i read earlier today about the pope lifting the excommunication of a holocaust denier.

now, i could care less about what the pope does.  what i found interesting was this:

“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” he said in the interview, which appeared on various Web sites since its broadcast.

“I believe there were no gas chambers,” he added.

He added: “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them by gas chambers.”

Prosecutors in Regensburg, Germany, where the interview took place — and where the pope once taught — are investigating Williamson’s comments on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Holocaust denial is treated as a crime in Germany.

while i understand why germany is so sensitive to holocaust deniers, i don’t understand prosecuting them.  aside from my personal fundamental belief in freedom of speech (even hateful speech), i don’t get what function it’s meant to serve?

no one with even a shred of credibility believes that the holocaust didn’t happen, and anyone with a few brain cells would immediately dismiss these kinds of remarks out of hand as completely deluded.  clearly he is not thinking rationally.  and we should ensure that future generations continue to learn the lessons that history has taught us.  as ban ki-moon has said today, on this international day of remembrance:

“New initiatives in Holocaust remembrance and education have given us an authentic basis for hope. But we can and must do more if we are to make that hope a reality.

We must continue to teach our children the lessons of history’s darkest chapters. That will help them do a better job than their elders in building a world of peaceful coexistence”.

but *prosecuting* these kinds of remarks gives them a power they would never otherwise have.  they imply that we are fearful of the weight of these words, no matter how utterly bizarre.  we give them gravitas by treating them as too dangerous, too influential to be discredited through simple exposure to the light of facts and truth.  and in banning them, we risk making such ridiculous ideas more attractive to others through giving them the aura of naughty excitement of the forbidden.

as any parent knows, the best way to extinguish clownish behaviour is to ignore it.

he’s a fool.  and instead of being afraid of foolish ideas, we should be careful of turning a fool into a martyr.

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