WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 3: THE GREAT SHUTTENING

In the days immediately following the events at Charlottesville, and before the dust had really settled there were some on the Alt-Right describing it as the Alt-Right’s Munich Putsch moment. The day, on November 9th 1923, that Hitler, hoping to emulate the previous years march on Rome when Mussolini had been able to intimidate the Italian prime minister Luigi Facta  and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel to stand down in order to avoid civil war and thus handover the reigns of power over to him and his National Fascist Party (NFP). However, Hitler, unlike Mussolini who had some 30,000 armed men to back him up, marched on Munich with just 2000 men and was confronted by armed police who shot and killed 16 of  them, causing chaos and his supporters to disperse . Hitler was arrested two days later, and would, on reflection, resolve to win power by legitimate means - eventually being elected Chancellor ten years later in March 1933.

Charlottesville was not Munich 1923, it was not even close, but it was nevertheless a defining moment in the evolution both of the contemporary far right and of how it is perceived, supported, opposed and accommodated, by the people, the media, the internet and the state. So in that sense the Munich analogy is not completely wrong…

…After the putsch failed Hitler was put on trial and imprisoned where he used his time to plan and to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle or My Fight). The party he led, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) was banned and its main mouthpiece, their newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was also banned. As a result numerous new nazi supporting newspapers were started to carry on the fight, likewise nationalists and NSDAP members formed a lose-knit political grouping, the Völkisch-Sozialer Block (the People’s Social Block) which in turn supported the 

newly formed Deutsche Partei (German Party), essentially the NSDAP with another name. 

In December 1924 Hitler was released from prison. Two months later the authorities lifted the ban on the NSDAP and the party was reformed, publication of the Völkische Beobachter restarted and the rest, so to speak, is history.

For the Alt-Right, the wider nationalist groups, assorted Alt-Right and Alt-Lite personalities, as well as numerous other rightist movements of various hues and shades, from the palest grey to the blackest black, nothing is as clear cut. There is no ‘leader’ or defining philosophy, no unifying manifesto, not even a party or uniting force to gather around or run to for a reassuring group hug or mass Hailing; there is, or rather was, the internet and perhaps Pepe, that great smirking frog in the cyber sky. 

But that was before Charlottesville and The Daily Stormer’s shut down beget the internet’s Great Shuttening which, in turn, essentially killed Pepe and the far rights digital Never Never land. Mordor had come to the Shire or Kekistan as the right had rechristened it, and were taking no prisoners.

The Daily Stormer went first, but like a hammy actor determined to make the most of his death scene, the Stormer has refused to die and has been resurrecting itself ever since much to the annoyance of the theatre’s management, which in this analogy, would be the Silicon Valley corporations.

The Daily Stormer may have screamed loudest when the knives went in, but there were hundreds of other victims, many killed quietly and for expediency, quickly, their domains and website content wiped out in seconds so that it was as if they were never there, that they had never existed. Others, less well known, or who had less followers but who were nevertheless important in contributing to the whole, were taken down in the cyber night and their screams have yet to be heard. In fact, many victims of the Great Shuttening will never be known.

Groups like Cross Currents, The National Policy Institute, Occidental Dissent, Alternative Right, The AltRight, Identity Europe, Vanguard America, Radix Journal, Rebel Media as well individuals like Lauren Southern, Faith Goldy, Mike Enoch, Andrew Auernheimer (weev) and Richard Spencer to name a very few. of all the hundreds and hundreds closed. What began as a bit of digital virtue signalling from internet companies like Patreon who closed the funding account of journalist and broadcaster Lauren Southern several weeks before Charlottesville on the grounds that it just didn’t like her views, escalated in the run up to Charlottesville when Airbnb started closing the accounts of anyone they suspected of using their services to attend the Unite the Right rally.

This digital virtue signalling then escalated massively after the banning of The Daily Stormer, almost as if the actions of Google, Go Daddy and Cloudfare in banning the Stormer gave legitimacy to actions that hitherto would have been unthinkable, that is the banning and erasing of a people’s opinion purely because they, that is, Silicon Valley, disagreed, or hated, that groups, or individuals, political views. Our Speech or No Speech was the motto of the day now!

