Risky
Freedom is risky business; when I let my little boy cross the street alone for the first time, I am letting him risk his life, but unless I do he will grow up unable to cross the street alone. For the American Occupation to have chosen freedom for the post-Nazi Germans would have been dangerous; even my anti-Nazi friends, so thoroughly German were they, were opposed to freedom of speech, press, and assembly for the "neo-Nazis." But it was the fear of freedom, with all its dangers, that got the Germans into trouble in the first place. When the Americans decided that they could not "afford" freedom for the Germans, they were deciding that Hitler was right.
Free inquiry on a free platform is the only practice that distinguishes a free from a slave society; and, if the post-Nazi Germans needed force, they needed it for the one purpose it had never been used for in Germany, namely, to keep the platform free. What they needed was the town meeting, the cracker barrel to see, to hear, and at last to join the war on the totalitarianism in their own hearts.
What they needed was not the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls but the Sunday afternoon forum in Bughouse Square and the thunderous cry of American authority: "Let 'im talk, let 'im talk."
-Milton Mayer,
"They Thought They Were Free"