| Hateland -
Articles |
??/??/02
- NSRUS response to The Irish Times article of 19/01/02
A new highway for old hatreds
NSRUS
Journalist surfs net and comes up with half truths ,forgets
first rule of journalism check primary sources In the
interests of ' Free Speech NSRUS are pleased to present
the article published in the Irish Times of 18th January
.
NSRUS comments in bold.
Opinion Fri, Jan 18, 02
A new highway for old hatreds
By Medb
Ruane Resistance Records of West Virginia, USA, bill themselves
as "the soundtrack for white revolution". White
power is where they're at. "Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River," John Denver
sang. "Life is older there, older than the trees,
(take me home, country roads)."
One day in virtual paradise, Suzanne "Flynn",
a virtual executive with the company, lent her name to
a website designed to make Ireland a nation once again.
With A.L. "Byrne" of Store Street, London, she
put her moniker on to a national socialist site that urges
Irish citizens to "say no to a black Ireland",
or any other colour - except white.
The intention of the site is not to make Ireland a
‘nation once again’, and there is no mention
of green or red people being prohibited. Also, the site
is a concrete fact, in the real world. Nothing virtual
about it really.
The site is still up. Its original, unwelcome, links to
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael websites were stripped
away late last year, as were links to the Defence Forces
and the FCA that had been billed via a signpost suggesting
opportunities for practical military and weapons training.
The site is still up, hence the article, although there
have been precedents for journalists inventing problems
in order to write garbled, incoherent rants with the intention
of disturbing the general public. Fiannas’ Fail and
Geal were afraid people would find nothing to contradict
NSRUS on their own websites, and had valid concerns regarding
plagiarism and shared content. There might also have been
bandwidth problems due to the volume of traffic being
directed towards them.
"I have removed my page because it was being misused
by a bunch of racists \ try to spread lies about Ireland,"
says Eanna, a webmaster the site abused.
NSRUS can categorically deny abusing any webmasters.
"No matter what your race or religion you are welcome
in Ireland. What we do not want in Ireland is racists
or bigots: the Irish Defence Forces, Permanent or Reserve,
do not allow these racists to enlist."
Now who is living in a virtual paradise?
Racism has risen almost as fast as Internet technology
over the last decade. Every new byte in cyberspace spawns
equal opportunities for speech that is banned on land.
Put another way, virtually every site is racist. Surely
not!
But it's different on-line. Rules and regulations generated
after years of racial and intra-ethnic conflict are shorn
away as though the world never experienced Nazism, Pol
Pot-ism or the evils of apartheid. It's a new highway
for old hatreds on a global scale.
Free and unregulated opinion. Now there’s a novelty.
Whatever would Pol-Pot think?
"Flynn" and "Byrne" are not contactable.
Numbers ring engaged or don't exist. E-mail inquiries
to their nsrus site (national socialists are us) yield
a polite automatic reply saying "thank you for your
input".
For ‘not contactable’ read ‘declined
to respond’. If the organisers cannot be contacted
by eager racists, what is all the fuss about? A polite
automatic response thanking one for one’s input.
Sounds like a Government, Media website or even worse,
technical support helpline. For ‘NSRUS’, put
in whatever you want i.e..No Speculation Ruane, Unless
Sure.
Yet the site publishes voices that claim to be authentic
Irish stock - or "folk" (volk) as they put it.
Can’t authentic Irish stock decide whom they will
associate with, or not? Are there no incommunicado Irish
people? What about ‘the quiet man’?
The voices speak in words stolen from wider debate. "At
present there is a moral inertia dominating the Irish
Political scene," says an editorial suspicious of
pregnant immigrants and critical of granting citizenship
to babies born in the Irish Republic of non-Irish parents
The veiled accusation of plagiarism, and the admission
that there is wider debate about Non-White immigration
sound like pure spite. ‘If I’m not allowed to
talk about it, you shouldn’t be able to either’
school of journalism.
"If racially and culturally British 'settlers' were
and are percieved as a threat to the Irish Identity, then
what conclusions must one draw from the invasion of Ireland
by Nigerians and others?"
Surely, a valid question for Sinn Fein, FF and FG?
Madness leaks through. Crazy versions of evolutionary
theory give the game away that whoever is running this
site is not the full shilling, although they define themselves
as pure Euro stock.
