No.
As I said, totalitarian ideologies are like viruses. They wait until the society is weakened, for example by some sort of a civil strife, poor performance of the economy etc., and then they use democratic rights to destroy the democratic system.
I agree.
You like democracy, that's fine, I like it too - it's the best available system of government, but it is not flawless and it is not invulnerable.
No, it is not.
Like all systems, it needs certain conditions to work. When these conditions disappear, democracy becomes unstable and vulnerable to the long dormant totalitarian parties and groups.
That is true. That is why there are supposed to be safeguards and that is why there probably shouldn't be straight-up democracy. After all, minority rights, basic liberties and rights must be protected. That includes those of these whackjobs. There should be certain measures in place to prevent 51% from deciding to kill the other 49%.
Though, if they did somehow gain the support of a supermajority of the people, two-thirds and up, then there isn't much a constitution could do anyway compared to sheer force in that case.
Therefore, democracy must be protected. Not by taking away rights of normal citizens, but by outlawing those groups, which threaten it. Like a human body, democracy has to produce "antibodies" to fight an infection, before it spreads.
Who decides what is a threat? Yes, Nazis are an obvious answer, but how do we deal with more borderline cases if we're going to throw out the rights of people that have yet to commit a crime (based heavily on the assumption that your run-of-the-mill Nazi just decided to show up at this rally and hadn't gone out to rough up the nearest Jew)?
It can be done without making the democracy any less democratic. Simple rule would be applied: freedom of speech (and other freedoms as well) only for those who respect it. Once you abuse your freedom of speech to incite hatred or support anti-democratic ideologies, you'll be punished (by appropriate measures, I am not talking about shooting anybody who disagrees).
Again, who decides what "respecting" such freedoms would constitute? It seems that the Nazis haven't prevented people from showing up to support the residents of this community.
Now, if they overtly called for the violent overthrow of the government, you'd have a much better case and I'm presuming that there are laws about such a thing anyway. If they tried to restrict the rights of others in the area, then you'd have a much better case. But, as far as I can tell thus far, they haven't yet done either.
In fact, if you want to be real technical, the people that wanted to block the Nazis from marching down a certain area would be restricting the freedoms of the Nazis. Would they then lose their rights because they sought to deny it to this Nazi whackjob fest?
Europe has enough experience with situations, when democracies fail. You shouldn't ignore it, you should learn from it and that's what I want.
And hopefully Europe also learned what such people would bring and therefore, people wouldn't fall into supporting these nutcases they way they had previously.
