Stormfront

It has long been difficult for the broadly-liberal west to decide how to deal with racism; freedom of speech dictates that all viewpoints ought to share the right of free public expression, though a peaceful society must, by definition, prevent the incitement of hatred and violence that would inevitably result in destabilizing society itself. Thus it becomes possible for a venue such as this to exist, even though its active membership would never be allowed to march in the streets of any western city. And given that it has a legal right to be here, however distasteful the majority of the internet community might find it, we may as well acknowledge its presence rather than look the other way and pretend such things don't exist.

This is an open online community, perhaps *the* community, of and for white supremacists. These range from self-appointed rednecks, whose interests probably lie mainly in the defense of their Tennessee backwoods communities from bands of roaming blacks set on raping their daughters, to neo-Nazis who quote the Fuhrer and extend their hatred and contempt to all the traditional enemies of the Aryan brotherhood.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as senseless extremism, undeserving of our attentions or concern. I happen to believe that it would be foolish to do that, or to pretend that we're looking at only a small, isolated band of lunatics with delusions of building, or re-establishing, a master race. We've made that mistake before.

There may be no real power here, no prospect of these words of hate rising beyond the level of background noise; the political and legal power in the world rests in the hands of those who will keep these voices no more than whispers in the dark, for now. And I know there will be many who feel that even drawing attention to these people gives them a credibility that they can't earn successfully for themselves.

Nevertheless, I'd urge you to take at least a short time to visit this forum, and touch the real hatred that emanates from these pages. It may be - most probably will be, extremely uncomfortable and even perhaps scary to know that these may be the voices of your neighbors, your workmates, maybe your community leaders. In places, it's disturbing and very much so. But you know, it's fine to tell kids that there are no monsters out there, but as adults, we ought to know better. We owe it to ourselves to be better educated than that.

This is not, of course, the real face of the movement; that's likely to be known only to those already deeply involved, and those whose job is to infiltrate them. This is a public venue and as such, it's a somewhat diluted version that may instruct people not to marry outside of their own race, but not discuss the actions to be taken against anyone breaking that rule. Some things are best left to the imagination.

I can't accurately rate and review this, because the normal categories don't apply here. I can give it a MEH because I can't recommend it, but as I said at the start, there's a free speech issue which means I can't entirely condemn it either. I think you need to know it's out there, and not forget, and I think I'll leave it at that.