From: mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 06:25:44 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: The Big Lie
In-Reply-To: <ad311df817021004e4bb@[205.199.118.202]>
Message-ID: <199601282156.NAA09063@netcom4.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.