From rcgraves@ix.netcom.com Thu Oct 17 09:20:23 PDT 1996
Article: 75178 of alt.revisionism
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From: Rich Graves 
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.censorship,alt.politics.white-power,alt.politics.nationalism.white
Subject: Wonderful essay on hate speech "Bunkley Debunked"
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 23:04:45 -0700
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I found myself wondering, "Whatever happened to Joe Bunkley, that Nazi at
Georgia State?" and so I looked. I didn't find what I was looking for
(anybody know? he dropped out of school and so they closed his account, but
I'd have expected him to show up somewhere), but as usually happens on the
Web, I found something even better.

The copyright terms seem to indicate that this may be freely archived on
Nizkor in its entirety. I think that would be a good idea. Excerpts
(basically, the middle) follow.

Patrick Burkart is Corresponding Secretary for the ACLU's Central Texas
Chapter and a social science researcher. 

- -rich

http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/24/burkart.html
   
        Copyright (c) 1996 by Patrick Burkart, all rights reserved.
                                      
   This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use
   provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and
   redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are
   notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution,
   or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires
   the consent of the author and the notification of [1]Bad Subjects.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
                              Bunkley Debunked
                                      
                              Patrick Burkart
                                      
                   Bad Subjects, Issue #24, February 1996
                                      
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
     In a front page article, the New York Times (1/10/96) reported that
     the Simon Wiesenthal Center has begun lobbying Internet access
     providers and universities requesting censorship of communications
     that "promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence." While
     the intent of the Center is not to impose formal speech codes
     through legislation or public policy, its lobbying efforts
     illustrate the perceived urgency of the problem of hate speech on
     the web, and the risks of censorship.
[...]     
     The Simon Wiesenthal Center targeted the hard-core racist
     propaganda found on the Internet, a sample of which I shall review
     and critique below. It is Joe Bunkley's "First Banned WWW Page,"
     which is not party-aligned, but political propaganda nontheless,
     especially working in conjunction with more benign forms of
     electronic mass communications. Importantly, it exists--or rather,
     is made into accessible propaganda--by virtue of public
     expenditure.
[...]
  Bunkley's "First WWW Banned Page"
  
