From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Skinhead speech protected, Supreme Court says (was: Re: Fuck You
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 02:15:47 GMT

Note: turns out that Jeff Spangenberg's account was compromised by some
skinhead.  I am concerned with the views of the anonymous poster
(although I do not know the anonymous poster to be a skinhead in a
fashion sense, of course, his language is characteristic of the 
movement and as such I feel no compunction in referring to him in this
way.)  I shall, in this post, refer to him as Adolf.

It is also possible that Adolf, strictly speaking, does not exist, that
a vicious rival of Jeff's WITHOUT skinhead views may be trying to
portray Jeff as a Fascist.  In which case, this post must be read as
concerning a literary creation named Adolf and I claim truth-value for
its statements in the way the literary critic claims truth-value for
statements about fictional characters such as (for example) Flaubert's
Bovary.

End of note.

In article <1992Sep8.204902.9825@kpc.com> dennisp@kpc.com (Dennis Preston) writes:
>In article <65327@cup.portal.com> Jeff_R_Spangenberg@cup.portal.com writes:
>>Vote for Jesse Jackson in 1992... He'll give us a REAL reason to 
>
><some pretty offensive stuff deleted>
>
>Please keep your racist, ignorant and immature comments out of this newsgroup.
>If I wanted more of this kind of drivel I'd move to Northern Idaho. (no offense
>to the residents who don't shave their heads.)

     Man called Adolf says he got laid off wants to get paid off
     Look out kid, you're gonna get hit
     Don't know what ya did but you're doin it again

                                     - Bob Dylan

But according to the arguments of Ted "Tedster" Frank, Charles "Goofus"
Perez, Henry "Jackanapes" Schaffer, and Chris "Knucklehead" Morton, Adolf
is a noble citizen exercising his right of free speech, is he not?
Criticising poor Adolf creates a "chilling effect" on his freedom
of speech and as such should not be done.  Booting him off the net would
violate, would it not, Adolf's First Amendment rights.

Adolf's post is interesting on several levels.  It is incoherent, calling
for what has been defined by a rightward-tilting society as radical
(voting for Jesse Jackson) and then Adolf immediately deconstructs this
call by calling for hatred.  As such, the post neatly illustrates the
manufacture of Fascism by the choking-off of Left solutions by the
Powers That Be; Jesse Jackson in the past mounted a serious, credible
alternative to centrist politics, so credible that he was carefully
destroyed by (false) charges of anti-Semitism, in somewhat the same way
Jerry Brown's campaign was destroyed.  Those low down enough (and Adolf
is obviously far down on the food chain) who would take their anger to
Left solutions are thus pushed, in their alienation, to Fascist
solutions which have for these people at least the merit of shocking the
bourgeois.  Before Jackson's campaign was destroyed in 1988, midwestern
whites were quoted as saying that they wanted to "vote for the nigger"
as a way of demonstrating their disaffection with an economy that in the
"boom" year of 1988 was failing millions of people, simultaneously
displaying their racism and their willingness to change.  Of course,
such unity between working-class whites and blacks scares the shit out
of the rich and powerful, and Adolf's post displays traces of this
carefully eradicated rage.

What one writer has characterized as the promise of libertarian and
free-market solutions, "freedom without power", produces Fascism by an
almost chemical reaction.  Destroy East Germany and you don't get
Arizona, you get skinhead punks beating up Turks.  Destroy the
agriculture and mining industries of Idaho and you don't get silicon
mountain, you get Ayran Nation.  Impose an American constitution on the
remains of the Hohenzollern monarchy of 1870-1918 and you don't get
America, you get Adolf Hitler.

Adolf's racism has for me one saving grace. He's out there with it.  He's
not like Richard A. Posner, whose law 'n economix has been demonstrated
in this newsgroup to be racist (cf. "Othello the monstrous black miscegenator").
Adolf isn't one of those Webster's Dictionary racists who wish us to
forget that the word "racism" was invented to describe the bad behavior
of white Northern European males.

