[FPSPACE] from Holocaust denial to Apollo denial

[Palladium@aol.com]

<<This would be a truly horrific education in history, for it would
 establish that any opinion can be suppressed by the courts.>>

No, it would establish that anyone who slanders an entire class of people with a ridiculous big lie had better be prepared to back up the charge with hard facts. 

<<And that is
 what we are talking about here--claims that man never set foot on the moon
 are merely opinions and the people espousing them have just as much right
 to them as you or me have the right to hold political beliefs.  The best
 way to fight lies is in the open, with truth, not in the courts, with the
 power of the state.>>

As an ex-journalist myself, I'm sympathetic to your point that everyone's entitled to their beliefs, not matter how lunatic and invalid. The ticklish thing is when a widely-propagated but plainly spurious "belief" slanders individuals or an entire class of people. The holocaust deniers are in effect calling the Nazi concentration camp survivors, the soldiers who liberated them and the historians who documented the horrors of Nazism liars and conspirators. That's a grotesque perversion of the truth, the the people so maligned have every right to feel offended and to seek legal redress.

It's not so outrageous in the case of the Apollo deniers, but you're still talking about calling some of most brilliant, hard-working, and motivated people who ever lived, people who have every right to feel proud at what they have accomplished, a bunch of liars and conspirators.

Yes, the best thing to do is to fight lies with the truth, but the world is drifting perilously close to Pilate's "what is truth?" as a justification for redefining history. The new "truth" is that every opinion is equally valid, that any objective truth can be "deconstructed" until it is meaningless, that it all depends on what your definition of "is" is.

U.S. libel law requires an enormous (and practically impossible) burden of proof to support a libel conviction against a so-called "public person," i.e. a celebrity or a politician. Apollo astronauts would fall into that category, but certainly not the rank and file Apollo engineer, scientist or technician. A class-action suit by them would demonostrate nothing more than that you can't launch an enormous, ad-hominem attack on a broad class of people with absolute impunity.

My concern is that dragging these nuts into court would give them precisely the platform they're looking for to spread their bilge. The people who brought such cases against the Holocaust deniers had to weigh that in mind as well, and judged that the danger of exposing these views to a wider audience was less than that of allowing them to go unchallenged. I don't think we've reached that point with the Apollo deniers.

DS Michaels