Here in Canada, we have the Internet, and with the click of a mouse I can find lots and lots of web sites explaining that the holocaust is a giant conspiracy and didn’t happen.

Nevertheless, it’s against the law for me to print them in a book and sell them in Canada. We know that people can read all that stuff, but there’s a statement being about what is and isn’t legal to publish.

It’s not so much the information that we are trying to block, it’s the signal I would be sending if I opened a bookstore and started selling copies of my book in broad daylight. The meta-signal of selling the book in public is telling people that holocaust denial is no different than any other point of view.

Canadians believe there is value in blocking the meta-signal, even if the signal itself flows somewhat freely across the country’s borders.

Not everyone agrees, of course. I imagine that most Americans regard Canadian hate-crime laws as being a horrible infringement on civil liberties, right up there with gun control and socialized medicine.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to abandon their principles and adopt the Canadian approach, I’m just pointing out that there can be a value in banning the publication of a work even if the work itself is available on the Internet.

Whether that value outweighs the other considerations in play is, of course, a public policy decision.

Citation needed. We're not on the Wikipedia list of countries in which Holocaust denial is either implicitly or explicitly illegal. [1]

As a Canadian, I've long been proud that we have been willing to refute bad arguments rather than just imprisoning those who make them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial#Laws_against_...

I happen to live in one of these countries (which name is easy to find out, continue reading...). While I certainly do not deny the Holocaust, on the contrary, I'm against these kind of laws. Should politicians decide what the historic truth is? because it can go both ways.

So in that country of mine, some politician (well I should say the president of that country) wanted to force school teachers to make pupils learn that colonialism "had positive effects on the colonized people". So where does it stop? shouldn't we let this to researchers or specialists to decide whether or not that's true? why should a some politician,who isn't an historian, be able to decide in their place?

I note that this applied only to people publishing things they knew was false, not to people who sincerely believed what they were saying.

> So where does it stop?

Your example is the government forcing the teaching of falsehoods, which is wildly different from forbidding the distribution of hate speech.

Yes. An important part of learned helplessness (playing the victim) is ignoring broadly accepted definitions.

The ability to deny ideas is the ability to deny all speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

"In logic and critical thinking, a slippery slope is a logical device in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument or demonstrable mechanism for the inevitability of the event in question."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Zundel

Nevertheless, my example certainly applied before 1992, and yes, it served as a signal. Public policy has changed, the Supreme Court decided that something else had greater weight. That doesn't invalidate the fact that it is still a signaling mechanism.

> I've long been proud that we have been willing to refute bad arguments rather than just imprisoning those who make them.

That's your opinion, which you've carefully crafted to sound "obviously meritorious," and you're entitled to it, but the "we" you speak of is far from universal, and the way in which you put it is not one I accept.

Saying the holocaust didn't happen isn't hateful, it's just stupid.

Explicit calls to violence should be banned, not stupidity.

Robert Jan van Pelt's testimony about the architectural plans of Nazi death camps in the David Irving libel trial is pretty fascinating. There is a documentary about his research, he takes the viewer through multiple plan revisions the Nazis made for these camps and shows how they even tried to hide the camp's true purpose from the people building it. http://documentaryaddict.com/films/auschwitz-the-blueprint-o...