       Over a year ago I began conducting extensive net searches for web
       pages of the fringe Right. I added Joe Bunkley's page
       (http://www.gsu.edu/~hisjwbx/#tocan) to my web browser as a
       bookmark, and there it has sat for many months as a reminder of my
       political competition. Since 1994, the page has fallen off the
       ranking indexes of all of the major Web search engines available
       to me.
       Upon returning to this site in late 1995, I realized that the
       false premise of this page is that it is, or ever has been,
       banned. The page is virulent, violent, irrational propaganda
       published at least partially with public resources in Georgia.
       Obviously, it presents a clear challenge to most aesthetic,
       political, religious, and philosophical sensibilities, and in the
       cases of Jews, other racial and religious minorities, and queers,
       it probably threatens our physical well-being as well.
       Like most sites, it is mostly untraveled and unvisited. And as
       with all web sites, it is a social space which exists only in
       communications but which also must physically reside on a server
       paid for by somebody. The institutional affiliation of a web site,
       especially a public institutional affiliation, can jeopardize its
       openness to the exercise of free speech. This is the main
       vulnerability of pages like Bunkley's which are the target of the
       Simon Wiesenthal Center.
       In private e-mail correspondence with Mr. Bunkley, I learned that
       the page never was banned, and is in no foreseeable danger of
       being banned. The discrepancy between the claim and reality is
       important. It is the difference between mere delusion and
       embarrassing self-deception before a global audience. The
       difference also points up the disturbed psychology of the
       electronically communicative anti-Semites, who would carry others
       into their own paranoid delusions about being Christians
       persecuted by an international conspiracy of Jews. In order to
       make his revisionist philosophies even mildly plausible, Bunkley
       needs the argumentative basis of a claim to having his paranoid
       stories censored by public authorities. The fact is, he
       misrepresents himself and invents a claim of censorship.
       On the page, Bunkley reiterates familiar anti-Semitic theses: 1)
       that there is a comprehensive system of powerful controls on
       "whites" held by Jews and their sympathizers, 2) that the
       Holocaust never happened; and, 3) "Talmudic Judaism" is the "sworn
       enemy of Christianity." Bunkley mixes these assertions with other
       conspiracy theories related to the New World Order family of
       paranoias, including "The COMING FALL OF THE AMERICAN
       EMPIRE/Collapse Of The Western Era And The Jew World Order." At
       every turn, Bunkley claims to unveil banned, suppressed, new, or
       little known facts which turn out not to be facts at all, but
       either hypertext tricks of the eye or embarassing assertions
       disguised argumentatively as facts. Every hypertext link--whether
       in a cool expository piece or a hotly polemical essay--is pitched
       to the visitor as a substantiation, academic reference, or proof
       of Bunkley's outrageous and impossible position. Bunkley imagines
       that his tired repetition of old accusations are revelatory
       articulations of a cutting-edge social movement to reclaim
       sovereignty for a mythical, nascent white nation of Christian
       heterosexuals.
       At one incredible point in the presentation, Bunkley gives
       visitors a link that takes them to a page called "Samisdat,"
       (http://www.pixi.com/~bewise/holyhoax.html) a holocaust
       revisionist page offering "Lies of the 'Holocaust.'" When you
       click on it, up comes a page that says "As you have already seen,
       this board exposes a lot of Truth about Political International
       Zionism and its role in bringing about the ominous New World Order
       - One World Government. They seem to have no problem at all
       slamming us with lie after lie in order to achieve what they want
       to achieve. . . . Perhaps the most incredible story to date is the
       'Holocaust' story. . . . Have you ever noticed that in spite of
       VOLUMINOUS evidence that exposes LIE after LIE with regard to this
       story, we are not allowed to discuss it, unless of course you
       'jump onto the bandwagon' and help support it?! After all, it is
       extremely politically INCORRECT to question any part of what we
       have been told about the 'Holocaust.'" And so on and so forth.
       The punch line is, immediately below this rant, appears the
       following disclaimer: "CAUTION: ALL 'Holocaust Lies' Pages are
       presently UNDER CONSTRUCTION. There is a possibility that some of
       this information may not be 100% correct. We WILL be making the
       corrections (IF ANY) when found or documented to be in error."
       This is the cheapest way out of the ugly challenge Bunkley sets
       before himself, to disprove the historical fact that the Nazis
       murdered millions and millions of Jews in Europe. Bunkley is not
       arguing as a postmodern scholar about the social construction of
       the Holocaust; he is not interested in discussing the transmission
       of historical identity through culture, religion, or politics.
       Instead, he is unmethodically tackling what he believes to be pure
       myth.
[...]
       Once a logical dissection of his confused argumentation is laid
       out, the psychological disruption of popular antisemitism comes
       into plainer view. Bunkley of the Master Race is utterly dependent
       upon the Jewish slave-victim to confirm his own superiority. But
       since he inadequately defames his Jewish slaves on the strength of
       his own weak presentation of historical "truth," he remains
       vulnerable to his sworn enemy's refutations. Moreover, Bunkley
       seems utterly unaware of the trouble he gets himself into with
       pasting disclaimers onto his miserable "truths" about history. The
       unawareness repeats as little messages peppering the text, like
       "What is history but a FABLE agreed upon? --Napoleon Bonaparte"
       and "History is Bunk! --Henry Ford." Bunkley takes us nowhere
       again and again, like a disoriented Virgil descending the pits of
       Hell with promises of burning sinners at every turn, but
       continually returning us to the gates after just a few steps.
       As part of the smoke and mirrors of this ugly website, Bunkley has
       packed his home page with thousands of starting-points which skirt
       the edges of multiple, far-flung constellations of racist
       conspiracy theories. His page collects links to an unnerving
       number of nutcase web, book, and record publishers and radio
       programmers
[...]
       Bunkley has used a fake threat of censorship as a foil to
       counterpose his radical political threat to civil society. If it
       weren't for the fact that the page lies about its being targeted
       with a conspiratorial suppression campaign, it would be tempting
       to suggest that this case illustrates that censorship --- or the
       perceived threat of censorship --- encourages new hate speech. In
       order to compensate for a deficient reality, Bunkley has
       constructed a psychological reality which feeds his desire to
       persecute and be persecuted. Bunkley exemplifies how deeply
       ultrareactionary ideas have been assimilated by alienated, white
       members of the lower-middle classes who would score high on
       Horkheimer and Adorno's Fascism-Scale psychological test today.
       Bunkley operates from a Georgia State University system, to which
       he adds a link concerning the University's free speech policy.
       That public universities are the sites of hate pages should not be
       surprising, since they provide some of the best and most extensive
       public access to Internet publication, and since college is a
       place where young people experiment with radical thinking and
       speech, generally without explicit censorship.
[...]
       Bunkley's page, like other virulent kinds of propaganda, is
       intimidating, ugly, and irrational. It presents a forceful
       challenge to those communitarians and liberals who would ban the
       most offensive varieties of communication in futile defense of a
       "community standard." As far as the Web is concerned, the choice
       between restricting objectionable speech and fighting to keep it
       unregulated must be approached as a choice of strategy. Hate
       speech on the Web must be confronted as a political challenge that
       comes organically with a net expansion of free speech into
       cyberspace. We can and should argue over content until the cows
       come home, but also permit the widest, unregulated diversity of
       content possible to preserve the rule. We must also fight hate
       speech with stronger, more reasoned speech.

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