Racism is contributing to the decay of American society.  The postings
by Chris "Knucklehead" Morton and Henry "Jackanapes" Schaffer of
incorrect C code shows that you cannot cordon off your racism, which is
the acceptance of deep bullshit, from technology and culture; racist
bozos can't program computers very well.  C. S. Lewis, in a chapter of
That Hideous Strength entitled "They Have Brought Down Deep Heaven on
their Heads" shows how misusing the language and speaking in contrived
codes brought "the curse of Babel" upon the heads of an amoral college
administration.  This is less a fantasy than demonstrated in the upper
reaches of academia, business, government and law every day.

John Edgar Wideman writes (in this month's Esquire) of the way in which
whites cordon-off "black" problems that are, in actuality, all of our
problems.  "Black" infant mortality is, in actuality, American infant
mortality; "black" drug addiction is, in actuality, American drug
addiction.  Making these problems "black" makes them the special
province of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition (minus its white
spectrum) and allows whites with intellectual pretensions the posture of
questioning and challenging appeals for assistance in these "black"
problems.  Whites like Adolf know that they are far enough down in the
food chain that after blacks have been destroyed, they are next, and
such whites don't have the luxury of talking knowingly about "reverse"
racism.  Since they see no avenues of constructive protest, they choose
to punch out with what are, in essence, cries of rage.  But the knowing,
anti-affirmative action, whites are quick enough to join Adolf's cohort
when the problems of the ghetto become THEIR problems...which they do,
shortly after that neoconservative white man is denied tenure, and
cannot get a real job.

Sure, black people need to Take Responsibility, in the language of the
code.  Most of them have been Taking Responsibility, against fearful
odds, for 200 years.  And (to take an example), those black people in
California who have gone to community college in order to get those
2-year degrees in data processing (often cheated in the process by being
taught outdated languages like Cobol instead of C) have been hit with a
67% increase in tuition, with more promised in spring.  This increase
should be compared with smaller increases at four-year colleges filled
with the Little Darlings of the middle class (yeah, you guys got it
rough too: but what's the rationale for treating community colleges
differently?  If there must be pain, why not be equitable in spreading
it?)

Joan Didion (New York Review of Books) asks why the Democrats feel the
need to speak in this code in order to appeal to the racism and fear of
my fortysomething generation, when they could mobilize the countless
Americans who don't vote.  Fortunately, Bush has wreaked enough havoc on
the economy that it is much harder for Clinton to blow his lead by
engaging (as Mike Dukakis did in 88) in what any marketeer recognizes as
the fallacy of "me too" marketing.  But it is still a long time to
November and Bush has the capability to be quite vicious.  It is still
possible for the crypto racism of focus groups and of appealing to
scared white homeowners, strategies the Democrats are embracing, to
backfire just as they backfired for Dukakis.

Racism causes you to expend energy on the essentially negative task of 
maintaining artificial distinctions in society, which drains energy 
away from the REAL tasks that face us, whether those tasks consist
in writing bug-free C code or in cleaning up the environment.  Such
racism made Latin America what it is today, for there are only 24 hours
in a day, and you can spend that time deluding yourself or you can spend
that time in constructive projects to improve your life.

And I'd hazard that new-fangled, Posneroid racism, in that it involves
speaking in code, is even more of an energy drain than Adolf's racism.

I am aware that new model racists deny that they are racists and indeed
it is a very serious charge that Posner et al. are racists.  The vicious
and flaming character of the replies to the "Hate speech okay" thread
demonstrate the hurt that these people feel.  Since they simultaneously
subscribe to the middle-class illusion of total individual
responsibility and since they deny the existence of deep social
structures that would compel them to act racist against their better
nature, these people feel very harmed by a charge of racism.  I can only
reply that racism is structural and that there are indeed times in which
you cannot help but perpetuate racism.  Why add to the problem by
defending the Viktoras of the world?

I am not defending Adolf; he should be booted off the net.  And I have a
coherent set of reasons for denying him his "free speech" whereas the
closet racists who encourage the Adolfs and Robert A. Viktoras do not.

Finally, Sinead O'Connor shaves her head, and she ain't no racist.  I
suggest you look at a person's beliefs (and, in Adolf's case, his
capacity for change) rather than his head.  


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