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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 (Page doesn`t exist)
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) (Page doesn`t exist) 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) (Page doesn`t exist) 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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From [email protected] 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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