The Unintended Consequences of Suppression

WARNING: This message contains Bad Thoughts.  The Surgeon General
         has determined that Bad Thoughts cause Critical Thinking,
         which may be illegal in Canada, Germany, and other
         countries too numerous to mention.

I just visited the Ernst Zundel Webcom page, which given the
number of server overload errors I experienced trying to browse
it, is now the Numero Uno Web Site on the entire Internet, thanks
to some anonymous and largely clueless official running
telecommunications services for the former Third Reich.

Like most sites run by "Infamous Holocaust Deniers", this one was
largely unimpressive, and would have garnered little attention
from anyone were it not for the noisy public villification
lavished upon it by its detractors.

After the furor this site is alleged to have percipitated, I
fully expected to see pictures of skinheads with explosives and
automatic weapons holding up pictures of Nazi atrocities and
libelous screeds blaming the Jews for all the misfortunes of
mankind.

You can imagine my surprise when I found only a few rather
simplistic historical questions, and that Mr. Zundel had even
included links to rebuttals of his points contained within the
Simon Wiesenthal Center's own Web Pages.

All of this might have gone completely unnoticed by the majority
of humankind, or have been the subject of dry boring debates at
occasional universities, were the topic not constantly dragged
into the public eye by stories about anti-free speech laws,
shrill cries by organizations like the SWC for censoring the
entire Internet, and officials who summarily unplug major chunks
of the Net and disrupt legitimate business while trying to stuff
a sock into the mouth of some individual whose views they find
embarrassing.

In doing this, the Speech Nazis, the Wiesenthalistas, and the
Clueless Bureaucrats have drawn more attention to the views of
people like Mr. Zundel than he ever could have on his own, and
have alienated many of the people who would cheerfully have
argued against Mr. Zundel on their behalf.  This goes beyond
simple stupidity, and clearly approaches the lobotomy level of
impaired mental functioning.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $

an entity calling itself "Mike Duvos" writes:

[visit behind curtain at the now-crowded-and-popular Nazi web-parlor]

On my Beginnings of Freedom page, I've had links to some similar sites
for a while now:

http://www2.Gsu.EDU/~gs02jwb/LIST/MEDIA/media.ind
Banned Media and Organizations List

http://www2.Gsu.EDU/~gs02jwb/
The Coming Fall of the American Empire

I keep them around as examples of laughable assumptions that shrivel at
the slightest sign of daylight. If I don't keep an eye on folks who espouse
bad ideas, they're more likely to pose a threat to me at some point in the
future; I'd rather know exactly what they believe, and what they want, and
how they hope to accomplish it, the better to protect myself and possibly
work against them in some manner. (It'll probably get worse; I don't see
David Brin's vision in _Earth_ of "every man a spy/Boy Scout/Neighborhood
Watcher" as being that far-fetched. And that's the least possible evil.. :-S

--
http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~frogfarm ...for the best in unapproved information
"We think people like seeing somebody in a uniform on the porch."  -US Postal
spokeswoman, quoted in AP 1/27/96. I don't know about you, but the only folks
I know who'd enjoy seeing someone in uniform on their porch are leathermen...

> This goes beyond
> simple stupidity, and clearly approaches the lobotomy level of
> impaired mental functioning.


    You just don't get it, do you?  Do-gooders like the Wiesenthalistas 
don't need to be *right*; they need *a steady stream of cash contributions*

No one had ever heard of Farrakhan, until the ADL starting pumping out
press releases, attacking him by name. But Farrakhan was cleverer than
than Abe Foxman, who makes six figures as the head of ADL; Farrakhan used
the publicity to his financial advantage. Farrakhan now works the college
lecture circuit; even better, he hires sports arenas and fills them up
with lower-middle class blacks who are willing to pay the price of a
ticket, to see Whitey get sassed in public. 

"You can say anything you want about me, as long as you spell my name right".

It is a metric of AMerica's wealth, that we have a whole class of 
individuals who can make a living by being the interlocutors in political 
show biz.

>     You just don't get it, do you?  Do-gooders like the Wiesenthalistas 
> don't need to be *right*; they need *a steady stream of cash contributions*

It's usually more effective to point out why what someone is saying is
wrong rather than to speculate as to what their motives for saying it
might be.