FW: Edupage 7/9/95 (fwd)

[David Mandl]

Adam Shostack <adam at bwh.harvard.edu> wrote:

> | And the nazi pages were written in english. The pages were named
> | after the author of the pages (something like 'The XY report', where
> | XY was the authors name, but I can't remember it. The author was
> | an american).
> 
> 	The Leuter report?  Leuter was a local moron who claimed to be
> an engineer.  He wrote a report claiming to prove that the gas
> chambers somewhere were too small to kill many people.

For the record: It's Leuchter, Fred Leuchter.
 
> 	The Commonwealth of Mass brought him to court several years
> ago for "practicing engineering without a license."  A good rebuttal
> of his report was written up by (I think) William McVey, in Canada.
> Ask in talk.politics.mideast, or soc.history.revisionist or something.

Ken McVay.  And dozens of other people too.  The newsgroup is
alt.revisionism.  If you've got any interest in the "holocaust
revisionism" phenomenon, it's well worth at least a brief look in
there.

Incidentally, I would say that this is one of the best uses of the
net I've ever seen.  This particular brand of neo-nazism is tricky:
in their case, it really is true that there's no such thing as bad
press.  Any exposure they get on TV, the radio, or in print media
helps their cause, because of the inherent limitations of those
media.  They can throw up smokescreens, spew out blatantly false
"facts" that sound plausible but can't be confirmed or denied then
and there, put on the "we're just skeptics who feel that these
questions need to answered even though they're controversial" act,
etc.  Very difficult to counter, given the strict limitations on
time and resources of live broadcasts.

But on the net, where claims can be researched and repudiated and
responses "broadcast" almost immediately, and where people have all
the time in the world to debate these issues, these guys get
absolutely trounced every day.  They make a claim, it gets blown to
smithereens instantly by a dozen people with access to university
libraries and scanned photos, and the revisionists crawl away for a
while.  Then they come back a month later and start again.  It gets
kind of old after a while, but's fascinating to see (especially for
those naive young people to whom the revisionists seem "reasonable").

Even for a part-time Luddite like me, this is an excellent
demonstration of how the net is in many ways fundamentally different
from traditional print and broadcast media.

> 	I have no idea why this thread is still on cypherpunks, unless
> its an experiment in text stego.

Well, I hope my little digression above is at least slightly relevant.

   --Dave.
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