Arkadiy provides the answer to which of the possible wrong-headed objections to my previous post he meant by his overly concise one... And -- surprise, surprise! -- turns out it's *both* of them:

What you have said applies to everybody, to you and me more than to many other people. The defences you refuse to grant to that fruit are the ones currently protecting you.

Oh yeah? So, are YOU currently engaging in illegal hate speech...? 'Coz I certainly aren't, you know... Or are you claiming that denying the Holocaust is anything *but* hate speech? That it can have *any* other real purpose than promoting a second one?

[...] people who were saying about the same thing you're saying now: "Would you bet that so-and-so was not really a spy? So what if we don't knoW anything bad about him - he cold have said the most dreadful things in private. Where there is smoke there is fire."

That's so fucking stupid, I don't know whether to get angry at the apparently attempted insult, or just exasperated at the stupidity you're displaying. (Depends, of course, on whether the display is true or faked.)

To be more explicit myself: Yeah, WE don't know; you and I. But the combined judicial and law enforcement systems of the several European (and possibly other) nations where he did hold those speeches would presumably be able to find at least *some* witnesses that could be persuaded to testify as to what he actually *did* say, in his speeches or at the banquets they probably held in the evenings after some of them(*). So, to rephrase my question from the previous post: You wanna bet that NONE of those potential witnesses would say he'd ever gone a step or three farther than "just" denying the Holocaust?

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(*): Actually, I'd have thought that that was what they'd done, already. Maybe they thought the easier-to-prove denial-in-writing thing was enough; that three years would be sufficient to discredit a guy as old as Irving. (And take a bit of the authorial and speechifying spark out of him... Heck, come to think of it, maybe they didn't *want* to try for more, so as not to make too much of a martyr out of him.) Anyway, I was of course talking about convicting him not based on my speculations here, but on those testimonials that I'm speculating about.