For my 13th column, I took a report on white supremacists by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and turned it into a review of “hate sites” on the Internet. Not surprisingly, I panned most of them.
“Hate sites” are expanding on the Internet, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that fights anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. The ADL recently published a “Who’s Who” of white supremacists online. Called “High-Tech Hate: Extremist Use of the Internet,” an executive summary of the report is at the ADL’s website <www.adl.org>.
The ADL says more Ku Klux Klan, anti-government militias, Holocaust deniers and other “hate and extremist” groups are going online “to recruit and propagandize, especially targeting youth.” But they must be targeting youths who read Friedrich Nietzsche, because most hate sites are pretty lame.
At “Stormfront” <www.stormfront.org>, which claims to be the first White Nationalist website, going online in March 1995, impressionable 12-year-olds are exposed to didactic essays on White Nationalist philosophy, affirmative action, immigration, National Socialism, and an annotated list of links to other hate sites.
In the early 1980s, webmaster Don Black spent two years in federal prison for trying to overthrow the Caribbean nation of Dominica. He once succeeded David Duke, the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate in Louisiana, as KKK Grand Dragon. Like Duke, he says he is a former member of the KKK. He also is married to the former Mrs. Duke.
Speaking of David Duke, he now has an Internet-only “radio” program, so you can hear him spew his racist philosophy in streaming audio. The “David Duke Report — Online!” <davidduke.com/> also has some of his writings, like “Tiger Woods, Race, and Professional Sports,” in which he reassures white supremacists shaken by a black man winning the Masters that “golf is just a game.”
It takes two to keep the race pure, so there’s also the “Aryan Dating Page” with personal ads from race conscious singles. Sorry, “Heterosexual, White Gentiles only.” The “Aryan Dating Page” also has an Aryan Women Hall of Fame, “dedicated to famous race-aware women … who show us that pride in White heritage is not just a man’s thing.” Hall of Famettes include Leni Riefenstahl, director of the 1935 Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”; Brigitte Bardot, sex kitten turned animal rights activist, who told the French newspaper Le Figaro she thinks France has too many Muslim immigrants; and Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, for those nice things she had to say about Hitler.
“Skin-Net” has links to many skinhead sites, including the White Power record company Resistance Records, with album covers, music and video clips.
Finally, there are the “Holocaust Revisionists,” the most mendacious of which may be John Ball’s “Air Photo Evidence,” which purports to show “irrefutable air photo evidence” destroying “death camp rumours and myths.” Using stereo magnifying equipment, Ball “analyzed” declassified World War II air photos of concentration camps, and in 1992 wrote and published a book, “Air Photo Evidence.” The Web version has 3-D color maps that are numbered and annotated, and in one of the slickest virtual museum tours anywhere online, you can click on the numbers and receive streaming audio narration. Accompanied by soothing Vienna Waltz music, the smug narrator describes where the prisoners stored their musical instruments, played concerts, and the kitchen “where bread was baked each morning, and hearty hot meals were served.”
For a more reality-based portrayal of concentration camps, there’s the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum <www.ushmm.org>.
However, there aren’t many sites debunking Holocaust deniers. One that does is Ken McVay’s “The Nizkor Project” <https://www.nizkor.org/>. McVay is a leading authority countering Holocaust revisionists, and with others has compiled a large, if not very visual, collection of Holocaust-related materials, including a primer on Holocaust issues, features, archives and links. It’s good that groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center raise public awareness of high tech hate. More questionable is their behind the scenes pressure on Internet service providers, big and small, to muzzle unpopular (and offensive) speech.
As Declan McCullagh wrote in a column for HotWired: “Far better to keep the white supremacists and their publications publicly available for criticism and critique — shining a bright light on them as the Nizkor Project does — than to permit the hate to fester in darkness.”
© 1997 By H.B. Koplowitz, all rights reserved.
