For many years there has been a debate over whether or not the Holocaust actually occurred. This debate has gotten so vicious that some lawmakers have made it a criminal offense to deny the Holocaust, actually putting people in jail for long periods if they so much as question the veracity of the numbers associated with the historical event.

To me that is the most scandalous attack on free speech imaginable. To put someone in jail for expressing an opinion - whether it be Holocaust denial or the belief that homosexuals are going to hell- is nothing short of a totalitarian, fundamentally sick state.

Do I believe the Holocaust occurred? Yes, I do. I believe millions of innocent, law-abiding, decent people were rounded up simply because they were Jews and systematically exterminated by one of the most evil governments in human history. I once saw a picture of Jews in a concentration camp, their bodies reduced to breathing skeletons, and they looked out with hopeless, pleading eyes for help that would never come. In the face of one of those Jews, a boy my age, I saw myself. It could have been me, or it could have been you. Maybe the government would attack you for a different reason, possibly for your political affiliation, or some other perceived inferiority. In this case, the state was the democratically elected and democratically sanctioned killing machine of the Nazis.

No one should ever be jailed or even prohibited from denying the Holocaust, just as no one should be jailed or prohibited from denouncing a political party, but the Holocaust did occur. It was a perfect example of that perverse, dark corner in the underdeveloped human brain which believes that some people can have the power of life and death over those under their control.

Even if one little girl holding a Teddy bear, or one little boy clinging to his mother's coat, was killed by the Nazis simply because she or he was a Jew, then that was a Holocaust against all humanity. The fact that millions of people were herded like livestock onto cattle cars and shipped to death camps is so ugly, so vile, that it makes you ashamed to be a human being. - Jim Power