You learn something new every day

[El Vez]

What did you learn today?

Today I learned that Mel Gibson is going to make a tv miniseries about the Holocaust. Considering his father's batshit insane views on that subject, I can't help but wonder if the film is going to be eight hours of a blank screen.

[A rope leash]

Holocaust denial is now a crime. Ernst Zundel is currently being tried in Germany after being extridited from Canada. Four other revisionist historians have been charged and are being prosecuted in a similar fashion.

It is literally against the law to say that it didn't happen. You can say you saw Elvis, or that you were abducted by aliens, but you can't say the Nazis didn't exterminate Jews.

I don't know what the truth is in the case of the holocaust, but I know that part of war is the victor writing the history of it. Jews were killed by Nazis, as were homosexuals and athiests, and many Armenians and Tutsis and Native Americans have been genocided, but it's okay to talk about that.

My assumption is that the law is designed to protect Jews from bigotry and hatred, and to keep other folks, (in this case mostly Christians and atheists), from being inflamed by so-called anti-Semetic political rhetoric. But, it would seem logical that the truth would not need a law to support it, as is apparently the case with the other grand genocides of history, so why not let free speech prevail, and why can't we have a good examination of the facts?

Most revisionists do not dispute the genocide of Jews by the Nazis, they mainly challenge the number of persons mass murdered in gas chambers. Let them talk, and prove them wrong. Throwing them in jail is chickenshit, and if Mel Gibon's dad is publically denying the holocaust, he had better watch his ass, or he's going to get sent to a German prison.

El Vez, I'd love to know Mel Gibson's views on the holocaust, and I think they should give Joe Pesci a shot in the film as visiting Italian general.

[miss buenos aires]

I learned that the Spansih word for "handstand" is "vertical."

I also learned that I can count on my little nose to wake me up in case of a huge fire. (Not in my apartment, thank God.)

[Mike Boom]

I learned it gets fucking cold in Texas.

[selfmademug]

Holocaust denial is now a crime.

In Germany, please let's specify. I'm not saying you don't have a point, but it's Germany's goverment/legal system, etc. It's not like the place has ever billed itself as the Land of the Free, so there's not the kind of hypocracy you're suggesting. Which ain't to say there's not hypocracy in it, believe me! As far as I know, you can still be brought in for questioning in Bavaria SIMPLY for being homosexual. All I'm sayin' is, if I were going to remake German laws and attitudes, the bit about arresting conspiratorial racists wouldn't be in the top ten on my to-do list.

Hey, and welcome back!!

[alexv]

I learned that to get an Apple employee to look at your IMini to see if the battery is a piece of shit you have to make an appointment through their web site and that the appointment must be made on the very day you will bring the Imini in. What a world!!

[alexv]

Rope Leash, the "revisionist historian" you cite, Zuendel, was extradited from Canada, and wrote a book called "The Hitler We Loved and Why". He has also been quoted as saying that Hitler was a "decent and very peaceful person". He claims the Holocaust was a Jewish plot to extort money from post-war Germany. Not much of a historian, in my book, more like a hate-filled propagandist for anti-semitic views.

In general, the prosecution of anti-semitic propaganda published under the guise of "holocaust scholarship" is not a recent thing in Germany. Nor should people be surprised. Germany has special reasons to make sure that speech is not allowed to be used, again, to defame and endanger a group of people who suffered so disproportionately during WWII. I suspect they equate the kind of garbage spewed by these racists in the same way we view those who scream fire in a crowded theater. It endangers a specific, and vulnerable group of people, and thus is unprotected speech and punishable.

[mood swung]

rope, it might interest you to know that Zundel was deported to Canada from that beautiful vacation resort, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I don't know why we didn't deport him to Germany. That is something I would like to learn.

[A rope leash]

Zundel is an American citizen as far as I know. Certain treaties we have with Germany allow him to be shipped there for prosecution. That's what is happening to other revisionists. It doesn't matter where you live.

It doesn't matter what he says, or if he's a legitmate historian. As an American, he can say anything he wants, supposedly.

Similar legislation nearly passed in our Congress recently, spurred on by our own Ed Kennedy. It's like drugs people...a law won't shut them up, it will only make them louder.

