tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) writes:

But if it really happened, why are so many countries trying to suppress the evidence that it was all just a CIA-Mossad plot? It seems more likely that the pictures were faked, or were pictures taken of dying Germans in Russian POW camps on the Eastern Front.

Since "Holocaust" is an Operational Definition referencing Jewish experience during the Second World War, there is a clearly tautological aspect to the oft-posed question "Did the Holocaust happen?", to which the answer is obviously, a priori, and identically, "Yes", in the sense that Jews did, indeed, live during the Second World War, and some of them did indeed, like numerous other minority religous, ethnic, and political groups, have experiences which would not be described as recreational in nature. Armed with a question whose answer is true by construction, it is not very hard to correctly characterize those arguing that the answer is "false" as crackpots, and only a tiny leap from there to characterizing those who ask different and reasonable questions as having asked the Canonical Question instead and having also given the wrong answer to it. It is of course then necessary to censor the ability of the public to view the original questions, since this would not only cast aspersions upon ones credibility, but would also require that they be answered, the avoidance of which was the reason for the original exercise in misdirection. While such political tactics work well in a world with a traditional hierarchical flow of information from the Big Press to the Little Citizen-Unit, they collapse completely under the Cooperative Anarchy of the Net, and blow up in the faces of those who attempt them. The Simon Wiesenthal Center desparately needs to regroup and try to understand how the Net works, before applying its traditional methods of debate and advocacy to an environment where completely different rules apply. This is not to deny the Holocaust, or to say that the SWC doesn't have its heart in the right place. This is simply an attempt to spare them any more self-inflicted wounds.

If the Germans are suppressing attempts to get at the truth, I suspect the stories are true that the Holocaust was part of Truman's "Big Lie."

Many people are likely to think this based on the Germans behavior, and the Germans need to learn that the remedy for Hate Speech is more speech, especially in an environment as uncontrollable as the Net.

[Note: I present this as a line of thinking that is actually often the result of suppression of views. "If They are suppressing it, maybe there's some truth to it." Note also that the views of Zundel and other Holocaust Deniers are not causally related to the deaths of millions of Jews, gypsies, and others in WW II. The damage, if any, is in the "hurt feelings" and "insults" felt by survivors and their relatives.

It is interesting to note that there is no specific law prohibiting free speech for Holocaust Agnostics in Germany. The actual laws under which such cases are prosecuted are libel laws, which have been liberally interpreted to mean that one may not "libel" deceased Jews as a class or their memory in the minds of their surviving relatives. The notion of libeling a class of deceased persons strikes me as a dangerous and particularly convoluted legal fiction. (Although I certainly don't mean any disrespect for the deceased or their survivors when I say this.)

The other danger often cited, that Zundel will recruit a Fourth Reich or somesuch, is no more likely than that Jerry Falwell will recruit a New Crusade, or that J. Random Ranter will do the same. In a free and open society, we let people believe in "wrong ideas" (witness Christianity, Islam, Scientology, Judaism, and a thousand other cults).]

The solution to Mr. Zundel is the same as the solution to Archemedes (Ne Ludvig) Plutonium. Allow him complete freedom of speech to express his theories, debunk him as time permits, and if all else fails, put him in your killfile. The chances that Mr. Zundel will organize a Fourth Reich are about the same as those that Archmedes Plutonium will force us all to do our mathematics with his N-Adics. It's not something I'm going to spend a lot of time worrying about.