I am half-Jewish and had relatives at Auschwitz. I get cannonaded by Holocaust deniers in the comments (only a few at Substack but more virulent ones at other sites where my work is republished) every time I reference that period of history, some pretty vicious.

You know what I do? I ignore them and move on. I used to try to talk sense to them but realized they are too committed to their world view to engage in reasonable dialogue so stopped wasting my time.

As someone who has studied and written extensively about the actions that made the Holocaust and other genocides possible, I emphatically feel the greatest threat to humanity is the acquiescence to censorship and the suffocation of free speech and free thought. A commitment to freedom demands a willingness to let others speak, whether or not we agree with them.

The solution to online harassment is not to stifle speech but for each of us to take individual responsibility for cultivating our own experience and developing resilience. There is no more powerful defense against other people’s hurtful words than cultivating one’s internal strength.

I highly recommend reading the following two books to understand how totalitarianism progresses and why censorship is the most powerful tool in the tyrant’s toolkit:

1) They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, by Milton Mayer (covered in my first Recommendations Roundup: margaretannaalice.subst…)

2) Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner