I hope you can keep “de-lurking”! I think you’ve expressed my point of view on this issue very well.

The idea of denying Hitler’s Final Solution is to me ridiculous and flies in the face of overwhelming evidence. Yet I also find it offensive that the very freedoms for which that gallant generation fought and died are now being suppressed and opinions silenced by those who misguidedly think we cannot make judgements of our own and must be protected from all dissent.

I do not agree with David Irving if he says that the Final Solution never happened, but surely if he was not being vilified by various bodies including the German government then no-one would ever have heard of him!

I do also think that historians have a right, indeed a duty, to question and revise history continuously. Voltaire had the right of it.

The price for freedom of speech is that sometimes…yes…we actually have to listen to things we may not only disagree with but outright detest.

These interpretations were determined 170 years ago, through the American Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution, and have remained relatively intact since those times, while surviving many challenges throughout the centuries.

I don’t believe in the suppression of information, but selective highlighting of such forms of speech that otherwise would be considered in the light of those three instances certainly wouldn’t hurt.

If the media could stop creating media frenzies around these hatemonger’s/historical revisionist’s actions their misguided agenda would not be so freely disseminated to a new generation of the uninformed public that weren’t there and may not have access to real information.

Before, there were official releases of information, and there was individual or small groups of people that had a dissenting opinion. This created quite a problem if the small group was in the right, as the official position could be used to override the dissenting group.

The internet/24/7 media and ability to speak to the public in general directly has changed that “monopoly” on information and our society is generally “better off” because of it. However, the downside is that every interest and viewpoint has the equal ability to throw it’s viewpoint into the ring. Now instead of being able to trust 3 or 4 sources of information as being a solid component of reality, you now need to process 20 to 30 sources of dissenting information and weave together the truth of the situation while weighting each component with monetary involvement, political bias, media viewpoint, nationalistic fervor and other factors.

A good analyst searching for truth can use this information to find the truth much easier and make a much more detailed analysis of the information, but a motivated supporter/evangalist can cherrypick the data and slant the information to produce a hodgepodge of wrong information.
Thus to be an informed participant you must be much more committed to the process.

If the media would focus its attention on the best information instead of the salacious/spurious allegations of these rabblerousers, then the flow of information would become easier to navigate, while these people who write obfuscating/spurious/inciteful materials would remain isolated, as they have been in the past.

As for the law coming into “suppress” information, it would have to act judiciously with only direct violations of the established limits of speech being punished after a thorough review of the materials in a proper legal setting. The terrible thing is that the writers of this material often incite people to commit violence, and the writers claim no responsibility for the resultant actions that were called for by their logic of hate. The legal system has it’s hands tied and can only respond to existing allegations of criminal actions. This makes for a freer society, but many, many people have been harmed/killed before the response of the legal system changes the situation on what is legal, and what response against individuals can be taken by society.

I must have seen it as a rerun, as I am too young to have possibly remembered this episode in it’s original airing, but I knew I had seen the episode you were referring to. It was so shocking to see that, even in a fictional setting, that someone would actively believe that the “final solution” was the “right” thing to do.

However, I think yesterday’s “duelling” Presidential and former Vice Presidential addresses about the Guantanamo Prison Camp, were much more shocking, because it was apparent that the former Vice-President really believed that the torture and indefinite imprisonment of these people without right to trial was helping to keep the US safe, and would do it again.

It is such a small step from:
All of the detainees were associated with known terrorist groups, and would have been a threat to the country.
to:
All of the detainees were thought to be associated with terroristic ideas, and could have been a threat to the country in the future.

That difference in phrasing is literally how close the US came to establishing a regime that could then persue actions that history shows, did lead to events of wide spread imprisonment/torture/death that happened in Germany, Armenia, Rwanda, China, Congo, Russia, the Czech republic, Bosnia, Kampuchea and other countries at various times in the last 100 years.
In fact the detainment of Japanese Americans was the last time that such thoughts in America were prominent. Fortunately our internment camps back then didn’t turn into either the Guantanamo, nor the Nazi equivalents, but they could have easily turned into them, which is why such belief in “total war” is such a pervasively harmful one.

