Streets of your town

Whose town?

Before society can be free, it must be.

—Raymond Aron

It is hard not to feel heartsick watching a bunch of neo-Nazis marching around our cities and towns, as they did on the weekend. Whether their performance achieved anything positive for their cause is doubtful, but even if all they are doing is preaching to the converted rather than recruiting new supporters, you still hate to see them out there.

Benjamin Roubaud's “The Grand March of Posterity” (1840). Here we see Eugène Scribe (left) leading a procession of vaudevillistes (right), including Michel Masson and Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort.

I’m inclined to err on the side that says such protests should be allowed rather than somehow banned, but I think we need to be careful. Liberal-democratic tolerance is not a suicide note and Goebbels comment from a 1928 article he wrote for the Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff, is always worth bearing in mind: “We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its ow…