[Otis Westinghouse]

I learned a lot about Cuba today. A colleague/friend has just been, two of them, in fact, and I looked at her lovely photos. Lots of stunning and very green landscape and vegetation, beautiful views everywhere, great colonial architecture. I tried not to look too interested in the sight of my two colleagues in their bikinis. Nice hummingbird and iguana shots too. I know have many images of Cuba beyond the ones of Havana that are very familiar, e.g. from Buena Vista film.

[noiseradio]

Rope,

My next door neighbors growing up were Auschwitz survivors. They're pretty sure it happened. And since most of their family members and most everyone they knew who was Jewish in Poland died in the gas chambers and ovens, they're pretty sure the number (6 million Jews, 6 million combined others) is accurate. You can say whatever you want, but you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. I haven't read Zundel's book, so I won't accuse him of anything. But perhaps there's more to what he wrote than merely questioning the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Maybe he actually broke the law. Being a US citizen doesn't make you imune to prosecution in other countries when you break their laws. There are plenty of non-US citizens in US prisons.

[noiseradio]

I learned that Echo & the Bunnymen have a new album out and that it sounds pretty promising.

[mood swung]

I am going to state at the outset that I am the least qualified person to pose these questions.

but

Zundel was NOT an american citizen as far as I can tell - hence the deportation. His wife is naturalized citizen.

my question, again, why didn't the U.S. deport him to Germany?

[alexv]

Otis, Cuba has always been a beautiful Caribbean island, although I am not an unbiased observer. There's a great Cuban writer, who I think has lived in England for almost 40 years, his name is Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and he wrote a book (I think you speak spanish) called: La Habana de un Infante Disfunto (translated as "Infante's Inferno"). I recommend it for a great (and hysterically funny) presentation of pre-Castro Cuba in all its tawdry beauty. Present day Cuba is of course a hell-hole for native Cubans, with only tawdriness and no beauty. It's different for tourists.

[anjabro]

I don't know much about this Zundel guy, other than what I've just read, but he sounds a bit like our own David Irving, 'Historian ' and darling of the BNP here in UK... He's about to spend Christmas in an Austrian jail after being arrested on Holocaust Denial charges ; Just to give you an idea...


QUOTE...

"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz."

He went on, "Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS."

...END QUOTE

What a lovely chap...

[Otis Westinghouse]

Otis, Cuba has always been a beautiful Caribbean island, although I am not an unbiased observer. There's a great Cuban writer, who I think has lived in England for almost 40 years, his name is Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and he wrote a book (I think you speak spanish) called: La Habana de un Infante Disfunto (translated as "Infante's Inferno"). I recommend it for a great (and hysterically funny) presentation of pre-Castro Cuba in all its tawdry beauty. Present day Cuba is of course a hell-hole for native Cubans, with only tawdriness and no beauty. It's different for tourists.

Ta, GCI's name is familiar from my days in Spain, but sadly and typically, his English residence goes unmentioned. I'm out of the habit of reading Spanish, but of course can. The hell-hole of economic/political life doesn't diminish the beauty of their native island, surely? Of course it's different for tourists, but presumably you would endorse the help they give the economy, especially if they're travelling around staying in fairly basic places and meeting locals rather than sitting in a 5-star compound all the time. they had some great experiences, including a dinner in secret in near darkness in a private restaurant on a hill-side, and a piss-up in a bar (in somewhere pronounced like 'come-away-a' - 'camahueia' or the like?) where a local woman was so pissed she puked on the table, swept it to the floor and then carried on drinking!

[Otis Westinghouse]

I learned that Echo & the Bunnymen have a new album out and that it sounds pretty promising.

Not at all bad. Predictable, but something of a return to form.

[A rope leash]

I learned once again today that free speech cannot be defended, because some are more equal than others.

Denying the holocaust is not the same as shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater causes immediate panic. Denying the holocaust makes the denyer look suspicious, and that's about it.

Perhaps what Zundel and Irving have been saying is rude, wrong, or bigoted...but if there is a law against that, then most of us would be in jail. I'm not saying that the holocaust didn't happen, my father said it did and he was there during WWII. All I'm saying is that if someone said it didn't, or that it didn't happen the way they said it did, then let them prove it...don't prosecute them for simply saying it.

