In Britain, David Copeland’s racist nail-bombing campaign claimed several lives in
1999. The 24-year-old engineer found his recipe for bombs on the Net.
The image of a white supremacist “new man”?
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Blurring
fantasy and reality
The combination
of intimacy and distance in cyberspace provides a new context for racist harassment.
Racists began by sending “mail bombs” or a truck-load of junk mail to crash their
victims’ computer systems. More recently they started using digital tools to offer
the “pleasure” of simulated racial violence. For example, a photograph of a young
black man, face down on the floor being beaten and kicked, used to be posted on the
Skinheads USA website until a police investigation. By blurring the line between
reality and fantasy, this kind of violence is politically slippery but very dangerous.
Cyberculture has also given a new lease of life to the “International Jew” as an
omnipresent figure of hate. The Internet’s global framework enhances a historical
component of anti-Semitism: the notion of an international conspiracy. The “traditional”
products of the racist imagination are now circulating further than ever before.
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The
face of racism changes on the Internet as preppy professionals join the ranks of
the “classic” tattooed skinheads. Will they prove even more dangerous?
After celebrating the
Internet as a digital nirvana in which democracy and free speech flourish, we are
finally uncovering the dark side in which racists and xenophobes not only broadcast
their propaganda in cyberspace but also ply their paraphernalia and hate through
international networks. However the spate of scare stories about the burgeoning tide
of racist online materials ignores the ultimate question: is the face of racism changing?
Most articles focus exclusively on the number of websites, virtual discussion groups
and chat rooms spreading the messages of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux
Klan, White Aryan Resistance and the British National Party, which first seized the
Internet as an unregulated and relatively cheap media in the mid-1990s. While there
is no doubt that these sites and groups are growing, accurate estimates are difficult
to calculate. To investigate hate on the Net, you must combine the skills of a detective,
a lie detector and propaganda code breaker. For online materials are part of a digital
masquerade that conceals as much as it shows. You cannot simply count and record
web addresses because of the frequency in which pages are posted and taken down.
However, experts agree that there are hundreds of sites, perhaps as many as 3,000.
Much of the debate about hate on the Net has revolved around censorship. Internet
Service Providers (ISP) may voluntarily prohibit use of their servers and install
filters along with web browsers to prevent access to key racist sites. But it is
almost impossible to regulate the Net as a whole. The debate about censorship has
become a cul-de-sac because of the seemingly irreconcilable tension between the libertarian
ethos of free speech and the difficulty in defining the limit of what is morally
acceptable to say or write. To some extent, the polemic overshadows the critical
issue: what is drawing people into the racist Net world?
“WHITE PRIDE WORLDWIDE”—with this slogan, Don Black of the U.S. launched the world’s
first and most notorious racist website Stormfront on March 27, 1995. Black, a former
Klansman, learned his computer skills in a federal prison in Texas where he compulsively
worked on the prison’s Radio Shack TRS-80 computer at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Once
out of jail, Black put his new skills to work to build an international system of
followers by offering a trans-local notion of race.
A
common language of race and white solidarity
Consider
this passage from an e-mail sent to Stormfront: “I am a 20-year-old white American
with roots in North America dating back 300 years and then into Europe, Normandy,
France. Well anyways, I am proud to here [hear] of an organization for the advancement
of whites.”
Racists like Black are basically using the Internet to foster a notion of whiteness
that unites old world racial nationalisms (i.e. in Europe and Scandinavia) with the
white diasporas of the New World (i.e. United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia
and New Zealand and parts of South America). Despite the diversity of racist groups
in cyberspace, they share a common language of race and white solidarity. Firstly,
this notion of whiteness promotes a racial lineage that is plotted through, and to
a large extent sustained in cyberspace. The Internet is the technology of globalization,
interconnecting permeable human cultures. Yet in the racist Net-world, the Internet
is used to foster an ethos of racial separation. With the goal of establishing “white
fortresses” in cyberspace, these racists are forging new connections between ultra
right-wing sites in North America, Western Europe and Scandinavia at a considerable
pace. Yet, it is still the American websites and news groups that are the most sophisticated
and the most active.
The big question remains exactly how many people are being drawn into racist activism
by the Net? Recently, Alex Curtis—self-proclaimed “Lone Wolf of hate” from San Diego
and producer of the extremist magazine The Nationalist Observer—claimed to “reach
100s - 1000s of the most radical racists in the world each week.” However, it is
dangerous to over-estimate the level of activity. The number of white racists regularly
involved in the Internet globally is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000, divided
into 10 to 20 clusters. Once again, it is impossible to offer anything other than
an educated guess. The number of “hits” on a web page, for example, need not indicate
“sympathetic inquiries,” rather they could include opponents, monitoring agencies
and researchers. The key point is that these relatively small numbers of people can
have a significant presence.
Not only are they using the Net for recruitment, but attempts are also being made
to combine cyber-activism with that of the “real world.” For example, the RaceLink
web page offers a list of activists’ contact details and locations around the world.
Additionally, The Aryan Dating Page (now posted on Stormfront) offers a contact service
for white supremacists. While most of the profiles are American, there are also personal
ads from a range of countries including Brazil, Canada, Holland, Norway, Portugal,
U.K., Slovakia and Australia as well as from white South Africans.
Lonely
hearts in search of their own kind
One
of the interesting things about scrolling through the personal ads is that the faces
that appear are nothing like the archetypal image of “The Racist.” There are very
few skinheads with Nazi tattoos: these white supremacist “lonely hearts,” mostly
in their twenties and thirties, look surprisingly prosaic. Take 36-year-old Cathy,
who lives in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, which is far from an ethnic melting
pot, but who is “desperate to move to a WHITE area!” She appears in the photograph
in a rhinestone outfit with glitzy earrings: “The picture of me is a little overdone,”
she explained. “I had photos done with the girls at the office … I look like an Aryan
Princess when I get dressed up. But I am really the girl-next-door type.” Or, 19-year-old
Debbie from New England, who wrote: “I am [a] young white power woman who seeks someone
seriously devoted to the white power movement. A person whose commitment is undaunting.
I would like to speak with men who share the same values as I.”
The male ads provide an equally unexpected set of portraits of white supremacy. Frank
(see photo next page), a 48-year-old divorced single parent from Palo Alto California,
writes: “Today I’m a responsible parent and have my views but don’t go out of my
way to let it be known unless confronted. I have tattoos, and am down for the Aryan
race. So hope to hear from you fine ladies in the near future.” Here Frank presents
himself as a kind of white supremacist “new man.” This is contrasted with John Botti’s
ad, a 25-year-old from Los Altos who presents himself as a preppy, “going places”
kind-of-guy. He wrote: “I am looking for some who is as conservative and pretty as
hell. Equally as important is someone with a quality education.” These are images
of fascism in the information age that bear little resemblance to previous incarnations.
This was brought home very powerfully by the image of Max, a 36-year-old Canadian,
who described himself as a “long-time Movement activist.” He listed his interests
as anthropology, Monty Python’s humour, the Titanic story, Celtic music and [U.S.]
Civil War re-enacting. Max chose to have his photograph taken at his computer keyboard,
where he presents himself as the picture of technological proficiency. This struck
me, the first time I saw it, as a very appropriate image of the face of today’s racism.
However, these postmodern portraits of racism are coloured by fragmented and multiple
identities little suited to the disciplined organization of “real world” racist politics.
In this mercurial world, can the ideology and commitment to racism be turned off
as quickly as the computer? There is some evidence to suggest that Net-racists have
a rather chaotic affiliation to white power politics. For example, American Milton
J. Kleim, who was once the self-styled “Net Nazi Number 1,” renounced his politics
almost overnight.
Shifting
from National Socialism to misanthropy
Kleim
first became involved through Usenet, a network of online newsgroups, as a student
in 1993. But he didn’t have a face-to-face meeting with anyone in the racist movement
until he graduated in 1995. Less than a year later, he abandoned racism altogether.
In an e-mail interview he commented: “The act of leaving was painful, and the aftermath
stressful […] I essentially became a ‘nonperson,’ and I haven’t really been denounced
[…] I only received two or three harassing phone calls from displeased movement adherents…
The saddest part is that my ‘movement’ experience was my most exciting, most rewarding
time in my life,” he commented. “I’ve moved from National Socialism to Misanthropy.”
Racist culture offered Kleim a sense of purpose through an online identity and a
temporary resolution to existential crisis. This same sense of purpose comes through
in many interviews with Net racists. What is equally true is that this does not last
and the virtual mask of racial extremism can be quickly cast off.
Not only does individual commitment appear shaky, but so do the larger networks of
Net-based racist groups. In the “real world,” each group generally revolves around
or owes its existence to a charismatic leader who takes on the initiative of forging
alliances. These agreements, however, are generally short-lived because of power
struggles between the various leaders. In cyberspace, this fall-out seems to be occurring
at an even faster pace. Basically, the condensed rate of exchange in cyberspace shortens
the fuse for an explosion. The vituperative on-line feud between Harold A. Covington
of the National Socialist White People’s Party, William L. Pierce of the National
Alliance and both sets of their supporters (in the U.S.) is perhaps the best example
of this syndrome. Reflecting on “The Future of the White Internet,” Covington wrote:
“The Net is being viciously and tragically abused by a shockingly large number of
either bogus or deranged ‘White Racists’ […] I think it is too early just yet to
quantify just how the lunacy interacts with, counteracts and affects the impact of
the serious political work. It is like panning for gold in a flowing sewer; both
the raw and toxic sewage and the gold are there, and the question is how much gold
any individual can extract before the fumes and the corruption drive him off—or until
he keels over and falls in and becomes part of the sewer system.”
The racist use of the Internet is not about to deliver a mass global racist movement.
In this sense, the imitators of fascism and Nazism are not in the same league as
the zealots of yesteryear. Yet the significance of this phenomenon should not be
sought in the numbers of activists.The fact that those involved remain relatively
small should not be read as a comforting statistic. What, then, is the nature of
this threat? The real danger is perhaps that in the information age isolated acts
of racist terrorism may become commonplace. In this respect the 1999 London bombing
campaign conducted by David Copeland—who found his “recipe” for nail bombs on the
Net—may be an indication of the form that racist violence will take in this millennium.
These acts are perpetrated by individuals whose prime contact with racist politics
is via their computer keyboards. |
