By David Futrelle
It’s not altogether surprising to see a writer at the far-right internet shitsheet Return of Kings crying “censorship” in the case of The Daily Stormer, the notorious neo-Nazi hate site that has been banished to the so-called Dark Web.
What is a little surprising is the language Return of Kings contributor “Jimbo Jones” used in his defense of the neo-Nazi site. “Years from now, ” Jimbo wrote in a post yesterday, “the ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia may be remembered—oh so ironically—as a digital rights Kristallnacht” ushering in a new era of internet censorship.
Wait, what?
Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) refers, of course, to the Nazi-orchestrated orgy of anti-Jewish violence in November 1938 that destroyed thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues and led to the deaths of hundreds of German Jews. To use the terms to describe the booting of a neo-Nazi site from the public internet is, well, pretty fucking egregious.
Jimbo also repurposes “First they came,” that famous poem from German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller lamenting the cowardice of German intellectuals in the face of Hitler, in his defense of the neo-Nazi site. Classy, dude.
Similarly egregious is Jimbo’s attempt to disguise the truly vile nature of The Daily Stormer, which he described as
a satirical website that the mainstream media labels as “neo-Nazi,” “anti-semitic” and “white supremacist,” among other arbitrary, self-serving descriptors .. .
Not even close. The writers and commenters at The Daily Stormer may make a lot of obnoxious jokes, but there is nothing satirical about the site; it’s run by a self-described neo-Nazi who is sincere in his hatred of Jews and people of color as Hitler himself was. Judging from their comments, most of his readers are equally sincere in their hatreds. Nothing ironic about these Nazis.
Indeed, the Daily Stormer sent a contingent to the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, with one of the site’s regular contributors telling Vice News that the rally
means we are showing to this parasitic class of anti-white vermin that this is our country, it was built by our forefathers, and it will remain our country … At some point, we will have enough power that we will clean them from our streets forever! That which is degenerate in white countries will be removed!
Hilarious, right?
Ironically, most hardcore alt-right neo-Nazis — like the kind who read and write The Daily Stormer — consider Return of Kings publisher Roosh Valizadeh, who is of Persian and Armenian descent, one of those “parasites,” and would boot him from their utopian white ethnostate even more quickly than The Daily Stormer was booted off the public internet after Charlottesville. That is, if they didn’t simply kill him outright.
At this point my Irony Meter has been broken so many times I think it’s probably beyond repair.
Digital Kristallnacht
As opposed to the actual Kristallnacht. Which actually happened. Where alot of actual people died.
http://www.joshmillard.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/josh-tweet-niemoller.png
The existence of the Daily Stormer is an argument for censorship of the internet, tbh.
That poem is probably particularly apposite in the cases of people like Roosh or Milo and their non Aryan, non straight, non whatever fellow travellers in the alt-right.
Niemöller himself was an avid supporter of the Nazis when they were attacking people who weren’t him. But he came to learn the hard way that previous enthusiastic collaboration provided no immunity when it came to his turn.
(Personally I’m of the opinion Niemöller only wrote that poem to save his own skin when the Allies had won. Wonder if Milo will similarly play the prodigal son card when they turn on him?)
Hitler killed 6 million people satirically so it totally doesn’t count. If you SJWs weren’t so uptight and PC, you’d laugh at the holocaust too!
I mean, really. What do these assholes have to do for these other assholes to stop using the satire defense. At this point, I would not be surprised if there was someone out there who has actually said my first paragraph word for word. Only seriously.
I’m remembering my ol’ German professor now. He was involved in the liberation of the camps, and his scholarly passion was dealing with Holocaust deniers. When I was working as his student assistant, that meant I had to help catalog and file all of the Holocaust-denier material he’d collected. He was a very sweet man, but he’d get passionate about the Holocaust. It *had* happened. He’d seen the evidence for himself. He wasn’t a swearing man, but I saw him come close a couple times.
I’m tempted to say that the Daily Stormer would break his heart, but on reflection, I think he’d sigh, then square his shoulders to deal with them. He was that kind of man.
@WWTH Holocaust deniers, probably.
