Hate on the Internet
Call for discussion
Should there be hate on the net - the perfect liberal world?
Hatred is real, but so are other things....
In the perfect liberal world there can be no effective anti-fascism. Either it is reduced to an "opinion" (to be sold in the market of opinions), or it is forbidden because it is "intolerant".
Should there be hate sites on the net?
A number of sites on the net combine two sets of links - one set to racist and fascist material, another set to anti-racist and anti-fascist groups. Clearly there is racial hatred, and it is on the Net as well. However, the position implicit in these double collections is: that hate is the only thing wrong with racist and fascist views. And, especially, with nationalist views. Nationalism, fascism and in most cases racism, are ideologies.
The explicit claim made by some of these sites, is that confronting arguments via the Net leads to something better. Exactly what is supposed to improve is not specified, but this is a classic liberal doctrine. (Liberal here is used in the European sense, and includes most libertarianism. It does not mean left-of-centre, as the word is used in the USA. It describes a category of political thought which includes John Locke, the US Constitution, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper and John Rawls, among many others). Liberals believe that an "ideal speech situation" is desirable, that is: free of coercion, prejudice and emotion. More recent liberal theorists, like Rawls, use it to justify social structures. They claim the structures would be agreed in an ideal speech situation.
It is not surprising, that liberals welcome Internet, and that supporters of the Net usually have liberal ideas. Superficially, the Net is an ideal speech community - if you forget difference in access, language, skills and education.
All ideal speech situations have an inherent defect. They can not possess the neutrality claimed for them. There is one opinion, one view, one proposition, which they always favour, namely "that the existing should continue". Anyone who puts forward this proposition in an ideal speech situation, has won already, as long as it is being talked about.
"Ideal speech situations" are therefore inherently conservative. Anyone who promotes them has got a hidden agenda: conservatism. And in practice, as you would expect, liberalism is the ideology of the privileged. This is clearly visible in liberal approaches to hate speech. Some liberals want to exclude hate speech from the right to free speech, which they normally support. Others prefer to confront hate with argument. Both are agreed that hate is wrong, as a distortion of ideal speech.
However, hate is not uniformly wrong. It is not wrong to hate evil. Hate speech directed towards evil is not wrong either.
Besides, there are other emotions. Liberals are being selectively indignant, and that is where the privilege shows. There is for instance, besides hate, the arrogant contempt with which liberals treat the justice claims of the poor and the oppressed. This is often itself parallel to a personal use of arrogance and snobbism against people from less privileged backgrounds. In effect, this approximates to a general hatred of the disadvantaged, yet it is not necessarily expressed in any "standard type" of hate speech. If you want to see this kind of elite hatred in action, try suggesting to a renowned professor at a renowned university, that the university admit the illiterate. You will probably be verbally abused as stupid, crazy, disturbed, inadequate, disordered, uncultured, ignorant, and so on. Yet excluding the illiterate is a sure way to exclude the most disadvantaged, in any one country and at a global level. True, simple literacy programs would be more appropriate: but most countries are run by university graduates. Therefore there are no illiterates in government, and the cycle continues. No American or European university would dare to openly refuse admission on grounds of race. Yet even suggesting that illiterates be admitted would make you a target of abuse at the same universities. The exclusion is considered totally normal. However, there is no anti-hate site which criticises this policy, or the arrogance on which it is bases. The same applies to other social injustice which is considered "just normal".
So, should there be anti-arrogance sites on the net? Or would a collection of links to arrogant sites be swamped under the volume of links? And where are the anti-arrogance associations?
In other words: sites that combine hate and anti-hate sites conceal more than they tell. They present a view of the world which ignores questions of justice, ideology, and change.
Hate is not the only thing wrong. Being polite is not a substitute for justice, nor for anti-racism, nor for anti-fascism. If you are an anti-racist, or an anti-fascist, there is no reason to value sites which mirror hate and anti-hate sites. Equally, there is no reason to believe people who tell you that a hate-free net would be a "global community of tolerance", or anything similar. Ask these people this question:
Would you oppose the construction of a physically separate communications infrastructure for anti-fascism, even though that means destroying the unity of the Net?
That would force them to decide their priority: anti-facism or liberalism. The unity of the Net is the model for the unity of the liberal world. In the perfect liberal world there can be no effective anti-fascism. Either it is reduced to an "opinion" (to be sold in the market of opinions), or it is forbidden because it is "intolerant".
So, the hate sites in the links below have a double meaning: they are "good hate", but they are also a rejection of "discourse as ideal". I wish there were more such sites.
HATE NAZIS! This site contravenes Art. 137d of the Netherlands Penal Code. In defiance of the law and liberal philosophy, I incite you to hate Nazis, because of their conviction, namely Nazism. Article 137d of the Netherlands Penal Code forbids incitement to hatred on the grounds of conviction.
Bribe Mayor Patijn of Amsterdam via Internet!