Perhaps driven by the hysteria of the liberal media in the aftermath of Heather Hyer’s death, or indeed as a way of exploiting her death, Silicon Valley joined in and began culling websites and social media in ways one would usually associate with communist China, or Iran, or indeed Soviet Russia had the internet existed pre 1989, and certainly not with 21st Century USA.

Cheered on by the liberal media it was as if all the main hosting and internet companies had convened an emergency board meeting and decided that they had to be seen to be doing their bit in getting rid of some ’nazis’. And for the avoidance of doubt 'nazis' no longer means ‘nazis’ in the Third Reich sense, but rather anyone opposed to leftwing liberalism and cultural Marxism. They would not put it in those terms of course but that is essentially what they meant and each company presumably got staff to troll through their sites and social media postings to find ’nazis’ with a view to ’shutting them down’.

Now, nearly a month since the events at Charlottesville, the Great Shuttening is still going on. Stormfront, one of the oldest nationalist forums in existence, having been established for over twenty years and with some 300,000 registered users, was recently closed down without notice and its domain seized by its hosting company, Network Solutions. And so it continues with ban after ban.

Yet finally, though with reluctance, some in the mainstream media and liberal left are beginning to question both the validity of these actions and the power of Silicon Valley in being able to arbitrarily silence an entire political point of view with a few clicks. 

Equally disquieting, abet only for a few so far, is the begrudging acceptance that backing up and exploiting the online attacks on the right, has been violent intimidation from leftwing thugs and mobs of politically correct radicals who are behaving with the same violence and intimidation as Moa’s infamous student Red Guards did during China’s Cultural Revolution. For many, including Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, who to her credit unequivocally condemned Antifa and other leftwing thugs filmed beating up defenceless Trump supporters in a shocking display of mob violence. 

Yet despite these setbacks the Right is regrouping and rebuilding and learning from its mistakes. Rival internet social media sites like Gab and Bitchute, are openly committed to free speech and have started up to try and break the monopolies of Facebook and Youtube. There is optimistic talk of forming and creating a rightwing alternative to Google (now aka Goolag) and other Silicon Valley behemoths. While others, including perhaps not unsurprisingly many on the Left, are now calling for Google and Facebook to be regarded as utilities in the same way that water and electricity are so that they can be nationalised and regulated by the state.  Something, I am sure that would have unthinkable were it not for the Great Shuttening.

How these developments will play out over the coming months is anyones guess, but what is sure is that if Silicon Valley and the liberal left establishment thought by banning and closing down thousands of sites and individual accounts that they could silence at entire political faith and crush its supporters then they are in for a big surprise. History has shown that revolutions rarely start with one big event, rather they begin with lots of little events and happenings, an incident there, a skirmish here, an arrest in one city, and a speech somewhere else. Drip by bloody drip and word by bloody word, a revolution builds and grows, and the people silencing and beating on the right now, may come to realise that their actions have helped unify and galvanise the right in ways that will make it a formidable force in the years to come. 

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

See also:

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 1: CHARLOTTESVILLE

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 4: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE

Because the events in Charlottesville were so calamitous and the fallout both extraordinary and ongoing I am going to write several blogs on it over the next few weeks. This is partly because the ripples from Charlottesville, whether in terms of online censorship, street violence, protests, Donald Trump, the Mainstream Media, and right and left wing responses to it, are still happening. It is also because I wanted some time to see how the dust settles…

On Sunday August 13th, the day after clashes between supporters of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and leftwing opponents had left dozens injured and a 32 year old woman, Heather Hyer, the online white supremacist newspaper, The Daily Stormer, lobbed a satirical grenade into the media storm that events in Charlottesville had caused and unleashed carnage.

