I don’t particularly care to debate world war II politics,
Yet here you are. Funny way of not particularly caring.
but I think there is enough data there to have a discussion, rather than questioning somebody’s character for even bringing it up.
Oh, cool, as long as it's Just Asking Questions(tm) it's okay. Next up, we'll do "Was Hitler REALLY a BAD guy?" and "Did the Holocaust REALLY kill millions of people?"
Banning somebody from an instance for referring to historical events, seems questionable for a cornerstone Lemmy instance to do.
"Referring to historical events"
By calling the Soviet invasion of Poland 'bloodless' and accusing the Poles of being the REAL Nazis, who the Soviets had to invade to defeat fascism?
Yeah, that's not 'referring to historical events', that's 'referring to pure fucking fantasy and passing it off as historical fact'.
It's curious how many times I run into defenders of people like this who insist that they have no skin in the game but still bend over backwards to accommodate the most horrendous views. I must just not be enlightened enough to understand.
The severe issue at hand is banning somebody from an instance, an instance which runs about 30% of all Lemmy traffic, because of a ad hominem attack against their character for having what looks to be a legitimate perhaps misguided discussion in a news community.
But your entire point rests on the idea that these posters engaging in atrocity denial is 'just a disagreement' that should be tolerated. So pretty clearly you are debating WW2, otherwise you wouldn't be defending their right to "Just Ask Questions" about Soviet massacres of the Polish people.
The severe issue at hand is banning somebody from an instance, an instance which runs about 30% of all Lemmy traffic, because of a ad hominem attack against their character for having what looks to be a legitimate perhaps misguided discussion in a news community.
Jesus fucking Christ. Correctly identifying and banning someone for spreading misinformation is 'a ad hominem attack', and genocide denial is just 'legitimate perhaps misguided discussion'.
By your logic should we ban all the Zionists in Lemmy.world denying all the dead Palestinians and calling them Hamas. Because there's a lot. The point is, these things become extremely subjective.
EDIT: Just saw that some people said the invasion of Poland was bloodless. Those kinds of comments do sound like straight up misinformation, though, so it's not all subjective lol.
Removing somebody from a community, is fine and the prerogative of the community moderators. Removing somebody from lemmyworld at the instance, has a massive chilling effect on the entire lemmeverse. These are things that should have different scope, and different magnitude requirements.
If you think somebody was being disingenuous in your community, removing them from the community fine I support you, I don't agree with you, but the fact that you can do that is a legitimate moderation tool available to you. And I think that's correct.
Removing that person from all communities, for what looks like genuine level engagement, I think is a bridge too far, and harms all of Lemmy.
First, the person was only given a community ban, and not even a permanent ban.
Second, people absolutely should feel that spreading genocide denialism isn't kosher on any legitimate instance. If it was an instance ban, I'd be in support of it, in the same way I would support someone playing debatelord games about the fucking Holocaust should get the boot. It doesn't matter even if they do 'genuinely' believe in their genocide denialism, it is not and should not be welcome in any civilized space.