Here's my answer. I've watched the criticism of John over the last five years, and tried to make sense of the outrage that has grown against him. https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1286611172125540354

I have also, in that time, moved to Poland, a country that was occupied and decimated by Nazis during the Second World War, leading to the clinical extermination of millions of Jews, Poles, Romany and other "undesirables".

I've visited Auschwitz and seen the wall which took the bullets where the first concentration camp victims were shot. I've seen the early makeshift gas chambers where the Nazis refined their killing process and experimented with Zyklon B.

I've seen the quarters these people had to live in like animals whilst they awaited an unknown fate. I've seen how these early prototypes were scaled up to murder on a massive scale, and to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

I've read about the experimentation that Josef Mengele carried out with crazed passion on his victims; how he would remove victims' organs without anesthetic; how he sewed the skin of identical twins together back-to-back, to recreate "conjoined twins" out of "curiosity".

I've visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and seen the impact this genocide had on a nation created so that the Jewish people might be able to have an existence without being persecuted, while Europe and the rest of the world largely failed to provide any sanctuary.

I've read some of the endless lists of names of the victims there, each one a human being with their own hopes, loves, dreams and desires destroyed en masse, without troubling for a moment the Nazis who carried out the crimes.

I've talked to @BartoszMilewski, who is from Oświęcim, about what it was like growing up in the shadow of that godawful deathcamp in the 1950s and 60s.

And meanwhile, I've watched you to do your best to associate @jdegoes with those people. You've done your best to paint the rest of the Scala community as complicit in the acceptance of Naziism. And it's ridiculous.

Nobody in the Scala community believes that those utterly egregious actions of the Third Reich were worthy of apology. Nobody. I know that nobody could accept anyone who accepts that.

But there are a lot of people who have different opinions on the best ways to avoid anything like that happening again, and a lot of those people believe that extreme opinions are best defeated by being held up to scrutiny, rather than suppressed to fester in secret.

And it is completely reasonable for people to disagree about the best way of overcoming prejudice, and nobody should fear for their credibility by coming out on one side or another of this debate. Whereas you want to silence everyone who doesn't agree with you.

I want to defeat extreme right-wing political groups too. But I'm also not so deluded as to believe that an obsessive four-year witch-hunt is good use of anyone's time. It's been a huge waste of my time.

Your profile says "I'm not one of the Nazi apologists", which has always seemed like an attempt to paint significant swathes of the community as somehow accepting of the Nazis' historical atrocities. If you think @johndegoes is one of those people, you're the one in Fantasyland.

So, what do I think of John de Goes resorting to legal avenues to protect himself and his family from being called white supremacists or Nazis by you? I think a court of law where justice seeks to be applied consistently, is a much better place to do that than Twitter.