For those unfamiliar with The Daily Stormer website, it is a virulently anti-semitic, humorous, OTT and rightwing news site inspired in part by the notorious Nazi era newspaper, Der Stürmer, which was published from 1923 until1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich. Its editor, the ebullient and fanatical ‘jew baiter’ Julius Streicher, was arrested and tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and executed. 

Founded in July 2013 by Andrew Anglin, a 32 year-old Alt-Right supporting white supremacist, and run as a news site, The Daily Stormer, is unashamedly and outrageously racist and antisemitic, publishing stories that are often very funny while being savagely satirical and, depending on the reader, either deeply offensive or highly appealing, particularly to a young audience. 

A bit like Family Guy mashed with VIZ comic, OZ (a 1970s anti-establishment magazine prosecuted for obscenity, regularly raided by the police and constantly attacked by the mainstream media), and Charlie Hebdo magazine whose cartoons of Mohammed led to it being attacked by Islamic terrorists in 2015 and the murder of twelve of its employees. In a typical example of the Stormer’s sense humour on June 8th, the day of the UK’s general election, it endorsed the labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with the ringing praise that he would “exterminate the entire Jewish race”, while the Conservative party leader Theresa May was dismissed as a “childless old woman with zero stake in the future of Britain who looks like a Cenobite”.

It was that mischievous sense of humour that led, on August 13th, to the exploding grenade. The article on the woman killed in Charlottesville was, even by the Stormer’s questionable standards, deliberately inflammatory and began with the headline: ’Heather Hyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year Old Slut’. The article itself, written by Andrew Anglin, went on to state that most people would be glad that Hyer was dead as she was a fat slob who, had she lived until the average female life expectancy of 81, meant she would have been leeching off men’s work for another 49 years. Hence her death was a plus, with the added bonus that it took out a Bernie Sauders supporter.

Appearing less that 24 hours after Hyer’s death, and at a time when the US media was in a full ‘shock and awe’ mode against anyone, or any group on the Right politically - from the KKK through to the Alt-Right, from Trump supporters to mainstream conservatives - the article exploded just like petrol thrown onto a fire in a burning building. 

This was full-on confrontation, upsetting not just the liberal left but wrong footing and alienating many on the Right and Alt-Right who were already reeling from the backlash following Hyer’s death and the events that had played out at Charlottesville. Yes, it was satirical, but at this stage no one, and least of all a hyped-up media who were now seeing neo-Nazis under every bed, had the inclination to debate the subtle nuances of describing a recently killed woman as a ‘fat slut’.

The backlash which began within hours of the articles appearance, while perhaps predictable, seemed to catch everyone by surprise. Go Daddy, the company that had hosted The Daily Stormer since its formation, and who made a virtue of its stance defending free speech and opposing censorship, gave The Daily Stormer just 24 hours notice to move its domain to another provider. This action forced the Stormer to register with Google, who, following complaints from leftist activists who were now buzzing around The Daily Stormer like angry wasps, cancelled the Stormer’s registration within hours of being asked to do so by activists. For added credibility Google also closed down The Daily Stormer’s Youtube channel as well (Google owns Youtube). This action then prompted Cloudfare, an internet company whose services help protect websites from cyberattacks, to also terminate The Daily Stormer’s account, in what was, like Go Daddy, a complete reversal of their previous neutral, anti-censorship stance.

These actions, all of which happened over the space of a couple of days, took The Daily Stormer off line, while making its figurehead Andrew Anglin and his web savvy hacker colleague, Andrew Auernheimer aka ‘Weev’, into a sort of cyber Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It also heralded in a period of increasingly  farcical cat and mouse antics between the internet establishment and The Daily Stormer as it started on a seemingly never ending period playing “What’s My Domain” as the Stormer website hoped from one host to another.

Starting very briefly with China and .wang, the Stormer then moved to Russia and .ru where it lasted about a day before it was closed down only to resurface a few days later with the perfectly the suited .lol , which unfortunately lasted for just a few hours. After that the Stormer went dark, as in the dark web, the part of the web that is hidden from search engines and favoured by government agencies and notoriously gangsters, drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles. 

