Dunno, seems tricky.

If we equate keyboard warriors with the people who actually commit atrocities, we're in a sense lowering the severity of those atrocities to be equal to being a sad edge lord.

Spreading ideas on the internet is spreading ideas to other meat sponges. I wouldn't consider most of the mass shooters of the past decade to be anything more than sad edge lords, but they've ended a ton of lives and ruined far more. Most skinheads are in loosely organized groups, not American History X or Sons of Anarchy with massive financial backing and tight-knit organization.

People have ideas, ideas don't have people.

If it was true that merely being exposed to an idea had the ability to take over and control a person like a mindless puppet, then democracy would simply not work, instead the only viable option would be strict control over thoughts and communication prevent harmful ideas from taking over peoples minds.

read about "radio milles collines" for something relatively recent

Rabble rousing is a different thing.

There's numerous examples of people being stirred into violent mobs over such things as the wrong person being considered for papacy.

e.g.

http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/SV1378.html

http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/SV1484.html

The ones who actually commit atrocities always start out as edgelords.

I'm not sure how I would even begin to verify that, but even taking it as true, it's necessary but not sufficient, but so is being a human being.

Edgelords always start out as babies, so … babies commit atrocities. Where does that get us?

I'd agree here and I think there's a big flaw in how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers.

Generally a high-school level of history (assuming you're paying the normal level of attention) leaves you with the impression that Germans got sad and mad and poor because of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the 'German martial spirit' or something and then Hitler appeared out of nowhere to do bad stuff.

Reading "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans was eye-opening in this regard. The Nazis did nothing more than tie together several existing culturally accepted themes more successfully than other fringe groups in Weimar politics. The swastika as a far-right symbol wasn't even 'invented' by them.

The Nazis to some extent were incidental, or didn't represent a step-change from the thoughts, politics and speech that were already circulating broadly in pre-Nazi society. This is what free-speech primacists seem to neglect. The Nazi ideology didn't arise from nowhere, death camps weren't the start, they were the end of 30 plus years of increasing acceptability and propagation of far-right ideas (stab in the back myths, casual and scientific anti-Semitism, anti-communist and anti-left propaganda, mainstream scientific eugenics, etc).

> how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers.

By placing the word _victorious_ in quotes, you clearly have some alternative viewpoint about military victory in mind. Given that Germany tendered its unconditional surrender to the Allied forces in Europe, I don’t see how that’s in question; but maybe I’m missing your point.

I think he means to include places like Denmark, France, Norway and other nations that weren't militarily victorious but for whom post-ww2 regime change was a reversion of what had been implemented by Nazi Germany and who generally teach that period of history the same way Britain and the US do.