Posted on 11/12/2003 10:13:08 AM PST by quidnunc
In his 1964 seminal work, Understanding Media, media analyst Marshall Mcluhan coined his famously cryptic line of "The Medium is the Message" whereby to the popular mind he sounded incredibly deep and totally shallow all at once. However, his message of how media affects culture and society is even more relevant today given the dominance of the Web on mass communications, commerce, and the free and unregulated exchange of information world wide. The Web can literally be seen as the physical manifestation of Carl Jung's Collective Subconscious whereby if it's been thought, it has a Web page.
For the average, non-technical user the terms Web and Internet are exchangeable although the Web is a sub-division of the Internet. There are five divisions of the Internet: email, ftp (file transfer protocol), telnet, the Web, and I forget the last division but no, it's not spam, porno, or pop-ups. Unfortunately, international socialism, as evidenced by the unelected bureaucrats of the EU is using the pornography excuse along with race hate and religious intolerance to censor and control what's on the Internet.
Over in Euroland the Euro-socialists are seriously going about establishing a real censorship not seen since Hitler's Third Reich; perhaps it's not a coincidence that in the UK, among certain conservative circles, the EU is often referred to as the Fourth Reich. The EU just passed an amendment to their Convention on Cybercrime that outlaws any speech these thought crime specialists deem as "any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors." If passed into law by the various national legislatures which comprise the EU, online books, such as Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and Pride, which is an honest and impassioned examination of Islamic immigration into the West or even The Bible, which is examined and reproduced extensively on the Web, could be deemed "hate speech" by Muslims in France and homosexual activists in the UK respectively.
Any site which tries to honestly discuss and debate illegal immigration, the Iraqi War, cultural clashes, homosexuality, Israel's right to existance, or even conservatism itself can be declared a hate site. In the EU, as in any socialist society, politically correct speech shifts constantly as expediency, vengence, and fashion dictate. A year before this Convention on Cybercrime amendment was proposed, British server companies anticipated the coming censorship and started pressuring sites whose contents made them nervous. Web sites devoted to nostalgia, which carry the innocently charming children's books by Helen Bannerman or items about Golliwogs, felt the heat. Now, according to EU censors, even suspect or disapproved of links on a Web page devoid of what the Brussels bureacrats deem inflammatory can get the original site in trouble.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at dfn.org ...
What Porterville was demonstrating is that we here in America — unlike you there in Europe — have freedom of speech.
We don't have to worry about 'xenophobe laws' designed to stifle opposition to the post-modern, multicultural nitwittery which bids fair to lead to the extinction of Western Civilization in Europe.
My advice to you; Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
American Free Speech will be silenced in the local and global market if these people get their way.
Don't try to bullsCENSOREDt me Fritzl, your government is restricting your freedom of speech.
Two examples spring immediately to mind.
Early this year criminal prosecution was being considered against a German named Voss, who made Internet comments expression admiration for the events of 9/11.
And just you have a bunch of pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler handbills printed up and start handing them out in front of the Reichstag or on the K'damm in Berlin and see how long it is until you find yourself in the stony lonsome.
In Europe you can get your butt jailed for 'hate speech', and don't bother to deny it.
The remedy for repugnant is not government cinsorship, it's even more speech pointing out and excoriating the repugnance.
The last line of my Reply #26 above, "The remedy for repugnant is not government cinsorship, it's even more speech pointing out and excoriating the repugnance." should read "The remedy for repugnant speech is not government censorship, it's even more speech pointing out and excoriating the repugnance."
The point is that this time the restrictions on speech apply to those advocating fascism, but what kind of speech will the next restrictions prohibit… and the next… and the next?
This is what's called a slippery slope; once you start down it it's impossible to go back.
As for politness, you'll find that in the dictionary between "piss" and "puke".
Europeans are not highly-esteemed by most here on Free Republic because we've finally figured out where you Euros are coming from and we now consider "Old Europe" — the chocolate makers and cuckoo-clock tinkerers — to be beneath our contempt.
You've irritated one of the most veteran flame warriors on this forum, namely me, and — to paraphrase Harry Truman — if you can't stand the heat then get out of the kitchen.
