BartSimpson wrote:
Unfortunately, the people who defend the Holocaust have actually brought this about on their own. Anyone who questions details about the Holocaust is called a "denier" and is hustled off to jail in most countries, Canada included.
Bart,
Out and out horseshit. Name the person in Canada convicted of denying the holocaust and being hustled off to jail, let alone "most countries".
If you're referring to Germany and Switzerland, they have a unique social perspective on the front. Do you deny them that?
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We debate history on this board all the time but dare ye not question things such as where the rendering plants were at the death camps that turned Jews into soap? (Hint: they never existed and no website ANYWHERE lists a rendering plant at any camp yet you'll get a jail sentence in Canada for bringing this up).
Again, no you won't. Barty, I don't think you understand free speech and how it relates to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, nor Canada's hate laws. Besides, if the best source you have on the holocaust are goddamn INTERNET sites, you should just quit before you go any further. Even Ernst Zundel was acquited of spreading false news by the Supreme Court in August, 1992 for his reprinting of a pamphlet denouncing the holocaust. Furthermore, pressure from groups on the OPP to arrest and charge Zundel for S.319 crimes was ignored.
You are simply fucking wrong.
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The German courts prosecute people who popint out that the gas chambers at Auschwicz and various other camps are actually "reconstructions" that were built after the war and not the originals.
I simply do not believe you on this point.
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A German judge said, when confronted with facts to support this, that the truth was not the issue on trial, it was that the accused had spoken against the official account of the Holocaust and had therefore committed a hate crime.
Please, post a link.
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Just myself, but I don't see why the Holocaust cannot be debated in the same way we debate other aspects of history such as Pearl Harbor, The War of the Roses, & etc.
Because in the past 50 years there has been absolutely zilch in terms of anything which substantively overturns the historical narrative on the holocaust. You can opine about Pearl Harbour, but who is debating what about it? Aside from kooks droning on about Seaman Z and other such conspiratorial nonsense, there IS no "debate" about Pearl Harbour. What, maybe it was the Brazillians what did the bombing?
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Once on Free Republic I posted a fake, 100% made-up story about a family that lost some of their members at the Saschen-Bergdahl transportation camp. I included obviously fake details such as the Russians being armed with AK-47's when they liberated the camp, the Americans dropping supplies on the camp from B-47's and accidentally killing some of the inmates, and that the camp was located in the German state of Bornholm (which is actually a Danish island).
No one questioned it.
Yippee shit. An undocumented personal anecdote is not evidence of anything.
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Now let me admonish you and anyone reading this that I am not a denier!
I agree. Talking about the holocaust does not a denier make.
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What I want to see is the Holocaust being discussed and challenged just like any other aspect of history. If it becomes a taboo to challenge the history of it then, like all taboos, it will eventually be dismissed by future generations as a myth of some sort. Tomorrow's teenagers may even find it fashionable to irk their parents by being deniers.
But challenge it with what? Who is doing the challenging? David Irving, twit extrodinaire, failed historian and proven fraud? Zundel? The reason that there are no debates occurring regarding the holocaust in proper academic realms (read: not unread goofs on the internet) is that there is nothing substantive to debate.
To simply state that one disbelieves something and needs to have it established as true before one will believe it is childish, anti-academic and a worthless endeavour.
When a person can produce a lengthy bibliography of academic books written by accredited historians and THEN produce serious challenges to the accepted narrative, I'll listen.
Dicks who surf wikipedia and stormfront.org do not count among their ranks.
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Currently there is no academic discussion of the Holocaust past parroting accepted ideas about it. No one challenges facts about the Holocaust at universities the same way they readily challenge accepted facts about past wars, the Crusades, the French & Indian Wars, and etc.
Thus, in the utter absence of legitimate academic debate about Holocaust facts academia itself ends up having no legitimacy on the subject and that makes things like what the Iranians are doing completely possible and inevitable.
I refuted this above in terms of universities. Read a news story or two about the Iranian president. He's attacking the holocaust to undermine the legitimacy of Israel. It has zip to do with a lack of academic debate in universities.
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The Holocaust will not gain acceptance if critics are silenced by government persecution. Far from it. The act of persecution causes the deniers to grow in strength and numbers because if governments must silence them then the natural conclusion is to wonder why?
Then these people are idiots.
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If the Canadian government locked up anyone challenging the official version of the Sponsorship scandal you'd wonder what they're hiding, wouldn't you?
And if the Sponsorship scandal were equitable to the slaughter of millions of Jewish people, you still wouldn't have a point.
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Even though the hate speech laws mean well, they are having the precise effect of making the deniers seem legitimate in circles such as in Iran and Russia.
Again, show somebody who has been convicted of "hate speech" and not for something else specific. French courts have convicted people under laws which make it a crime to denounce crimes against humanity, but it's not "hate speech." I don't think you have a handle on what hate speech is or isn't.
Hate speech is not equitable to unpopular speech.
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Free discussion by the deniers (coupled with free mockery of them by other people) would do more damage to them than persecuting them does.
Persecuting them has created martyrs and that's not a productive thing to do if you really want to silence a movement.
I agree with your first point, but it goes too far. By engaging deniers in debate, you grant them legitimacy. NASA doesn't hold public debates for those who want to challenge them that Venus is made of juicy spare-ribs simply because there isn't any real challenge.
I don't agree that uneducated anti-semites need to have their time in the spotlight. Ignoring them and challenging them seem to be the best way. Why give them any sort of quarter at all?
Your overall comment needs to be addressed. You do not allow yourself to even consider that *accepted* details about the Holocaust may not be true. And I am not trying to engage a debate myself about the here nor there of those details. I am pointing out that anyone who challenges those details is met by people such as yourself who vent their fury upon anyone who dares question, nay, anyone who dares to ALLOW a question about their accepted point of view.
of the Holocaust.
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