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Really, the question to me is not what the intentions of SATS are, without wishing to sound harsh, when I see someone making comments about "the myth of the 6 million" and "well, we know something happened, but the figure of 6 million is hugely inflated..." I just dont really feel myself wanting to know them.
The question to me, and I think this is the defence of the moderators, is what is the best way to deal with holocaust denial? When someone comes to this site and wants to post something along the lines of "well, you know, their were Jewish casualties in WWII, but the scale and the scope of the holocaust were invented by zionist controlled governments and used as a justification for the creation of Israel" - I mean, most of us do not believe that these statements to be factually true, most of us can find a huge wealth of evidence that the holocaust did happen, that those people did die, most of us understand that what SATS says is simply not true, that whether it is "his opinion" or "someone else's" at best it is a very poor misunderstanding of history, at worst an extremely distasteful falsehood.
So when you have a post like this, you have two options - 1 you censor it because you and the majority of people find it offensive, 2 - you allow it to stand, and you allow the members of this community to demolish all of the claims made within in it, to show that holocaust denial has no historical or factual basis whatsoever, that the holocaust clearly can be proved beyond any doubt to have occured.
When I first saw this post, I was upset that option 1 was not taken, but after I have thought about it, I do appreciate that option 2 was probably better all along. If we just censor holocaust denial or holocaust revisionalism, we allow their claims to be unchallenged - it is better to knock down the claims, to always and at all times fight them and prove they are untrue, so that if there are people who are doubtful, who have not studied this - when they come to this thread, they do not see the revisionist comment only and then it disappears, so in fact the only education the thread gives them is "the myth of 6 million", they see the revisionist comment and then see many people offer proof of the holocaust, and they understand that the revisionist claims are very base lies.
Sometimes, free speech can be valuable, we cannot fight these ideas by just banning them, we should never be afraid to engage them. I think this is what lebell and analog have done here, and although I initially did not agree, I now think that their actons to allow this thread were correct.
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"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."
The Gospel of Thomas
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