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The political complexion of the ‘net
Rumors that the Right owns the ‘net are greatly exaggerated. It sometimes seems that way, since the Internet is one of the few settings in which the Right is allowed to exist and make its points, but Google searches on leftist and rightist slogans suggest the contrary. The buzzwords of the Left (e.g., tolerance and inclusiveness) are uniformly taken at face value and treated with respect. It doesn’t occur to anyone to blaspheme them. The most net conservatives do is grumble about political correctness, and even that has its vocal defenders. In contrast, the Right’s favorite terms (family values, patriotism, faith, American tradition) more often than not are treated as rhetorical camouflage for bigotry, re-interpreted in a left-liberal sense, or commercialized. On the Internet the secure zones and disputed territories are the same as elsewhere, and the Left is pressing the fight home far more effectively than the Right. Posted by Jim Kalb at September 10, 2002 09:48 AM | Send Comments
Just one example to show that the Right most certainly does not own the net: You can find any number of English-language anti-Fascist web sites. You cannot find even one that has a kind word for Fascism [I do NOT speak here of Nazism], or gives an honest history of Fascism, or documents the extremely interesting people in America and in Europe who thought very highly of Fascism at any time before 1938 (e.g., Churchill) - even with regard to the role of both Spanish fascism (the Felange) and the Italian state in the Spanish Civil War. There are such sites in Italian and in Spanish. But they are still fewer than the anti-Fascist sites, and clearly written by an older generation. Anybody who thinks the Right dominates the web hasn’t done enough searching and surfing on hot issues that make a clear demarcation between Right and Left. One more point: I have seen any number of sites, of the Right or of the Left, that take it for granted that the white farmers in Rhodesia actually stole the land they have from native blacks. Sadly, it is NOT just BBC and the NY Times that take this as settled dogma. NOBODY bothers to research such a claim, or produce any evidence, because everybody holds the racist, indigenista view that European whites in the New World, in Africa, or anywhere else, are interlopers and thieves who have no right to be where they are, for no better reason at all than that they are white, while those who got to those places before them were not. Nobody seems to understand that there can be a legitimate moral right to found colonies, and even to militarily conquer and rule natives, under some circumstances. Not even the defenders of the white colonial societies all over the world. And that is proof the we have all been (as the Left says, though for the purpose of accusing others) “morally colonized” - by the Left. Posted by: Joseph Auclair on September 10, 2002 5:30 PM |