Jackboots in cyberspace

The Internet has enabled the grandchildren of Adolf Hitler, the heirs to Josef Goebbels, to acquire a whole new audience, a world-wide community which six months ago was estimated to be over half a billion people, and which other estimates put at over a billion…one sixth of the world's population…in three years time.

These facists, proudly calling themselves neo-Nazis and wearing the unmistakable insignia of Hitler and his storm troopers, sprouting the age-old vilifying canards about Jews and Asians and Catholics and Blacks, have improved on the use of radio and newspapers perfected by Goebbels.

They have now attached themselves to the Internet, and are using cyberspace to reach minds which are often untutored in the truth of history and open to all manner of suggestion. Young people often wander the Internet alone, and away from the eyes of their families, and so rarely is there a censoring or parental mind at hand when a youngster comes across a virulent racist site.

The vast majority of the fascists who are now using the Internet as their medium for communication are to be found in America, Germany and to a lesser extent in Canada and the United Kingdom. Of course, there are racial hatred and vilification sites in many other countries, dedicated to the destruction of particular racial, religious or ethnic groups, or those professing a particular lifestyle.

But in terms of general hatreds…hatred of everyone who isn't white, Anglo-Saxon and following a hideously narrow branch of Protestantism…the majority originate in America. This has been the case since the Internet first became popular. But there's a brand new development, something, which has only just started to happen, something, which can be dated back to September 11th, something which should worry all of us.

This is growing conflation of the camps of the extremists. Suddenly we find that Islamic militants and neo-Nazi Christian groups are becoming confluent in purpose, if not confluent in ideology.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director, Abraham Cooper, calls it Trans-national hate, in which the technology of the Internet has united haters from all around the globe, forming the most unusual of bedfellows.

Suddenly Islamic extremists, neo-Nazis, fundamentalist Christians and other cancerous groups from the United States to Russia, from Switzerland to Pakistan, from South America to Japan, are all finding in each other validation for their virulently racist ideologies.

Now one would never ever have thought that a neo-Nazi skinhead from Berlin would happily sit down in a café and discuss his ideologies with a member of the World Church of the Creator, or an Islamic terrorist group, but that's what's happening in cyberspace on the Internet.

Because of the invisibility of the communicators, the only thing which seems to matter in cyberspace is the object of their hatred…blacks, Jews, Gays…the usual pantheon of victims. These groups of haters are sharing their ideas, reading each others' messages, supporting each others' positions.

The extremists in Australia, of course, slavishly follow the credos espoused by their peers in other countries. While in this country we certainly have our own home-grown brand of racially intolerant and prejudiced individuals, from One Nation to the League of Rights, most of the newer extremists have adopted the language, iconography and even the nuances of America.

Just as an example, let me relate to you reaction of local extremists of the far right to the September 11th assault against America.