Frosku 
Vox Exercitus
Principle seems to be an idea which is rapidly vanishing from public discourse. By painting the debate as “pro-Nazi” vs “anti-Nazi”, the insinuation is that anyone who doesn’t want to see Aryanne or other edgy OCs banned agrees with Nazi ideology. The reality is that the vast majority of us actually aren’t Nazis – we aren’t the ones calling for book burning, after all – we’re concerned pony fans who:
- understand that freedom of expression exists specifically to protect that speech which is most offensive (you don’t need to protect free speech for popular opinions);
- opine that the primary purpose of Derpibooru is to serve as an archive of pony art (deleting things from an archive seems like a weird thing to do); and
- understand that the woke mob will not stop at Aryanne, Trump hats and Confederate flags will be next.
This goes far beyond Derpibooru. We, as a people, stand at a crossroads between the ideas of Voltaire, Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky – “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – and the ideals of Trigglypuff. I implore the staff to head up a full-throated defense, not of Aryanne or Nazism or hate, but of the principle of free expression which founded liberal democracy, and against the censorious ideals of theocracies, totalitarian dictatorships, and lynch mobs throughout history.
The debate, therefore, is between people in favor of Derpibooru remaining – as it always has – as an archive of the history of pony artwork, and people in favor of Derpibooru becoming a political platform for their opinions exclusively. Librarians vs book burners.
In 2020, you can still buy a copy of Mein Kampf – the actual text that founded Hitler’s Nazism. You can also buy books written by Stalin, Marx, Pinochet, and all other manner of terrible people preaching terrible ideologies. It would seem to me that those books have a significant amount more potential to cause people to adopt hateful and violent ideologies than a candy-colored pony who wouldn’t be too far out of place in an episode of South Park. As far as I know, there are zero recorded incidents of anyone seeing even the most offensive depictions of Aryanne and deciding to sign up on the Daily Stormer or stock up on Zyklon B.
From my (admittedly limited, as I have the tag blocked) experiences of comments on Aryanne threads, most of them are full of edgy humor. Edgy humor may not be your thing, but enjoying darker jokes doesn’t make someone a Nazi. I’m a Jew, some of the most offensive holocaust and Jew stereotype jokes I’ve heard were from other Jews. Most of us know not to take ourselves or the world so seriously as to assume that humor and memeing are hateful in intent. Mainstream TV shows like American Dad, Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons etc have depicted discrimination by empathetic characters, that doesn’t mean the writers are in favor of it.
It’s also important to understand global differences in culture. In Japan, for example, it’s not that uncommon to have empathetic Nazi characters – Schrodinger from Hellsing is the most obvious example. The Internet (and therefore Derpibooru) is global, and to enforce western norms of what is and isn’t acceptable in artistic expression – when even the west doesn’t agree on those norms – on a global community makes no sense.
So, I ask you, do you honestly believe the average person who consumes art of Aryanne is a Nazi or sympathetic to National Socialism?
