Friday, August 6, 1999 24 Av 5759 Updated Fri., Aug. 06 02:58
COLUMN ONE: Networks of hate
By THOMAS O’DWYER
(August 5) “Any person with a phone line can become a town crier with
a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.”
So said US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and it echoed the
opinion of a certain Mr. Black who said, on first discovering the
Internet: “There is the potential here to reach millions. I think it’s
a major breakthrough.” He went on: “I don’t know if it’s the ultimate
solution to developing a White rights movement in this country, but
it’s a significant advance.” Don Black went on to found Stormfront –
the first prominent hate site to be launched on the Internet. It has
since been joined by hundreds of other bigots, propagating every
imaginable brand of hatred from behind the safety screen of the US
=46irst Amendment.
Both Black and Internet hate-sites go further back than we might
imagine, further than 1995, when computer networks went global and
Black set up Stormfront.
Ten years earlier, the Anti-Defamation League had issued a report
called Computerized Networks of Hate. It warned the public of an
easily accessed bulletin board, the Aryan Nation Liberty Net and it
prophetically commented that complacency about this new phenomenon
would be unwise.
Black and Whites
Black had become an organizer for David Duke in his teens, and in 1980
he succeeded Duke as leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He was
arrested and jailed a year later for plotting to invade Dominica
island and establish a neo-Nazi state there. (Note the irony of a
White supremacist being named Black.) A newly released ADL report,
Poisoning the Web, is much fatter than that 1985 issue exposing the
Aryan Nation. Citing the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado
last April, the sixth and worst such incident in two years, the report
says that among several pernicious elements of modern teen culture
that help criminal youngsters to act out their fantasies, the Internet
looms ever larger with “uninhibitedly hateful Internet Web sites,
facilitating expressions of bigotry and explanations of bomb-making.”
Maybe a bigot with a web site is just a moron with a megaphone but the
Internet allows the morons to network, rather than stew in their
isolated little personal soupcans of hatred.
With such dangerous people, networking can quickly become conspiring
or, as Black’s Stormfront site calls itself, “a forum for planning
strategies and forming political and social groups to ensure victory.”
Israel a ZOG?
Black, who thinks WWW stands for World Wide White, now hosts a growing
variety of clowns, lunatics and imaginative historians (the Institute
for Historical Review) linked to his extensive web site.
In a famously fatuous news analysis on Stormfront titled “J’accuse,”
Eustace Mullins, a grandfather of paranoid antisemites, proved that
the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by the Anti-Defamation
League.
Stormfront also dishes up old trash in new downloads, such as “The
Talmud” which “proves” one of the greatest works of religious
literature is an “anti-Christian tract filled with malice,
hate-mongering and barbarities.” If one tires of “Jewish Communist
Killers,” “ZOGs” (Zionist occupied governments) and “Proof of Negro
Inferiority,” there’s the fun sections, such as White Singles. There
you are guaranteed to meet “heterosexual White gentiles only.” Some of
my best friends are heterosexual White gentiles, but here you should
truly find that first date from hell. Sado-masochist (heterosexual)
males should find a feast of fantasies at a linked site for White
supremacist women.
Then there’s the Duke himself. During his brief run through American
politics, David Duke assured everyone he had dropped the White
supremacist follies of his youth. He won a seat in the Louisiana state
legislature in 1989, and a frightening 43.5% of the vote in an
unsuccessful bid for the US Senate in 1990.
Pierce will
As his political star has faded (because of the “biased, alien,
anti-White, liberal media”) so has his repentance of youthful folly.
Alas, his web site reveals the extent of the regression, now that it’s
no longer politically inconvenient to be the sort of racist who once
said “Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures.” The virtual
dukedom features a “Race Information Library” but I wouldn’t advise
padding the bibliography of your social science thesis with such
learned papers as “Can you handle the truth?” (the inferior brains of
Blacks) or “Race and Christianity” (three guesses – right first time).
One of the most seriously dangerous villains online is William Pierce,
a former American Nazi Party official and head of the National
Alliance, America’s biggest neo-Nazi organization, and the name of the
web site. He wrote The Turner Diaries, an explicit terrorist manual
that directly inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb Oklahoma City federal
headquarters in 1995. (You know – that Jewish plot mentioned above!).
So what can be done? The ADL’s Poisoning the Web is vague, indicating
what most of us know already – nothing. The first protector of the
hate Internet is the First Amendment, the second is the international
nature of the medium. You can use filtering software on your computer
to protect the kids – and that about it, unless someone wants to
organize a hacker task force to swat the storm-troopers.
But then, that would be a Jewish conspiracy against free speech,
wouldn’t it?
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