I, for one, am over and done with the “it’s just a joke!” excuse. That site is absolutely not satire; neo-Nazis are not just “talking shit on the Internet”; death threats are not jokes.
Holy shit, I’m tired of these intellectual amoebae.
For what it’s worth, neimoller did oppose Hitler well before he would have been in the crosshairs. He wasn’t selfless like the White Rose but I don’t think he was trying to save his skin either.
It’s so hearthbreaking see that disgraceful Anglin doing a nazi heil in my very homecountry. Hope he got arrested since fascism is now forbidden in Italy.
Italy suffered a lot under nazism and fascism, I don’t want that part of history be back again, neither there nor everywhere else in the world.
… satirical of what exactly? You satirize things you disagree with. Jonathan Swift didn’t support eating babies.
Karl Popper and his paradox of tolerance just keep coming to mind these days. Why is that, I wonder?
Wouldn’t being “banned from the internet” require action by ICANN? Like, if GoDaddy and Google don’t want to host your site, you can look elsewhere (like some Russian nocturnal airline/government entity, for a completely random example) for your hosting, and you can even buy a server box, and a great big pipe to go with it, and host it yourself on your own property; the only reason that wouldn’t work would be if ICANN refused to allow you to use their DNS servers, which is not a thing that happens to regular people who don’t want to register a new TLD or something. If weev is too bone-idle to manage his own business in such a way that it’s accessible to his customers that’s his problem.
gosh this is so like rain on your wedding day
First they came for the Nazis and I said “hell yeah fuck ’em up do you need any help let’s make it a party”
…This is the worst kind of cultural appropriation, first and foremost.
I don’t have much else to say on the article, so I’ll bring up something tangentially relevant: I talked to one of the people who’s teaching the online German class I’m taking, and he was a pretty cool guy. Dude was even willing to do research as to what non-standard pronouns nonbinary people use when it comes to the German language, and was fully prepared to address me as such (I’m genderqueer, but am at the moment fine with feminine pronouns (she/her, or in the case of German, “sie” and so forth)).
Also, I tried huckleberry hibiscus soda. Not my thing.
Fuck The Daily Stormer and fuck Return Of Kings.
‘SJW’ and ‘feminazi’ are his favorite words, guaranteed…
Sorta-kinda surprised how those neo-nazis who may read the daily stormer haven’t started some witch hunt for Roosh considering his own background and history. He isn’t white enough for neo-nazis.
But at this point, I don’t care. Different trash, same bin.
The Daily Stormer was dropped from Cloudflare’s anti-DDoS and security services (until then Cloudflare had a strict content neutrality policy), so their servers immediately went down once they had no DDoS protection. Dropping them was a personal decision by Cloudflare’s CEO. They’re currently running the site on their own server using Tor for security and DDoS protection, which means their service is much slower and the site is harder to access for people who don’t have good computer skills.
@runsinbackground
That’s a good point. It’s the ol’ freeze peach argument all over again. These are private businesses who are free to refuse service for pretty much any reason that doesn’t violate discrimination laws. And I’m pretty sure that literal Nazis are not a protected class.
Nope. Wasn’t built by “our” forefathers, but by the abducted Africans they kept enslaved. If we wanted it to be ‘our’ country, we shoulda picked our own damn cotton. That ship has sailed.
They actually need to provide services to the general public without pre-screening or denying service on a totally arbitrary basis. But it’s a good enough reason if the company opposes what you stand for.
i have to say that these guys have already done so much against freedom of speech on the internet. Whenever some kind of oppressive internet crackdown thing like SOPA or FIFA or whatever comes around, these guys overwhelmingly support it because supposeldy it’s good for big business and therefore good for whites.
Like how Gamergate clowns supported a guy who literally wanted to shut down all video games forever because he hated Anita Sarkesian.
They’re literally people who sit on the high end of the sinking Titanic and laugh at all the other people panicking about drowning; then claw, piss and scream as they plunge into the freezing water with the SJW-thingies they profess to hate so much.
Honestly, seeing Stormer, Breitfart and Rebel Media in Canada take advertising hits like this really, really fills my heart with joy.
“Our Forefathers” shoulda picked their own damn cotton if they wanted it to be their country.