Should we ban older authors who expressed ideas we now consider un-scientific? For example, H.L. Mencken:

"The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort; his ideals, no matter how laboriously he is trained and sheltered, remain those of a clown."
—H.L. Mencken

Clearly this is racist, and since races "don't exist," we shouldn't tolerate it. But should we strike his books from the shelves and ignore everything he has written in the name of the pursuit of egalitarian utopia?

We shouldn't ban authors because we shouldn't ban authors.

indeed, spidergoat.

to ban someone because they are wrong........who can say what is right?

In the specific question of older authors as expressed above, no. Let their work stand as a testament to the human endeavor, a freeze-frame of our finite and mortal condition.

Like my favorite racist joke. It's one of my favorite jokes of all time. (The sandbox joke; I shan't repeat it here, else I upset yet another somebody.) Or my favorite racist term. Seriously, both make me laugh hysterically. Not because I bear any animosity toward skin color, but because human frailty fascinates me.

When I think of "revisionism", I have a mixed but distasteful reaction. To the one is some British professor we hear about every few years on this side of the pond. He has a problem with the holocaust. It would bug me if a prestigious university gave him a place to promulgate specious theories and assertions, but by no means should he be banned from publication or speech. Or the current patriotic crusade against revisionism in the U.S.; the Bush administration has cheapened the term with their shennanigans.

There are at least two major classifications of revisionism. One is reviled by American conservatives because it works against puffy myths and the cornerstones of conservative pride. Revisionism was accused of those who wanted to observe the historical record. To acknowledge Columbus was a murderer was decried as revisionism. But there is a record, in the explorer's own hand, of those acts. History itself was not revised; the breadth of acknowledgment widened. Revisionism?

And then there is the hazy argument about revisionism and the Terrorized Bush Wars. Conservatives have succeeded in confusing the American people to such a degree that the Bush administration was legitimized in 2004. Only by separating people from the ideas they advocate can we separate President Dubya from a managed evolution aiming toward Iraq. Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? Who's getting revisionist, here?

And what of Zell Miller? The ultimate revisionism, a demonstration of what a Democrat must do in order to satisfy Republicans. Talk about cover fire: too bad Americans just don't care enough to think for a couple minutes.

The Rove School: sleight of hand beats any hand.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

To ban people who said things we have subsequently learned to be untrue is tantamount to pretending those people never said those things. Eventually humanity will believe that those things were never said, that people never had those ideas. This causes us to lose touch with our own history.

There is much in our history to be ashamed of. To pretend otherwise is to lure ourselves into hubris.

nice
and...want a revolution? speak the truth. ahh, i remember now.....

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." (orwell)

mccarthy apologists=holocaust deniers

"I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the Communist Party still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." (mccarthy)

"the dixie chicks should be hanged for treason" (gustav)