@Sachiko
You are right, that without representation, claims go unchallenged leading some who value the speaker’s position to possibly follow that person’s lead.
In the case of the Iranian President, here you have the head of a country (with a proven track record of anti-Israeli sentiment) speaking about an Israeli conspiracy to cover up “racism” because of their “power & control” of the Northern European, North American and Australian continental population and governmental ideologies.
Since I had trouble actually typing this summarized version of the conspiracy without several facepalming moments, I could see right away that anyone who would be inclined to believe such a claim as the one made by the Iranian President would be certainly swayed by a swift and coherent rebuttal by several representatives from those “cowed and controlled” continents.
Um, no. The conspiracy believers would just say, “See the Western representative’s response confirms the Iranian President’s claims, as those Western representatives said exactly what the Iranian President said they would say!”
As to those, who are uneducated, or on the fence about those issues, and actually care enough to be swayed either way, they could probably be inclined enough to be bothered to read a newspaper or search some other information source, to find out enough about the situation to realize the claims made by the Iranian President were outrageous and unsubstantiated, unless of course the person was in one of the countries that doesn’t have a free press. In that case, the other side of the issue wouldn’t have been reported anyway, and any logical outcome would be impossible to achieve, as there is no analysis possible by interested parties who can’t get access to both sides of the issue.

Again, I am requesting some data that shows that individuals who are open minded and have access to both sides of an issue will be willing to believe a single unrefuted statement by anyone, if the spotlight isn’t given to them by the media because of their “notorious/outrageous” beliefs.

Does anyone at the funerals of soldiers believe the Westboro Baptist Church’s wild claims that gays are the reason that American soldiers are dying in Iraq or the Televangelist Jerry Falwell’s claims that hurricanes strike America because we acknowledge gay people’s right not to be killed in the street?

Do these need to be publicly disputed too, every time these people go and picket a soldier’s funeral or when Jerry Falwell goes on TV?

a. The holocaust denier recanting his position.
b. The news media not making a huge deal about whatever event that the holocaust denier was involved with, thus making the person known.

When I search for “holocaust denier reversals” All I ever get are “Apology, but no recantment” stories.

here are a few:
2/26/2009
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/02/26/holocaust.bishop/index.html
5/12/2009
http://www.mis-asia.com/cio_focus/leadership__and__management/facebook-dances-around-holocaust-controversy
1998
http://books.google.com/books?id=kiBHkRtRmIIC&pg=PA217&lpg=PA217&dq=holocaust+denier+reversals

Again if the fringe idea of society were to be less focussed on (regardless if they are on the fringe for good reason or for bad reasons), these people would have no entrance to the mainstream to make their ideas center stage of debates. If the media and everyone else had left Intelligent Design where it should have stayed (out of the limelight), it would have faded away like most other minor fringe religious movements, but because we have recognized it, reported, it constantly gets revived as an “important issue of contention” even though it has no validity. These people should be monitored, but ignored until they do something that crosses the line of legal action, and then they should be properly dealt with, as fits the legal infraction.

Again I am looking for some evidence that the confrontation of these deniers/religious zealots/etc. actually leads to changes in belief and a recantment of their former behavior.
I have seen plenty of the reverse happen, where people who didn’t at first believe the fringe idea, become believers as a result of media coverage getting them interested in the idea in the first place.
However, I have not personally encountered a person who was willing to change his belief of a non-rational subject, unless that person was already beginning to question their belief in the first place because of an internal disconnect from that belief that had affected them previously. I hate to be categorical, as I cannot say I have searched everything, but I have not found any evidence that non-rationale based beliefs can be changed by rational debate because it is a “belief” normally unprovable, and as such becomes so personal that they will defend it to irrationale levels of obstinance.

Sachiko, please present some evidence for your statement that publicly debating non-rational based view points leads to the non-rational beliefs being forgotten or put aside. I have an open mind, and am willing to consider the concept, but as of yet, there is very little that suggests it works.