The so called dark web enables The Daily Stormer to exist and to be visited by any one who downloads a TOR link (the Daily Stormer’s hosting company on the dark web) but it is effectively

removed from public view, the aim of its enemies. So, after a weeks absence The Daily Stormer resurfaced again in the real world, this time with the domain punishedstormer.com, where it bloomed, like some rare and poisonous Orchid, for a couple of days before vanishing once again into the darkness. 

Predictably, and almost heroically, nearly a full three weeks after it was booted off the web, The Daily Stormer resurfaced yet again, this time bizarrely via an Albanian host  using .al. But it was not to last, and after three days of normal life in the daylight The Daily Stormer has, at the time of writing (September 2nd 2017), once again been consigned to the wilderness that is the dark web.

Many initially rejoiced in what they saw as the death of The Daily Stormer, especially the majority for whom it was just a name in a news story about some obscure racist, anti-semitic and nasty hate site. What did it matter if it was banned? Well, it matters a lot regardless of what the The Daily Stormer says or stands for, as this is the first time in the democratic West, where the internet was heralded and defended as a vehicle for freedom and free speech, where outside of criminal and illegal activity, ideas, opinions and so on were free, and no more so than in the United States, where under the First Amendment, The Daily Stormer, has every right to say what it likes, no matter how offensive it is.

Ironically, a side effect of all this is that The Daily Stormer is no longer an obscure website, because with each resurfacing, the traffic to the site, like people flocking to see some rare event, has grown, with the dailystormer.al domain getting in excess of half a million unique visitors a day. Consequently, the longer this farcical game of internet cat and mouse continues, the more publicity The Daily Stormer is going to get, with now even the BBC covering and naming it in a news feature describing its banning.

Another side effect of The Daily Stormer’s banning is that whereas it was originally dismissed as just a neo-nazis hate site, its plight now seems like bullying and victimisation, and the new world order loves a victim. Indeed, as The Daily Stormer is pitched from pillar to post on a weekly basis by massively rich, unregulated corporations, so increasing numbers of mainstream organisations and even leftist journalists are beginning to question the validity of Silicon Valley censoring opinions it doesn’t like. So much so that Google, Go Daddy and Cloudfare’s actions may prove to be one of the biggest shot in the foot incidences ever …

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

See also:

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 1 - Charlottesville 

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 3 - The Great Shuttening

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 4 - Tomorrow is Another Day

Good Censor, Bad Censor

In a week that has seen both the condemnation of the US National Security Agency for surveying emails and other personal data worldwide, and major calls in the UK for the complete blocking of online pornography, the pressure to control and rein in the internet is growing stronger and stronger.

There is no such thing as good or bad censorship, as there are only good or bad people and content, visual, verbal or written, is what it is. It is how we, as adults, react, or respond to it that gives content its power, be it private, moral, political, sexual, criminal or offensive. Yet the internet with its labyrinthine pathways and myriad ideas, images, and views, reflects all mankind. It is our psyche, a huge digital Id into which we pour our thoughts and impulses.  Each day we upload the minutia of our lives, be they bland, brutal or base, good or bad, moral or immoral, legal or illegal, whatever mankind is capable of, the internet absorbs and stores it. Then, when we plug in, we have a choice, of what amongst man's cerebral detritus, to look at, read or ignore. 

Now our governments want to control, monitor and in some cases, expurgate sections of the internet in much the same way that doctors use electro-convulsive therapy to wipe out and erase parts of the brain. The result, even on a digital brain, is likely to be just as brutal and damaging.

Google is the current internet bugbear, chastised for the amount of tax it does or doesn't pay, and ordered by governments to stop this, or block that. Google is attacked relentlessly, but because of its size and financial clout, has been able to pretty much ignore these assaults on its propriety. However, the current furore around the activities of the US's National Security Agency (NSA) has caused Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, to worry that the internet is about to suffer from a process of "Balkanisation", in which, like the countries of the Balkans, the internet begins the process of fragmenting as national governments seek to exert greater influence over it, essentially breaking it up.  Thereby creating a series of tightly controlled national networks and ending forever our current open communication platforms and the free flow of information that has been at the centre of the internet since its inception some twenty plus years ago.