History is not science. Only the folks who were actually present at the time really know. When it comes to war, truth is the first casualty, so why would anyone trust the official "history" of any war? Just because we were taught that a certain event went down a certain way doesn't mean we got the whole truth, or even the truth at all...look at the Gulf of Tonkin event and what we know about it now.

There's a lot about these holocaust denyers at http://www.rense.com.

[A rope leash]

Looks like there are a few holocaust denyers of the Islamic persuasion, as well...

http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArtic ... INEJAD.xml

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051208/wl ... 1208164944

[noiseradio]

My point with the crowded theater chestnut was just to say that we don't protect all speech. In some circumstances, speech can inflict harm, and (to pile the cliches on) your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. I don't know the specifics of the charge against Zundel. I'm just saying it's possible that what he wrote was worse than mere speculation that the Holocaust didn't happen. Perhaps what he wrote in some way constituted a verbal assault. Perhaps his words actually inflicted harm. You can go to jail for threatening someone verbally. Maybe some part of his writing is legally comparable to a verbal threat. I don't know. But unless you've read his book, you don't know either. It's a mistake to assume his 1st amendment rights are being violated, just as it is a mistake to assume that he is guilty of anything more than being a collosal asshole.

But on that charge, it's dead to rights.

As for disproving the claims that the Holocaust never happened, it's been done so many times by now that such requests are infantile and pointless. Watch Night and Fog or countless other films that documented the attrocities as they happened. There are countless photographs, films, interviews, journals, all of which point to the same thing. Many of the interviews with former prison guards even support the claims of the Holocaust survivors. It's a slam dunk. And no, History isn't Science. But there are some things the two have in common. When you do an experiment 100 times, and it works the same way 97 times, you're well on your way to a solid theory. When every liberated prisoner from the camps says things that match the visual record, the written record, and even the testimony of many of the monsters accused of these acts, anyone denying the mountain of evidence is either a fucking moron or a fucking asshole. Or both.

[BlueChair]

Rope, American citizens are pretty immune to spouting hatred and bigotry publicly. Look at the KKK and that priest who rejoiced at the death of Matthew Shephard, the gay student that was brutally murdered in Wyoming. Until they break the law through violence or another crime, they remain untouched by the law.

Zundel is not an American citizen. This is from Wikipedia. See the "Detention and Deportation" section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Zundel


And I haven't seen this film, but apparently it's a pretty shocking display of how much anti-semitism occurs in the U.S.:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436686/

[selfmademug]

He has no First Ammendment rights if he's not American. And although cracking down on hate speech to prevent hate crimes may not be the most ethically or even logically pristine strategy, in a democracy people decide what measures and compromises are acceptable toward the given ends. As I said before, I think it's rife with hypocracy, but if I was going to spend my energy fighting hypocracy, conspiratorial racists (which is what they are, they're not just saying these things to themselves, they're recruiting) wouldn't be my poster children. There are lots of other messes that need cleaning up way more than that bit of minor untidiness, IMO-- you could start, in Germany, with doing more to protect homosexuals, naturalized immigrants and others who are still persecuted there.

Rope, you say "Only the folks who were actually present at the time really know," and that is true in the crudest sense. But as that generation dies off, it's all the more important to protect the truth they've imparted to us; otherwise we have a clean slate each time the first-hand survivors/witnesses of an era are lost to history, and we're living in meaningless relativism.

[noiseradio]

He's a citizen of Germany, subject to German law. I actually take great comfort in the fact that Germany is prosecuting Holocaust deniers and recruitment by hate groups. Nations need to take responsibility for past crimes and offenses.

[bambooneedle]

Isn't it spelled 'deniers' and 'hypocrisy'?

I learnt that wikipedia is great site.

[selfmademug]

Isn't it 'hypocrisy'?

Always with the relevent comment. I've copped to being a crap speller more than once on this board, I'm hardly going to stop now: I can't spell my way out of a paper bag with a large rip in the bottom.

Maybe 'hypocracy' was a slip-- it seems to be the form of government we're living under just now.