In the beginning, many of us were glad to see the Canadian National Post appear as a competition daily to the fossilized and boring Globe and Mail, hoping that marketplace forces would act as some restraint on some liberal spewing, given that middle-class Canada is still on the conservative side. Little did we know that we would have in this "New kid on the block" yet another mealymouth neighborhood bully.
Once again, your worthy Zundelsite has made it to the news. Here is one good example of exactly what I mean in an op ed piece, dated today, titled Lead Editorial | Cybertaste
The prevailing theory is that normal rules of mass communication do not apply to the Internet, where speech is free in both senses of the word. "Obscenity" and "hate speech" are empty legalisms or pressure-group jargon in a world where a Web site run off computers in the Cayman Islands can deliver content to surfers the world over.
But national governments have not yet endorsed this view. In November, the Superior Court of Paris ordered California-based Yahoo! Inc. to block French Web surfers from buying Nazi-themed merchandise (such as Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg mouse pads and concentration camp uniforms) on its auction site. In December, Germany's highest court ruled that domestic hate speech laws apply to Australian Holocaust-denier Frederick Toben, even though Mr. Toben's Web site is hosted outside Germany's borders. In October, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal conducted hearings into complaints that a Web site used by Toronto Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, www.zundelsite.org, promoted hatred against Jews -- again, even though the site is situated in California. And in August, Saudi Arabia shut down a site entirely, saying matters had "gone beyond what is acceptable, and pornographic and other offensive sites are mushrooming."
But in nations where citizens have more than one Internet access point -- almost every country -- the Saudi solution is hardly realistic. The French cannot shut down Yahoo!. Canada cannot block Zundelsite. And Germany cannot block Mr. Toben's hate-mongering Adelaide Institute. Judges can issue judgments and tribunals can hold hearings, but the Web keeps serving whatever fetishists and cranks care to post on it.
Still, a recent announcement suggests the Web may be about to clean itself up. Though Yahoo! is still trying to overturn the Paris judgment, the company announced this week that its auction sites will no longer sell Nazi memorabilia and items relating to other inflammatory racist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
The move should be no surprise. When the Web came of age in the early- and mid-90s, futurists predicted it would be a high-entropy medium in which content and visitors would spread themselves evenly across a vast virtual ether. But following the big bang, the expanding Internet organized itself into dot-com galaxies and stars -- Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Canada.com, etc. -- whose gravitational power sucks hits from the undifferentiated space that surrounds them. There are still millions of 10-visitor-a-day amateur sites, and new ones pop up every day. But the real action is now at a cluster of brand-name locations. And when a company creates a brand name, it protects it. Yahoo!'s decision to censor its auctions may be decried by Internet libertarians, but unlike most Internet companies, Yahoo! has real earnings, and it does not want to jeopardize them by courting a bad press.
Yahoo! is probably a leading indicator of a trend suggested by Lawrence Lessig in his 1999 book, Code, and other Laws of Cyberspace. In it, he wrote that the "invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of what it was at cyberspace's birth," and that this architecture, through commerce, is producing new elements of control. Just as Internet share prices have been subjected recently to traditional methods of valuation, so too will Internet content be constrained by traditional concerns about taste, which are the concern of corporate public relations executives the world over.
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Ref: http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/editorials/story.html?f=/stories/2001 0105/426040.html National Post <letters@nationalpost.com> January 5, 2001 =====
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However, being the erudite and civilized folks that we are, it must impress our enemies that we can shake an answer right out of our sleeves in hopes it wll appear in the National Post's Letters to the Editor.
After all! For the sake of diversity, multi-ethnic harmony and fairness. Right?
Here's a Revisionist penning his answer:
The Editor:
I note that in its January 5, 200 editorial ("Cybertaste") the National Post has underscored the alleged hate-mongering on Frederick Toben's Adelaide Institute website and, naturally, assume NP is sincerely concerned with hate-mongering.
Consider, therefore, the following passage in Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's Legends of Our Time [[Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1968], p. 142]:
"There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart against silence. Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate--healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."
Now follow Wiesel's train of thought, and note the clues that reveal precisely what he was thinking. To begin with, consider the passage quoted: A 133-word paragraph lifted from a chapter in Elie Wiesel's 1968 memoir Legends of Our Time entitled "Appointment with Hate." It underscores the primacy of hate; the word "hate" is used 7 times. The paragraph consists of 6 sentences.
The third sentence states: "The Germans did their best to teach us [to hate] but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate." Here Wiesel refers to "the Germans" in the plural. The reference is to "the Germans" who lived during the Hitler era and assimilated Nazi ideology, including its official anti-Semitism, during "the years of ordeal" that are referred to in the second sentence.
In the next sentence, the fourth, Wiesel refers to his "fleeting visit to Germany." He describes his mindset "today" and laments "having been deserted by my hate."
In the fifth sentence, Wiesel urges his co-religionist Jews to become diligent pupils in the discipline of hate, to "set apart a zone of hate--healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German."
"Every Jew" of course means all Jews; and "the German," a synecdoche, in which the part stands for the whole, points to all the Germans; not "some" Germans or German "Nazis." There is a pairing, like two bookends, of the Jewish people and the German people.
There is also a continuum between the reference to "the Germans" in the third sentence, "...today...Germany..." in the fourth sentence, and two references to "the German" in the fifth sentence.
Note also the phrase, "...what persists in the German." The verb "persists" is in the present tense, the present habitual. By "persists" Wiesel clearly means a bedrock essence that continues on. And therefore, "the German" of "today" continues being the carrier of the ideological virus that infected "the Germans" of the Hitler era.
He, "the German," is even now, years later, still very much the personification of those anti-Semitic policies, whether he was born before the Second World War, during, it or even decades after it ended. So, Wiesel lays a collective guilt trip on all Germans.
In his concluding sentence, he writes: "To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead." Here, Wiesel ends by resorting to moral blackmail to compel his co-religionist Jews to share his reactionary vision. Race hatred elevated to the status of a moral imperative, no less. Sound familiar?
Now you will understand why I look forward to the National Post editorializing against Elie Wiesel and his vicious anti-German hate-mongering. We inhabit an age that likes to portray itself as being passionately egalitarian. It would, I am certain, be warmly received.
Sincerely yours,
Orest Slepokura
Alberta, Canada
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Thought for the Day:
"We are a quarter of one per cent of the population, dispossessed and powerless, but we're still here, worshipping God in the way our ancestors did."
Britain's Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, in interview with Alice Thomson, 'A Martian would think you worship in supermarkets', The Daily Telegraph (London) 21 December 2000, p. 10.
Back to Table of Contents of the Jan. 2001 ZGrams