Yankee Notebook: This web is site of hatred
Toolbox
By WILLEM LANGE - Published: June 28, 2009
Time was, if you had an idea or theory you wanted to pursue, you had to go to the library or the bookstore to find some authorities on the subject. You took notes, including page references, assembled your information in a coherent structure, and then wrote or spoke about it.
The sources you used had earlier been vetted by the publishers of the books or articles and scanned for libel, facts and loopiness. Nutty ideas often were called "provocative" by the end-paper blurb writers, and you could believe them or not. But the point is that it was work – often long and laborious – to sift through what you could learn, and some assembly was required.
Not anymore.
Now, with a few key strokes and a high-speed Internet connection, you can connect with a whole world of information from the comfort of your den. You can access a Web site written in Farsi, Urdu or Spanish and request a translation. The Internet is perhaps the greatest boost to the explosion of human knowledge and communication since the invention of the printing press.
But there's a hitch: All of us know that not everything we read is fact – may in fact be fantasy or paranoia. We tend to ignore that as we hunt for opinions, data or arguments that accord with our own. We often find what we want, even though we know that what we're reading hasn't been responsibly edited.
A recent letter to the editor of The Times Argus from an apparent member of the "9/11 Truth Movement," for example, cites "facts" taken directly off the Internet about the speed at which the World Trade Centers fell – facts that lead him to conclude that a conspiracy of some sort ("the official version") has been at work to keep the truth from the common people.
I have no problem with that; this is a country in which you can say almost anything except "Fire!" in a crowded theater (unless there really is a fire).
What is provocative is the underlying assumption that dark forces are at work to hoodwink the American people. Why? And to what end?
Herr von Brunn, the aged white supremacist who recently tried to shoot up the Holocaust Museum with a .22 rifle and succeeded in killing a guard, had obsessed for years on the Internet about the threat to "white" society from Jews, blacks and "mongrels." No one knows yet what put him over the edge – the desperation of ineffective old age, perhaps, the election of an African-American president with a Muslim name, or the knowledge that in a generation or two the so-called white race will no longer be the dominant ethnic group numerically in the United States.
A failure at almost every vocation he tried, he fell back on scapegoating others for his problems. His Web site, like so many others of its ilk, blisters with fear of the coming racial apocalypse.
It's always tricky to raise the specter of National Socialism when speaking of all-American skinheads and conspiracy theorists. But we must never forget that Herr Hitler during his rise used – almost exclusively – fear, scapegoats (Jews, gypsies, homosexuals) and Aryan supremacy to lead a powerful – but economically and politically distressed – nation into megalomania and horror. At the time, almost no one sounded the tocsin. Hitler's early followers were largely underemployed, low-caste bully boys. What harm could they possibly do? Now we know.
The bright side of our current situation is that there is no leader willing to take the responsibility of rallying the radical, disaffected white right. There are a few cheerleaders, as usual – Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Liddy ("When the feds come, aim for their heads") – but they also accept no responsibility for feeding the fantasies of the white supremacy movement.
Meanwhile, the Internet provides the moist darkness where the toadstools of hate flourish.
Race hatred is as old as the human race; there are in our consciousness always "others." We suspect that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons duked it out millennia ago. Successive waves of marauding aliens rampaged across Europe and Asia all through recorded history. Slavery was (and remains) a feature of our global social order. Ever fewer Americans remember the "Help wanted" signs proclaiming, "No Irish need apply."
I have a fragile old book, produced quickly on newsprint just after the terrible Johnstown Flood of 1889, which floridly describes the scenes of the rescue and cleanup operations. "Hungarian ghouls," it reports, were cutting the fingers off dead bodies to get at their rings. Hate of others, regrettably, seems to be in our genes.
In a conversation some years ago with the former Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, I remarked on how liberal our church seems to be (in the United States, anyway – most of it). "Yes," he responded, "it's a vast ecclesiastical tent in which almost anything goes – as long as it isn't tacky." He then opined it was like that because its members tended to be higher than average on the social, economic and educational ladder, and thus were not threatened by the huddled masses yearning to be free down at the bottom rung – immigrants, atheists, homosexuals, labor unions and other riffraff daring to pursue vigorously what patriots call "the American Dream."
We shouldn't need to be reminded, but Homo sapiens comprises only one race – the human one.
Ethnicity is interesting (even though many labels, like "Hispanic," have been invented), but nowhere nearly as interesting as cultural differences, which often dictate behavior through generations of assimilation. Facing change is usually difficult for all of us, but change is the only social constant, and the face of America is changing as we speak. As we often say to complainers, deal with it!
But don't deal with it by sitting for hours on your backside in front of a computer brooding over warnings of conspiracies, apocalypse and the drowning of life as we know it in a sea of alien others.
Get up, get out, and do something positive! Isn't that the American way?
Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and retired contractor who lives in East Montpelier. His column appears each week in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus. He can be reached through his Web site, willemlange.com.
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