Repressive Tolerance, by Herbert Marcuse (1965): [True] tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short....
The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress.... [T]he exercise of civil rights by those who don't have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.
The forces of emancipation cannot be identified with any social class... they are hopelessly dispersed throughout the society.... More than ever, the proposition holds true that progress in freedom demands progress in the consciousness of freedom. Where the mind has been made into a subject-object of politics and policies, intellectual autonomy, the realm of 'pure' thought has become a matter of political education (or rather: counter-education).... The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values.... The tolerance which was the great achievement of the liberal era is still professed.... The altered social structure tends to weaken the effectiveness of tolerance toward dissenting and oppositional movements and to strengthen conservative and reactionary forces. Equality of tolerance becomes abstract, spurious....
[T]he idea of tolerance implies the necessity, for the dissenting group or individuals, to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent. This would be the case not only in a totalitarian society, under a dictatorship, in one-party states, but also in a democracy (representative, parliamentary, or 'direct') where the majority does not result from the development of independent thought and opinion but rather from the monopolistic or oligopolistic administration of public opinion, without terror and (normally) without censorship.... The ideology of democracy hides its lack of substance.... These conditions impose upon the radical minorities a strategy which is in essence a refusal to allow the continuous functioning of allegedly indiscriminate but in fact discriminate tolerance.... Tolerance [must] be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character... movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled.... To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.
If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail.... [A] dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative. What we have in fact is government... by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen. The record of this 'elite' is not very promising, and political prerogatives for the intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole.... Until there shall have been devised... some mode of plural voting which may assign to education as such the degree of superior influence due to it... the benefits of completely universal suffrage cannot be obtained without bringing with them, as it appears to me, more than equivalent evils....
The tolerance which is the... token of a free society... can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities... minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.
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