MovieChat Forums > Denial (2016) Discussion > It doesn't matter whether you believe or...

It doesn't matter whether you believe or not


You still have the right to think whatever you wish to think.

This movie comes out right after the largest search engine in the world removes holocaust denial sites from its results or pushes them so far down the page using "a new algorithm" as to be irrelevant.

Censorship is never the proper response in what is supposed to be a free country. If someone says something you disagree with then counter their argument with your own using facts. You don't simply silence their opinion because people disagree with them. Free speech is essential in a free country. When censorship becomes acceptable a country is no longer free.

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You still have the right to think whatever you wish to think.


It's true. You have the right to think the earth is flat, that Elvis faked his own death to retire in obscurity, that NASA faked Apollo 11, and so on. You do have the right to think it. But, like Holocaust denial, you'd have to be a moron.

This movie comes out right after the largest search engine in the world removes holocaust denial sites from its results or pushes them so far down the page using "a new algorithm" as to be irrelevant.


If by "right after" you mean "several months before." But, hey, close enough for Holocaust deniers, who have such terrible trouble keeping clearly documented timelines straight.

Censorship is never the proper response in what is supposed to be a free country.


If you're saying that David Irving shouldn't have tried to silence Lipstadt by demanding her publisher stop selling her book, which he repeatedly noted was one of his goals during the lawsuit, you're right.

But Holocaust denial isn't just a historical opinion. It's a racial opinion as well, because it asserts that the Holocaust as we know it is the product of a powerful international Jewish conspiracy to swindle the gentiles. It's a necessary requirement of any Holocaust denial alternate history. You can't have a scam without scammers, and you can't have the biggest scam in history -- which this would have to be, if the Holocaust deniers are right -- without having the Jews as the world's biggest scammers.

So yeah, you're free to embrace a stupid, fraudulent, racist pseudo-history. You have the right.

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Free speech in the sense of the constitution always was meant only to limit the power of the government. Private companies like Google are free to style their services according to some TOS however they like - and rightly so. Free speech for example does NOT mean that everyone has a right to get their opinions published in the New York Times. People are still free to found their own newspaper though, and the government should not be allowed to interfere with that – like dictatorships did in the past. That is the actual scope of free speech, which is often misunderstood – or deliberately but falsely used as an "authoritative" argument.

The problem with Shoah denial especially in combination with the internet is that no matter how often its arguments have been debunked already, for each case of debunking the same argument pops up a dozen times in some other places. Sometimes with no way to comment, and some denier forums only cry "free speech" as long as their own interests are concerned, i.e. they have no problem with censoring criticism. In addition some people only seek out information which confirms their belief system, and some algorithms in the world of social media already amplify this tendency of confirmation bias. The internet as a medium like many others is a bliss in the sense that people can get information and publish their own much easier. The curse of the internet is that it allows the abandonment of all professional standards regarding journalistic and scientific work – in the age of relativism more and more people don't seem to understand why this is important, all sources of information are considered "equal" – and thus allows the distribution of untruths to an extent probably not possible before. Ironically all this often happens under a false banner of "search for the truth".

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