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.
Milo Yiannopoulos claimed that net neutrality is a form of Marxism, but ending net neutrality would be pretty bad for 4chan and other offensive sites ISP’s may not want to support.
The EFF has had a lot to say on the topic of the Daily Stormer losing its hosting, etc. Mostly along the lines of “it’s not good that monolithic for-profit megacorps can effectively decide who can or cannot have a website” which I think are good and relevant points to discuss… that said, Fuck the Daily Stormer.
Well, it does mean I get to upgrade my description of Roosh V to his fans (such as Australian senator Cory Bernardi) from “rapist and rape supporter” to “rapist, rape supporter, and friend to Nazis”. That’s worth something, I bet.
I agree with the EFF in its concerns. Cloudflare needs a consistent policy on harassment and hate speech, but I’m not exactly bawling my eyes out that Nazis are getting a taste of what it’s like for someone to target you without any due process. I oppose the death penalty in all civilian cases, but I’m not losing sleep over people who raped and murdered children getting executed.
It’s important to note that using Tor can really suck, and I don’t think the Daily Stormer’s readers care enough about improving themselves to know how to use it well:
Dear Anglin:
Ah, the central paradox of Holocaust denial. “It never happened. But the Jews deserved it.”
It’s a pattern with these guys. They complain about something (Kristallnacht, censorship, oppressive gender roles) while also admiring it.
Ah, the Schrodinger joke, my favorite defense of the bigots who cannot fully accept their label due to social stigma and shame. It’s pretty simple. If you think that what they said was repulsive, threatenning or simply incredibly stupid, it was a joke and you should learn to live a little. If you agree with them or think they are having a point, then it was said in a straight fashion. It’s the favorite weapon of the bigot that hides beneath the mantle of the troll and agitator.
Their second favorite weapon is the good old ”free speech” defense. Any reaction of disgust at their opinions and ideas that would result in a push-back be it by boycotting those who would finance their activity or provide help to organise them up to expressing that disgust in a mirror fashion to theirs is automatically intolerent and a danger to the very concept of freedom of speech. This means they want all the power, but none of the responsability all the while being fundamentally opposed to the concept of individuals having power.
Bobbie Loblaw:
QFFT
When these jerks say stuff like “This is our country!” I’d answer with; “Okay, genius; What INDIGENOUS AMERICAN TRIBE do you belong to?!”
I’ve come down to the conclusion that when these bigots….
* ….apply terms like “Kristallnacht” to their own misfortune….
* ….borrow a term (Red/Blue Pill) from a movie series written by transwomen….
* ….wear a Johnny Cash T-Shirt (despite Johnny Cash being anathema to Alt-Wrong hate stuff)….
* ….use music from artists, without permission, who would oppose the Far-Right agenda….
* ….ETC….ETC….ETC….
….I think they do it on purpose. They do it to troll us. It’s similar to the weird sort of appropriation that turned a goofy peace-loving stoner frog/internet meme into an Alt-Wrong hate symbol.
I also call these jerks, The Alt-WRONG.
Today on #FoxNews
http://i.imgur.com/wEcHX3e.jpg
This dog was found on my porch back in February.
Nice doggy…
What can I say that y’all haven’t already said so well.
I laugh at roosh v and hope he gets the boot too.
First they came by themselves, and I said nothing for I didn’t really want to be even watching.
I recently came across the idea that tolerance isn’t a moral imperative so much as a peace treaty. The minute one party starts advocating violence and/or mass deportations, much less genocide, they’ve broken the treaty and we don’t have to abide by it any more.
I got nothin’. Not a witty thought. How are we still fighting fascists 72 years after WW2 ended? I hate these fools, do none of them have family who suffered during the war? Civilian grand/great grandparents who had to live under Occupation and/or with food shortages, bombing and the risk of death, forced labour, concentration camps? Serving grand/great grandparents who fought, were captured, starved, forced into labour camps, killed? How are they so ignorant, forgetful, disrespectful?
There is nothing satirical about a website promoting the hate that killed millions of people.
“cat” wrote:
How Do You Do, Fellow Cats!
gosh this is so like rain on your wedding day
It’s like may-ee-aaaaaaames
When you’re really a shit
Ah, the Schrodinger joke
I believe this is also known as Schrodinger’s Douchebag. Most concisely expressed by the noted philosopher Krusty T. Klown, when he said: “I was kidding! When you make that face, I was kidding!”
weirwoodtreehugger: Not to nitpick, but the Nazis killed an awful lot more than 6 million people. 6 million Jews, and (by most estimates) at least another 5 million people, among them leftists, union members, disabled people, LGBT folk, and so forth. I know you’re more than likely aware of this, I just wanted to take the opportunity to emphasize that the enormity of the crimes of the Nazis goes beyond the Shoah. This isn’t to imply the Holocaust is undeserving of the scholarly and popular attention it receives, of course, nor that this extermination of political dissidents and other “undesirables” is even comparable to their attempt to complete wipe all traces of Jewish people from the face of the earth. Only that the other victims died too, and Nazis, past, present, and future, deserve to have the true extent of the horrors they caused be public knowledge. They should have it shoved in their faces and down their throats, and, if they’re going to try to spread their odious philosophy, they should have to do so to a public which is keenly aware of what they’ve done.
