Assault: Aussie Headed to Prison For Performing Recently Outlawed ‘Nazi Salute’

In Australia, celebrated liberal democracy, one now cannot move one’s arms in a non-state-sanctioned manner, the recently imposed penalty for which is a term of imprisonment up to twelve months and $16,177 in fines.

Via ABC News (emphasis added):

A self-described Nazi will become the first person in Australia sentenced to prison for performing an outlawed Nazi salute when a magistrate sets his term next month.
Magistrate Brett Sonnet told Jacob Hersant on Wednesday he will be sentenced to a “relatively modest term of imprisonment” at his next court appearance. “It will not be a severe term of imprisonment, but I have not determined the length,” Sonnet said.
Sonnet initially intended for Hersant to be taken into custody on Wednesday until his sentence was set on Oct. 23…
Hersant gave the salute and praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in front of news media cameras outside the Victoria County Court on Oct. 27, 2023. Hersant had just avoided a prison sentence on a conviction for causing violent disorder.
He gave the gesture six days after the Victoria state government made the Nazi salute illegal. The Federal Parliament passed legislation in December that outlawed nationwide performing the Nazi salute in public or to publicly display, or trade in, Nazi hate symbols.

*Just a “modest term of imprisonment” for nonviolent speech. Is she not merciful? Is she not just?

Whether any given speech or ideology is popular or offensive or mwhatever should be irrelevant; in a free society, people are allowed to express whatever views they like.

(For the record, as an aside, in my personal opinion, embracing any ideology as anachronistic, as specific to a place and time that no longer exists, as Nazism or communism any 19^th or 20^th ideology is silly and unserious. No one could possibly believe the Fourth Reich is going to re-emerge in Australia.)

Furthermore, the great irony is that by making a gesture so taboo that people go to prison for performing it in public, the government makes it infinitely more intriguing and alluring to people who otherwise wouldn’t even notice it.

This phenomenon is called the Streisand Effect, and it is very real. If the state and society left Nazis alone — the whole dozen of them in Australia — to Sieg Heil to their hearts’ content in the town square or wherever, no one would care and they would remain forever in obscurity.

Instead, the state decided to make a martyr for free speech out of them.

Via Britannica (emphasis added):

Streisand effect, phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. The name derives from American singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit against a photographer in 2003, which drew attention to the photo she was suing to have taken off the Internet…
Scholars have noted that censorship often backfires when the public perceives an attempt by a powerful person or organization to repress free speech. It can incite public outrage, especially if the story involves an underdog. Moreover, attempted censorship can spur curiosity. The banning of books and websites, for instance, often drives further interest in them. People tend to want to judge for themselves what is objectionable about something that has been singled out for suppression.

Editor’s note: As we’ve painstakingly documented here, Google censorship of PJ Media is out of control.
We won’t be doing any Nazi salutes here, but nevertheless this article is likely to be flagged as “misinformation” — or hatespeech, or whatever alleged violation of constantly-changing policy — and demonetized by Google.

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