The nazis did some things during world war 2 that perhaps lost them the label “human.” I don’t have the emotional vigour this morning to make a list of the atrocities but one that doesn’t get mentioned often was a literal war of extermination against the “sub-human” Slavic peoples. Dan Carlin did a disturbing series on the war in the east.

The question is what sort of nazis these people are or wish to be. Are they passive but ignorant supporters, or do they want to make an army to kill tens of millions based on their race? The term is too broad

I understand the historical significance. I was born to a Jewish father and a Russian mother in Belarus, a country that was the first ussr republic to be invaded and had more than 25% of its population die (as you mentioned, many of them were Slavic). I’ve been on trips to many villages that were exterminated and burned down for helping the partisan. The wounds of that war run deep and the horrors are well remembered and taught to the new generations.

On my dads side most of his family was killed by the nazis and while he was only 4 when the war started he remembers Minsk burning and the horrors that followed, especially towards the end as he was older. My paternal grandfather (also Jewish), fought in wwii starting from day 3 of the invasion of ussr all the way until nazis got pushed out of Poland (and a miracle of survival since most of red army in Belarus was wiped out quickly).

As you can imagine, I am no friend of the Nazis.

At the same time I’m now a US citizen, and one thing I internalized about my adopted homeland is that America is this weird place where everyone can have a voice. It doesn’t mean we need to amplify all voices, such as nazi voices, but I do think that it is very important to allow meaningful expression of all sides, even when it is despicable and uncomfortable.

Only when nothing is taboo can people truly speak their mind and change narrative. When things are not hidden in subcontext but rather spoken out openly.

I do not mourn loss of nazi voices, but I am worried about it being ok to silence anyone. Especially at infrastructure/carrier level. I believe that if one doesn’t like platform rules they should move/make their own, but if the very infra of internet prevents you, that’s really bad. You can’t say “don’t like our rules then make your own internet.” This goes beyond simply not amplifying the voices (such as the justified Twitter/fb bans), and into total suppression.

> Oppressing Nazis is still oppressive, nazis are people too.

But choosing not to associate with Nazis isn't oppressing them.

And that’s why I think the Twitter/fb bans are ok. But common infra and monopolistic stores are not. Store, esp apple store, is more of a utility. There are no alternatives.

> There are no alternatives.

The alternative is to not use iOS-based devices, which seems like a pretty good idea all around from a transparency avenue (and like I've said before on this site, like the broken record I am: transparency is a dependency of trust). That's exactly Librem's argument, and it's a compelling one: you have no control over the device or visibility into the software running on it, so how can you trust it to be operating for your benefit instead of that of some third party?

Even Android devices typically allow sideloading, and quite a few even support custom ROMs. That is: even devices with software maintained by a literal ad company are more transparent - and therefore more trustworthy, even if only marginally - than any iPhone or iPad.

But your argument isn't really meaningful to majority of phone users -- they are not sophisticated enough to do side loadings or installing custom ROMs or using poorly supported stacks. What they do need is reliable phone that does things that they need them to do, and there is no real alternative for this case. It's why Linux desktop is still not a real alternative to Windows desktop (and I say this as someone who runs linux at home and professionally writes code that runs on linux servers).