WARNING: This message contains Bad Thoughts. The Surgeon General has determined that Bad Thoughts cause Critical Thinking, which may be illegal in Canada, Germany, and other countries too numerous to mention. I just visited the Ernst Zundel Webcom page, which given the number of server overload errors I experienced trying to browse it, is now the Numero Uno Web Site on the entire Internet, thanks to some anonymous and largely clueless official running telecommunications services for the former Third Reich. Like most sites run by "Infamous Holocaust Deniers", this one was largely unimpressive, and would have garnered little attention from anyone were it not for the noisy public villification lavished upon it by its detractors. After the furor this site is alleged to have percipitated, I fully expected to see pictures of skinheads with explosives and automatic weapons holding up pictures of Nazi atrocities and libelous screeds blaming the Jews for all the misfortunes of mankind. You can imagine my surprise when I found only a few rather simplistic historical questions, and that Mr. Zundel had even included links to rebuttals of his points contained within the Simon Wiesenthal Center's own Web Pages. All of this might have gone completely unnoticed by the majority of humankind, or have been the subject of dry boring debates at occasional universities, were the topic not constantly dragged into the public eye by stories about anti-free speech laws, shrill cries by organizations like the SWC for censoring the entire Internet, and officials who summarily unplug major chunks of the Net and disrupt legitimate business while trying to stuff a sock into the mouth of some individual whose views they find embarrassing. In doing this, the Speech Nazis, the Wiesenthalistas, and the Clueless Bureaucrats have drawn more attention to the views of people like Mr. Zundel than he ever could have on his own, and have alienated many of the people who would cheerfully have argued against Mr. Zundel on their behalf. This goes beyond simple stupidity, and clearly approaches the lobotomy level of impaired mental functioning. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $