Friday, April 18, 2014

Stormfront: Evil Lurks in the Heart of Man

Evil lurks in the heart of man and anonymity tends to bring it out. Internet flamers would never say the jagged things they do if they had to sign their names.

Garrison Keillor



Right. Actually some of the time they love to make sure you know who they are. The site in question is called Stormfront.org. It is run by a guy named Don Black. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center in the last five years at least 100 people have been murdered by active users of this particular corner of the internet. In fact the SPLC study calls it, "a magnet for the deadly and deranged."

They have a valid argument. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian sweet heart who killed 77 of his countrymen, many of them high school age kids, was a three year alum of the site. According to him, he did it because the Norwegian government was allowing the country to be overrun by Muslims.

Wade Michael Page was a ten year member. He killed six and wounded four at a Wisconsin Sikh temple in 2012 before blowing his own diseased brains out.

Richard Poplawski was a two year veteran of the site. In April 2009 he shot and killed three Pittsburgh cops and wounded a fourth a couple of hours after his last post.

The list goes on, but you get the drift. Black was interviewed by NBC the other day and called the SPLC report a bunch of bullshit. According to him, when you have 280,000 plus users the law of averages dictates there will be a few bad apples in the ol' barrel.

He says the site doesn't tolerate anyone who advocates illegal violence and it exists solely to, "educate people as to the threats we're facing which we consider to be literally white genocide." In addition he claims Stormfront provides a community to the, "embattled white minority" which, in fact, helps prevent acts of violence by it's members.

Yes, there is nothing more comforting to some out of work, blazing racist, who owns a ton of guns, than a place which assures him every person of color in the world wants him dead.

The SPLC notes membership in the site sky rocketed after Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and acts of deadly violence perpetrated by Stormfront users began to spike after his inauguration.

A quick peek at just one of the many areas on Stormfront--a section addressing revisionism--revealed these samples of entries: "The Holocaust Cartoons," "Top Ten Reasons The Holocaust Didn't Happen," and "The Persecution of Revisionists." Another promised it would prove there is, "no physical, or forensic evidence of a holocaust either by gassing, or bullets." There was other stuff. A lot of it concerned the deliberate mis-quoting of Adolf Hitler by allied propagandists. The theory being it was done in order to mis-lead us into thinking he was saying only Germans were the master race, rather than all white people, no matter what their nationality.

In the end, it would seem no matter how many times we kick evil's ass it always returns. We just can't get rid of it. It is like a horrid weed you pull out of the garden time and time again. No matter how deep you dig into the soil, you simply can't kill the whole root.

Think not? In September of 1941, over a two day period, German troops, aided by units of Ukrainian auxiliary police, killed more than 33,000 Jews in Kiev. The ravine where they did it was called Babi Yar. On Wednesday, three masked men handed out flyers in Donetsk, Ukraine. The sheets of paper ordered all Jews over the age of 16 to register at the regional government office, now controlled by pro-Russian dissidents.

Both sides of the separatist dispute are blaming the other for the outrage. Both sides also know how it resonates throughout Europe and America. Tragically, in a far darker way, it also touches a chord on the pages of places like Stormfront.org. We, as a species, are the lesser in both cases.



sic vita est

4-18-14





1 comment:

  1. The problem with trying to reason with these types of people, there is usually a kernel of truth in just about anything. "Give an inch, take a mile," comes to mind.

    ReplyDelete