Many of us are too close to the trees to see the forest, as the saying goes - which is the reason I continue with snippets of the Michael McMillen mini-essays I so love because they verify for me how young people see our struggle with fresh eyes:
"Perhaps the most famous man to suffer governmental harassment is Mr Ernst Zündel, a German-born Canadian (immigrant) who has been hauled before courts and tribunals and hounded for years because he dared among other heterodox actions to publish a pamphlet called "Did Six Million Really Die?"
This booklet is a succinct introduction to the field of World War II revisionism. In its pages one will find neither libel nor incitement to assault or riot. It simply raises a question and adduces its evidence.
The work is imbued with the spirit of free and open inquiry. The edition that I read even lists comments, critical as well as laudatory, about the pamphlet at the back of the book.
Mr Zündel is not the author of "Did Six Million really Die?" The booklet was written by man called Richard Harwood. Mr Zündel simply published it in Canada.
Even a cursory persual of Mr Zündel's own words shows that his business is not hate; however, under the malcontent-coddling statutes of Canada, the government may pester a man on the flimsy pretext of his having "hurt the feelings" of protected minorities and pressure groups.
To be sure, there is much on the web that can hurt one's feelings and offend one's sensibilities. (And, I might add, turn one's stomach!) Some of the material is truly hateful and venomous. No one has to read such stuff.
There are also vast expanses of wasteland and tundra containing nothing of value and nothing to offend. Other websites, however, contain disputed or unpopular views or attempts to inquire freely and openly into certain taboo historical and political subjects.
Here one man's hate may be another man's history.
The Canadian government, however, gives every apperance of fearing free and open inquiry. How else can we explain its capitulation to snarling pressure groups who are unwilling to defend their views in rational discussion and who rely for insulation on the guns of the state?
Canada prides itself on being a "democracy." The assertion reflects a widespread misconception about the nature of legitimate governance. Democracy is rule by the people - and this means, presumably, by the majority of the people.
Any attentive student of politics knows that the concept of inalienable individual rights is incompatible with a system that would permit 51% of the citizenry to dispossess the other 49%. Still the usage persists both among self-styled "liberals" (i.e., socialists) and their real and putative opponents.
Hate laws and statutes that ban (causing) "hurting feelings," however, go Democracy one up. They are bludgeons wielded not by the majority but by envious minorities to thwart opposition and stifle the rights of critics.
The Simon Wiesenthal center purports to stand for the rights of Jewish people. As such, the Center's mission is laudable as far as it goes. What makes the Center's avowed position so puzzling (to put it politely) is its willingness to become an accomplice in censorship with regimes such as the Canadian.
There are many Jews in America and elsewhere who are justifiably disgusted by anti-Judaic bigotry or who are honestly convinced that the Allied/Soviet version of World War II history is immaculately accurate.
Some such Jews nevertheless stand up for the right of people who purvey such ideas to broadcast and vend them so long as they refrain from physical force. The SimonWiesenthal Center's eloquent calls for justice towards Jews would ring more sincerely if the Center made a clear public declaration of such principled American ideals.
Instead, the Center's Mr Littman invokes the armed might of the Canadian government to silence those whose views he finds repugnant.
To be fair, we must concede that some of the Center's work is quite legitimate. Its spokesmen consider it their duty to contend with and repudiate revisionist historians. The material at their website (http://www.isisw3.com/swc/) does provide some substantive material in this regard. (However), the question of German policy towards the Jews and consequent Jewish suffering is by no means definitively answered. I for one expect that there are some exagerrations, misconceptions and tendentiousness on both sides.
Nevertheless, my study of the matter has convinced me that revisionists are by far more intellectually honest than their carping critics who rely on force and intimidation. I know of no revisionist who advocates state measures designed to stifle his opponents' free speech.
Free speech and the rights that buttress it are the issues here. It is pathetic that the mayor of Oliver British Columbia didn't approach it on that level.
(Submitted to the Zundelsite)
Thought for the Day:
"Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows."
(John Milton in "Paradise Lost")