thanks, brother paul, for the elaboration. i may have jumped the gun
there.
On Thu, 15 May 1997, COLIN WIGHT wrote:
> The, I suppose, well meaning (although you could equally well describe this
> as simply good old fashioned wooly minded liberal toleration (commitment to
> difference?)) calls to allow the Nazi's to have their say, their space,
> their voice, could only be articulated for two reasons: (i) because deep
> down those people arguing for an unconstrained right of free speech might
> just be supporters (I am NOT assuming anyone on the list is of this form,
> but then again we simply don't know do we?); or, (ii) because they pose, or
> at least we think they don't, no threat to us (safe as we are in our
> comfortable white intellectuals bubbles), this, of course simply forgets
> those they do pose a threat to, but then why should we care?.
colin, i guess i don't see the point of argument (i) so i'll jump
straight on to (ii). i guess i'm as much in the white intellectual bubble
as anybody, altho not exactly. but i can appreciate your comment b/c
just yesterday, after browsing thru one of these "storm front" homepages,
it did occur to me that my complacency might have something to do with
my position - not much threat from the neo-nazi's here in nyc. if on
the other hand i lived in a suburb of a state where they were more
active, and my family and i had to deal with seeing them hang outside
the local 7-11 everyday (oh, i don't know) maybe i would be so scared -
and for good reason - that i would be the first to advocate sabotaging
their meetings in any way i could, especially if i could be anonymous
while doing so. but given my place in the bubble, i still have to judge
that i don't want to censor them (and this "voting down" business is still
censorship - i won't go into it).
my reason for this judgement is that fear based on good reasons is
not enough to justify censorship. if you go to one of these web-sites
and read the letters they get, you realize that for the most part
these folks don't sound like hitler - they sound sincerely afraid and
angry. and why shouldn't they be afraid of blacks? the media and
racist discourses in our culture give em every reason to be afraid.
i am taught that it's only common sense to be afraid of nazis, but
i am not taught to be afraid of the national review. yet the national
review is more influential than any nazi newsgroup could ever be. and
i really gotta go back to my original point - just as i am sincerely and
legitimately afraid of the nazis, so somebody else might be sincerely and
"legitimately" afraid of the nation of islam, the socialists, "gangsta
rap", operation rescue, the ANC, the PLO, the republican party - by
the time you're done censoring every group that could be argued is
"dangerous" foucault is gonna be all you're gonna have left to read.
in the end you gotta be willing to sit down with people who might want
to kill you. i was reading about some gay, vietnamese-american filmmaker
who interviewed a series of convicted murderers of gay men for a
documentary. he found the process deeply humanizing, whatever that
means. granted, they were locked up and he was free, but the point
is the conversations were good.
> But the threat is real and those demanding a voice intend to silence other
> voices. How to silence such a voice ethically and with sensitivity?
you don't silence it, not directly - you bring it out so you can
work with it, so you can negotiate. you can't convince somebody to
agree with you unless you show your willingness to be convinced by them.
that "willingness" might be bogus - poststructuralism without any personal
investment whatsoever. but you gotta at least respect form, gotta at
least play the game. two interesting things i've learned from reading
some online nazi documents are 1) nazis believe in environmentalism,
and 2) nazis believe in radical epistemological purity - "woolly
liberalism" is seen as hypocritical and not manly. at one point a
document said something like "we would never wage war on a non-white
nation for political reasons. if we needed land or food for survival,
then we would negotiate with non-whites to get those things, or we
would acquire them by honorable conquest." the document went on to
say something to the effect that "honorable conquest" is more manly
than the sneaky conquest pulled off by christian missionaries during
the age of empire. no wonder pound, with his hero-fetish, admired
mussolini! are we gonna have to censor homer too?
sig http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891