Weimar Republic was democracy, because WWI victors forced Germany into democracy. Weimar Republic was also failing mess, from start to end. With fights and screaming in parlament, with political murders, with attempted revolutions and with increasing violence in the streets. Germans themselves did not wanted democracy at any point. They have found loss in war humiliating and unfair.

Weimar Republic also had highly militarized civil service, comited to military values rather then to democracy.

Russian Empire was dictatorship to large extend. Not as much as communism, but it was not democracy with political freedoms. The little reforms they had were basically too little too late. There were little of such a thing as citizen right in most places. Peasants also had huge illiteracy rates.

The Russian empire was an absolute monarchy until 1905 that was definitely totalitarian by modern understanding. The subsequent semi-democratic government was ineffective.

The Russian Empire was authoritarian. It was not totalitarian under any definition of the term I’ve ever encountered. There was an extremely lively press, active intellectual life and real if toothless political opposition. It was absolutely nothing like under the Soviet boot.

> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...

Which is what is so depressing about "cancel culture" and radical redefinition of what is "hate speech". Liberals and the rational center are not defending those ideals which gave us our modern Western civilisation.

Even on this website, merely questioning the validity of some of the aspects of the politically correct zeitgeist will get your post flagged and hidden from public consumption.

Free speech as how some people like to define it now (anything can and should be said) was never an ideal, and certainly never reality.

It’s funny how the people complaining about “cancel culture” (usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore) are completely fine with twisting especially history to benefit themselves.

> usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore

As an external observer, this seems to me exactly the problem. Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say "this thing that started as a reaction to overt racism has gone too far" without people replying "that just means you're racist".

The situation has come to where there are ridiculous abuses going on, and criticizing them is anathema because the initial purpose of the system being abused was to counter a bias.

Hell, even writing this comment, meta-analyzing the situation, I'm semi-afraid will have personal impact to me, which is pretty indicative of the problem.

> Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say

A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becomes interesting for all participants. As opposed to a horrifying journey plumbing the depths of polarised discourse.

American liberals runs the social networks almost everyone uses so whenever they decide to cancel stuff the whole world gets affected. Therefore it makes sense that many people all over the world learns to hate them and their cancel culture.

> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.

Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?

Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.

Well that's kind of the issue, right? There are some things you can't talk about because if you want to talk about them, it means you're a racist that just wants to legitimize racism.

Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.