There are many crazy Europeans. Is Medb trying to imply
that people of pure stock can’t be mad, therefore
the authors must be mixed race? Why would mixed race people
be against a black Ireland? All very confused, and confusing
Paranoid delusions from an "Irish mother" trying
to raise a family in multi-racial London can't but be
sad, as well as bad.
At last we agree. It is sad that a mother has to bring
up her children on her own, but in the multi-kulti maelstrom
that is London it must also make a bad situation worse.
Yet millions take them and their like quite seriously.
The number of hits recorded on such sites is now running
into hundreds of thousands annually.
Which was bandwidth problem I was talking about earlier.
FF and FG were quite happy to announce they had a website
until people started actually visiting them in their thousands.
Of course it was only to see what their manifesto had
to say about the asylum mess, and as soon as they realised
that there was no comment, they all left again. Still,
all very troubling,when all one had in mind was to establish
one’s party’s technological credentials in the
virtual world
And although the Irish site may be stupid - a racial stereotype
they need to fix? - the sites you get to from it are so
smart they could sound reasonable.
But not to a journalist from the Irish Times of course.
All Medb’s innate racism, if she ever had any, has
been educated out of her. She could not have a racist
thought if she tried, which makes her uniquely qualified
to investigate these sites. Unlike the rest of you
These sites lie, of course, again and again, the way the
far right always does. But the very way they misuse the
work of established scientists and writers - Dawkins,
Nietzsche and so on - gives them a credibility that might
impress.
In ‘The Selfish Gene’ Dawkins spends the
last chapter telling us we can rise above our basic nature
as he had observed it in the preceding chapters. What
it all boiled down to was; don’t be racist, it’s
not very nice. Nietzsche of course, didn’t care about
being nice, so his advice would have been to carry on
saying whatever you liked. I liked the way Medb is impressed
by how well the racists misuse the work of established
scientists and writers. She knows sound journalistic practices
when she sees them.
Attempts by police forces or Internet service providers
to close them down are transformed into defences of the
free speech principles that ground Western societies.
Critiques of their anti-social fundamentals are presented
as undemocratic conspiracies fuelled by hypocrisy.
Yep, that about sums it up Medb. You give good soundbite
The distinction between harmful and illegal sites is key
to the complex Internet debate, Internet advocate Colm
Reilly told me (contact me by email, see below, if you
want to learn more). You can access watchdogs to protect
your modem from, say, pornographic materials, which are
harmful, especially if children access them accidentally.
The implication being that they are not so harmful
if children access them on purpose? Are pornographic materials
always harmful, even if one accesses them by accident?
But vast differences in how illegality is approached or
understood make it more, not less, likely such sites will
multiply. After being dragged through French courts for
allowing Nazi memorabilia sales on line, Yahoo! asked
a US federal court to declare the French could not hold
it accountable for breaking French law because as an American
company it was subject to American law, chiefly the First
Amendment guarantee of free speech. Was that what the
founding fathers fought for?
No. They fought for the right to free speech, to spread
sedition, keep as many slaves if they wished, pay no taxes
to England, carry guns if they wanted. All sorts of principles
equally as valid today as they were then.
Different attitudes to free speech between Europe and
the US mean George Bush's America has facilitated more
hate speech from neo-Nazi groups in a few years than Germany
allowed in four decades.
Why shouldn’t Americans be allowed to facilitate
hate-speech? The Germans had their chance and they cocked
it up.
And the post-September 11th dilemma is whether the US
will decide to regulate without abusing individual rights.
Yet Yahoo! has effectively yielded to French law and public
opinion by banning Nazi memorabilia from its auction sites.
While governments argue with each other and providers
about the legal and ethical morasses, hateful and incitement-based
sites multiply like head lice.
Expanding to fill the market vacuum no doubt
Rants pass for analysis, and one man's truth is valued
equally to another man's lies. In an age when judgment
was never more difficult or more necessary, the Internet
debate strikes at the heart of the liberal ethos.
Moral equivalence being the speciality of the Liberal,
I’m sure you’ll find a way to decide which are
the wrong opinions and which man’s lies are truth,
Medb. When the bosses have approved your opinions, do
let the rest of us know, won’t you?
Free speech for all, no matter who gets hurt?
You also give good headline. But then, we could expect
no less from the Irish Time’s leading female journalist.
I’m sure Mammy is very proud of her little girl,
and hopes to live to see a Black Ireland |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
|
|
|