This drive to control the internet and breakup the power of independent US companies like Google and Amazon with their huge stores of data, is coming not just from Authoritarian regimes like China and Iran, but from the law makers of the European Union. EU lawmakers in the wake of the National Security Agency scandal, are using the fear of data snooping to promote the idea of creating their own internet platforms separate from the likes of Google et al. Indeed for many European lawmakers the move now is to push for the ringfencing of their national networks which in turn will force internet companies like Google to comply with local rules for protecting local data and so on.

The result, according to an EU spokesman is that "You are likely to get a federation of different data centres, each fiefdom with its own different rules", which aside from its immediate aim of protecting its citizens data from the prying eyes of US intelligent agencies, becomes more sinister if used to repress political or other perceived subversions.

Indeed the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on foreign nationals and probably eavesdropping on phone calls and reading the occasional email should not surprise or excessively worry us as this is what intelligence agencies do, and given that Facebook can already interpret everything from our taste in music to our political allegiances from analysing our 'Likes', the activities of the NSA will not make much difference to someone after your personal data. What should worry us are the calls for national security surveillance to be stopped or monitored, presumably by human rights lawyers and EU functionaries, as that will begin rendering any kind of clandestine snooping potentially unworkable, with possibly disastrous implications for our ongoing national security.

We should expect the United States, the most powerful country on earth to protect its people from attack, as likewise we expect our UK government agencies to do the same and as our main ally to share information and data when necessary. In effect, we expect our intelligence agencies to get the terrorists and our enemies before they get us and to do that successfully agencies need to snoop, spy and lie. Indeed, surveillance and data gathering are crucial, and by the very nature of their work the agencies involved need to be able to operate in secret, and monitoring the mass of internet traffic worldwide is a big part of that. Where this falls down is when those actions are perceived either as a threat to the citizens in whose name the surveillance is being carried out, or as a threat to other friendly nations, as the NSA's actions are now being made out to be.

Ironically in the name of democracy, and in a perceived benign move to protect its citizens from US data collecting, the EU's lawmakers could now begin the breakup of the Internet as we know it. Even more alarming is that the EU's desire to ringfence the internet along national borders is playing well with China, who's gleeful words on the NSA story see them sticking the knife in:  "Washington has been accusing China of cyber espionage, but it turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the government". 

This means that countries like Iceland who have said that they wanted to ban access to all pornography, or in the UK where Prime Minister David Cameron or Labour MP Diane Abbott have called for a block on access to pornography in an effort to protect the young, and who have previously been mocked for their naiveté in thinking that an internet block along national boundaries was unworkable, can now look forward to a future where bans could not only be workable, but be made to work. Indeed, the calls of UK politicians for the blocking of pornography are now being championed by the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. Therefore the chance for the UK Government to create its own server will now be perceived by many on both sides of the political spectrum as a real vote winner. State control of the internet along national borders is coming, and coming fast, and ironically it will be championed not by China or Iran, but by the unelected and unaccountable law makers of the EU and I believe, by our own government.

The former CNN journalist and writer Rebecca Mackinnon said in her book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012), that: "We cannot assume that the Internet will evolve automatically in a direction that is going to be compatible with democracy" and prophetically that "Ten years from now, we will look back on the free and open internet with nostalgia". Yet this will all be done in the name of Democracy, of protecting personal data, and of fighting the currents totems of evil like racism, pornography, Islamophobia, homophobia, fascism, incitement to hatred and so on. As once the government and their state authorised censors are unleashed on an internet with borders, they will be unstoppable. For like the doctor who sees a once wild and dangerous patient rendered quiet and placid by the effects his electro-convulsive therapy, the glorious digital and untrammelled Id that represents our collective self, warts and all, will be blasted into submission and left, safe and inert, cured and cared for, in our new world, where nice is the new nasty and all bad thoughts have been erased. 

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© Nigel Wingrove 2013