Gen. Reinhard Guenzel, the head of Germany's Special Forces Command (KSK), got the hobnailed boot on Tuesday. His mistake? He expressed a bit too publicly the sort of Jew-hating sentiment tens of millions of Germans harbor privately.
In a letter to a vicious right-wing extremist who sits in Germany's parliament, the general praised the claim that Jews bear at least as much blame for the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution as Germans do for the Holocaust.
Next, we'll hear from Berlin how Jews planned the Holocaust all along. Just as we hear that Israel is the only terrorist state in the Middle East and that Palestinian suicide bombers who butcher women and children are freedom fighters.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's flacks have begun their damage-control effort, insisting that the general's views are rare and isolated. Bull. I lived in Germany for 10 years while serving in the U.S. Army. I speak German. My family's bloodlines are half German. And because of all that, the Germans among whom I lived assumed I shared their bigotry and, eventually, spilled their guts.
It wasn't pretty.
Of course, there are good Germans. Plenty of them. But they live in Philadelphia, not Frankfurt. They or their ancestors all left Germany by 1938. Those who stayed didn't just support Hitler — they loved him and fought for him to the bitter end.
The whopping difference between the Allied occupation of Germany and our occupation of Iraq is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis welcomed their liberation. We had to force freedom and democracy on the Germans at gunpoint.
They'll never forgive us — no more than they'll forgive Jews for surviving the Holocaust, making a success of Israel against all odds and enriching the United States in virtually every field of human endeavor.
And Germany? In the 19th and early 20th century, German-speaking countries led the world in culture and science. Then they killed or drove away their Jews. The result? Germany's greatest contributions to world culture since 1945 have been Milli Vanilli and Gummi Bears.
What about the charge that the terror in the wake of the Russian Revolution was the work of Jews? Like so many of the Big Lies "made in Germany," there's a tiny grain of truth in it. Yes, Jewish subjects of the Czar played a prominent role in the Russian Revolution. Had I suffered as horribly as Jews suffered under the Romanovs, I'd like to think that I would have been a revolutionary, too.
But Lenin wasn't a Jew. Stalin wasn't a Jew. And just by the way: Hitler, Himmler & Co. weren't Jewish, either, although I fully expect a revisionist historian from Munich or Marburg to argue that they were all secretly manipulated by the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy and guided by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In Germany today, there's an utterly repulsive movement — ranging from such dreary literary "stars" as Guenter Grass down to Herr Meier behind the wheel of his Opel — to shift the blame for World War II atrocities away from Germany and to insist that the Allies were equally evil.
Tell it to the ghosts of Auschwitz. And Babi Yar. And Warsaw. And, for that matter, Malmedy.
The German resistance? Almost as big a lie as the denial of the Holocaust. Count von Stauffenberg and his fellow aristocrats, whose inept attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb in 1944 is forever cited as an example of German courage, never lifted a finger against the Nazi regime until the Red Army closed in on their hereditary lands in East Prussia. They weren't fighting for high ideals. They were defending their real estate.
The only thing most Germans regretted was that they lost.
And now we hear that it's high time for an end to German guilt, that the present generation had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that Germany paid its dues for its misdeed and, anyway, it was all a long time ago.
Sorry, Fritz. It wasn't long ago. Holocaust survivors just had a reunion in Washington, D.C. When the wind's just right, we can still smell the smoke of the ovens.
And let's not forget that the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years. There's no reason why German guilt shouldn't last 500. That's a 50 percent discount.
Oh, sure, making anti-Semitic remarks is a crime in today's Germany. But anti-Israeli remarks are just fine. You've merely got to choose your words carefully. Don't say the J-word. Talk about "Zionists" instead.
The truth is that we're still so close to the Holocaust that, despite all the books, films and debates, we still have not come to grips with just how much the Germans destroyed. The annihilation of the great Jewish cultures and populations of Europe's heartland may have been the single most tragic loss in human history.
What is to be done?
For a start, don't buy German products. The boycott of French wine sent a strong message, but if Americans stopped buying Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens, it would really hurt.
Anyway, German cars of recent vintage have become a lot like the Germans themselves — grossly overrated and unreliable. Let Gen. Guenzel buy one.
(Ralph Peters in the New York Post, November 6, 2003)
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/10058.htm
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