I know that knowledge of the Holocaust (by which I mean the campaign to exterminate the Jewish population, specifically) doesn’t dissuade Nazis, but maybe if some of the disaffected blue-collar white guys, construction workers, plumbers, etc (i.e. a demographic which is strongly represented in Neo-Nazi groups, to put it mildly) who would be otherwise be amenable to the nativism, the fantasy of superiority, the convenient scapegoats, all the security blankets that Nazism provides, knew how easily they could end up victims, “Aryan” or no, they’d think twice. I realize that there is approximately a 0% chance that anyone in that demographic who is currently weighing the pros and cons of becoming a Nazi is reading these comments, but it bears mentioning all the same. Sorry if this post is a little incoherent, I haven’t slept too much or too well for the better part of a week. I don’t mean to seem like I’m calling you out or anything. I just wanted to expand on what you said.
@JS: That sure is an interesting dog. I’m jealous, there are foxes which live in the forest behind my parent’s summer house, but we never see them, we just hear them screaming bloody murder, which is less cute, but knowing they’re there, doing their own thing, makes me happy all the same.
@Molloy, Moran, Malone
Don’t forget Romani people. They got pretty fucked in that, too, and they didn’t even get reparations until decades later. (It comes to mind likely because a Holocaust survivor came to speak at my middle school, and while I believe he himself was Jewish, he did mention how “g*psy” was a slur for Romani people. It’s the only part I clearly remember, aside from me trying to give him a butterscotch.)
You’re right, I ought to have mentioned the fact that they, too, were targeted for extermination; however, the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make in the latter half of my comment was that perhaps the revelation that the Nazis of yore also saw fit to treat an awful lot of people who, in all likelihood, looked *gasp* an awful lot like the average person who might be interested in joining up with the Neo-Nazi. Hypothetically, if this fact was better known, it might make at least some of people just a little more leery of hitching themselves to that specific post. It’s cynical, but if they don’t care about, happily minimize, celebrate, or outright deny what happened to the Jews, I can’t imagine that they would have any significant empathy for/visceral reaction to what the Nazis did to another group which they likely know next to nothing about, except, perhaps, that they don’t look like them and aren’t up to their standards of “racial purity”. Hearing about how (white, German/Aryan) unionists, on the other hand….
I know that a lot of American Neo-Nazis have backgrounds in the types of jobs which have very heavy union presence. Maybe airing this information would give at least a tiny number of them some pause when thinking about which horse to back. It’s profoundly disturbing that, y’know, the MILLIONS and MILLIONS of other people who were exterminated mean less than nothing to them, but maybe their capacity for empathy, defective though it may be, would be able to finally internalize that, gee, maybe these Nazi guys aren’t all they’re cracked up to be? Of course, even in this hypothetical, somebody simply not identifying as a Nazi doesn’t mean all of their other political beliefs would change; this person would still be a far-right white nationalist. So, the best case scenario is only a teeny, tiny improvement, but still. I’d take it.
I hope that was clear.
@ Molloy, Moran, Malone
Awesome plan. I agree we need to emphasize that the Nazis didn’t target just Jewish people. They targeted many groups and demographics (including those that some today’s NeoNazis may belong to).
It’s also important to emphasize that Slavs were also a huge target and that Slavic/Russian/Ukrainian NeoNazis would have been exterminated under Hitler’s regime.
Finally; It’s time to take back the term “Aryan” and return it to the Iranian/Central Asian/Northern Indian faces it belongs too….
….Heck; IRAN means “Aryan/Land of the Aryans”.
REAL ARYANS ARE NOT NORDIC/GERMANIC GUYS!
I tend to agree with JRR Tolkien who objected that “Aryan” (in so far as it meant anything) meant Indo-European. As in languages, those spoken from Sri Lanka to Iceland. Or, in context, it doesn’t mean what Nazis think it means. I doubt anything does, ever.
And yes, the Romany and the Zinti in the Holocaust, let’s not forget them either.
A friend visited Auschwitz some years ago and the tour guide told the group “Here is where the gypsies were kept, and even here they did no work.” In fact they were given no work – and no shelter either, in the Polish winter – to the extent that mothers used to fight to get their children “accepted” for medical experiments, because inside the “hospital” block they would at least be warm, and probably fed.
I don’t have any answers for dealing with people who think that’s funny, trivial, or a good idea, or something they might like to inflict on other people who are not them. I’m keen to prevent them marching in my town, though.
Wait, the tour guide at Auschwitz made a racist joke about the Romani? On the tour? The tour at AUSCHWITZ?!
The Nazis were fine allowing an economically left-wing faction, but they betrayed those people at the earliest opportunity.
Murdering people with disabilities was also strongly rejected by most of the German public, even though Hitler’s opinion that the physically disabled and mentally ill should get a “merciful death” was mainstream. The Nazis continued the “euthanasia” program in secret after the public backlash.
Nazis/alt-right do not “do” satire. There is no humor in anything they say, just racist, misogynistic, xenophobic garbage. I wager that true satire would go over most of their tiny heads.