"V for Vendetta" is the hot movie this week. It has been described as a story about one man fighting against a corrupt system.

A recent review says that the setting is "a dark, futuristic London ruled with an iron fist by a totalitarian government that controls its citizens through fear and terror. Dissent, free expression and religious beliefs are crushed. Censorship is the order of the day."

Sounds like a pretty scary future. Unfortunately, that future is right now but few people even know it. Sadly, repression is seldom seen by most people as they live through such a time.

Because life is not tightly scripted and condensed into a two hour movie we often can't see the tyrants for the trees.

So, who are the real rebels against our present totalitarian society?

A few names that may occur to many people are those of Ernst Zundel, David Irving, Germar Rudolf and a whole bunch of other good, decent people who are being persecuted by those who don't like what these folks think, say, and write.

Have no doubt about it, it is precisely because of what these three thought, said, and wrote, that caused those who are against freedom to throw them in jail. They thought things that they weren't supposed to think and then they communicated their thoughts to others. Thought crimes. Period. They didn't throw bombs. They didn't attack anyone. They didn't hurt anyone. They just used their brains and they communicated their thoughts. They did what humans are made to do. For this, they were arrested and thrown in jail. Repression? You bet. That's real repression. That's not Hollywood.

Let's be very clear, these three didn't incite others to violence or even, as far as I know, use what reasonable people would call hate speech. All they did was independently investigate an historic event and then they wrote and spoke out about what they think really happened or didn't happen. That's it. For this, they're in jail. The issue here isn't really whether they're right or wrong in their views of the Holocaust or anything else. The principle is what is important, and the principle is that all humans should have the freedom to investigate, think about, write about and speak about whatever it is that interests them in a search for the truth. That's part of what it means to have human freedom--freedom to use our brains. Freedom with a capital F.

Imagine someone being thrown in jail because they investigated the Civil War and then wrote and spoke out about it. Most people would probably be outraged and wouldn't let such repression stand, unless they had been propagandized to believe that this is also something that we shouldn't investigate or talk about. And in this case, the masses would probably calmly accept the repression. We know this is true because the masses are calmly accepting other repression. Society is so lacking in real freedom right now that most people buy the lies of the tyrants who say that speaking out and writing about the Holocaust is somehow different than doing the same thing about any other event in history. Why should any event in history be off limits? Why should any search for truth be a crime? It's absurd. To think otherwise is to return to the days when people had to accept as true the false idea that the earth was the center of the solar system. Do I think the Holocaust as usually presented is a lie? Got me. I haven't studied it and I have about as much interest in studying it as I have in studying the Civil War--which is to say, my interest is nil. But, if others want to study either of these events or any other events, they should be allowed to do so. It's intellectual and personal freedom that I'm interested in, not these events per se.

But the repression goes even further in our dark present. The two other subjects that will land you in trouble today are race and religion with race being the most sacred of the two in most Western nations.

My guess is that if the stories of Zundel, Irving and Rudolf were made into a movie, the public would see what a horrible injustice has been done to these three people and that many would then realize that when the free thinking and communication rights of a few are ground into the dust, then the free thinking and free communication rights of everyone else may be next. Then, maybe people would be clamoring for true intellectual freedom and demanding that those with power stop forcing others to think as the powerful want them to think.

Now, let's be clear that free speech does have limits. You've heard it a thousand times: You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. And, there's also no reason to gratuitously insult others because of their race or their religion or for any other reason. What's to be gained by doing so? That doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss race or religion in a robust fashion in our search for truth, but the problem in our current Dark Age is that the anti-freedom types have defined hate ever downward so that it now means just about any discussion of these subjects that questions the current orthodoxy about them. That's wrong and that's repressive.

Yes, Zundel, Irving and Rudolf were thrown in jail because, each, in his own way, questioned the current orthodoxy about the Holocaust. That's their crime--they used their brains. They were skeptics. They didn't just blindly accept what they were told was the truth, but wanted to find out for themselves. They did what free and intelligent humans should be taught to do from earliest school days--they questioned.

Now they're in jail. We live in an age when the human mind is being held captive by bigots.

It does no good, in our topsy turvy times, to tell these real bigots that "bigot" means someone with a closed mind. The bigots have tacitly defined the term bigot to mean someone who has an open mind and who questions anything that the real bigots have put off limits.

Try to speak out about the sacred cows of our present dark age in a world ruled with an iron fist by a totalitarian society that controls its citizens through fear and terror, and you may end up in jail along with Zundel, Irving and Rudolf. Talk about race, even if not in clearly insulting, volatile or incendiary terms, and you'll find that your right to dissent, your right to free expression and your right to have your own beliefs are crushed by goons, who have defined hate to mean any discussion about such topics that doesn't parrot the company line. Censorship is the order of the day.

Read the wrong books, say the wrong things, raise your arm the wrong way and you'll end up in jail in Germany today. And, doesn't this seem like the very same Germany that did similar things in the past, but with different targets? What's changed? Tyranny is tyranny.

One of the people associated with "V for Vendetta" told a reviewer recently that if there is a message to the movie "it is about the individual's right to be an individual, and not be forced by fear into conformity."

It's too bad we don't have such freedom and it's too bad that more people don't understand this, because, today, we are being forced into a conformity that is robbing us of our humanity. Today, we are being told that we can only think inside the box. Today, we're being told that we must blindly accept as true, whatever the tyrants want us to accept as true.