Spring
2007 [source]  Sharing
the hate
Video-Sharing
Websites Become Extremist Venue By Brentin
Mock
Southern
Poverty Law Center LOS Angeles blacks are destroying
property and attacking white people as a soft,
pitiful ballad plays in the background. Then, about
two minutes into the video, the words "Whose
Freedom?" appear as a still frame of a young,
smiling German girl at a Third Reich rally suddenly
replaces the footage of the 1992 Rodney King riots.
A man wearing a swastika armband stands
protectively behind her, his head cropped from the
frame, while the words, "A paradise lost," scroll
down beneath her chin. Finally, a message, "Save
the White Race," fills the screen before dissolving
into a Celtic cross encircled by the phrase, "White
Pride World Wide." NSM International, a recruiting arm
of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement,
produced this video, probably at a cost of just a
few dollars. But despite its amateurish nature, its
makers are getting a big bang for their buck,
thanks to YouTube, the red-hot video-sharing
website that allows anyone with a camera phone or
digital camcorder to upload for free their videos.
The NSM video is now available to millions of
people. Welcome to the latest medium for the
American radical right -- one more electronic venue
that seems particularly suited for recruitment of
the young. Since it was founded in February 2005,
YouTube, along with competitors like Flickr and
Google Video, has become hugely popular, especially
among the young. YouTube alone streams hundreds of
millions of clips daily to a global audience, with
its users posting more than 65,000 new videos to
its swollen archives every day. And while extremist
clips like the NSM recruitment video are only a
tiny percentage of those posts, neo-Nazis and other
white supremacists are close on the heels of the
commercial advertisers now rushing to exploit this
still-burgeoning medium. "Increasingly, the Internet is
replacing membership groups as the primary way for
white supremacists to obtain information and
communicate," asserts a January [2007]
report on the white supremacist movement by
Strategic Forecasting Incorporated, an intelligence
analysis think tank. "Adherents regularly establish
their presence on popular Web destinations such as
MySpace and YouTube."  As
of mid-January, roughly 12,000 white supremacist
propaganda videos,
hate rock concert
highlight reels, and Holocaust
denial
pseudo-documentaries, many of them posted
anonymously, were openly available on video-sharing
websites. (This estimate was derived through
keyword searches of the three leading sites and an
analysis of how many were extremist, rather than
merely mentioning extremism.) One of the most
popular videos, "Branik White Power," is a
poor-quality depiction of skinheads gone wild, set
to roaring hate rock.
The high-speed montage depicts Nazi skins dancing
violently in the "mosh pit" near the stage,
throwing punches, waving "SS" flags, and showing
off white-power tattoos. Since it was posted by
YouTube user "bulldog88" in May 2006, it has been
downloaded more than 40,000 times.
Some of the most noxious videos are
more reserved in their approach, such as "The Real
David Duke," which has the former Klan leader
pontificating on race relations for nine minutes
and which has been viewed more than 10,000 times
since it was posted last October. Another example,
is "David Irving on the Holocaust,"  a
five-and-a-half-minute excerpt of a speech by the
notorious Holocaust
denier in Britain that's been downloaded
over 4,000 times during the same time period. The Irving video was posted to
YouTube last October by "Hadden88" ("88" is
neo-Nazi code for "Heil Hitler"), who has compiled
his own YouTube "channel" of 79 videos, most of
them anti-Semitic mini-"documentaries" and speeches
by hate peddlers like
Irving, National Alliance founder William
Pierce, and Adolf Hitler. Other popular YouTube racist videos
include a series of six "White Nationalist News"
clips, the earliest episode dated last Sept. 8,
some of which have been viewed more than 3,000
times; "Ku Klux Klan -- A Secret History," posted
in September, and its accompaniment "Ku Klux Klan
4-Ever," posted in December, each viewed over
11,000 times; "Nazi KKK," posted in October and
viewed 15,000 times; "Russian skinheads. We are
here," posted in December and viewed over 45,000
times; and "Skinhead" posted in November and viewed
132,000 times. Video-sharing may be a particularly
effective way for extremist groups, which have long
sought ways to find new recruits, to connect with
young people. You-Tube and its imitators are
immensely popular among children, teenagers and
young adults, and sometimes a single video will be
downloaded literally millions of times. In
addition, compared to direct-mail literature or
dead-of-night "literature drops" on people's lawns,
posting video footage is vastly less difficult,
expensive, risky and time-consuming -- and it can
be done anonymously with virtually no effort. Videos can also easily be used to
create a false image. While back-country Klan
cross-burnings, warehouse
hate rock festivals,
and neo-Nazi park rallies may draw only a handful
of supporters, a crafty amateur filmmaker can edit
or exploit camera angles to foster the illusion of
a much larger and more dramatic event. NSM, for example, posted a YouTube
video last October depicting their August
[2006] rally in Madison, Wis. A couple of
dozen NSM members, dressed like Nazi storm
troopers, seig-heil enthusiastically as the speaker
rails: "Pedro go home! White America was founded by
white Americans for white Americans! We will not
allow our nation to become brown!" The camera
lingers lovingly on the snappy accessories and
stern gazes of the NSM, creating in the minds of
some electronic visitors the impression of a
polished, powerful show. But what the footage
doesn't show is hundreds of booing, jeering
anti-racist protesters right across the street. Questioned last December
[2006] by the Intelligence Report about NSM
videos on YouTube, NSM Commander Jeff Schoep
claimed: "The effectiveness of the NSM and its
growth speaks for itself. We use many tools."
Schoep also complained that civil rights groups
were pressuring YouTube to remove "all so-called
racist content." Actually, YouTube already bans
"hate speech," defined
as "slurs or the malicious use of stereotypes
intended to attack or demean a particular gender,
sexual orientation, race, religion or nationality."
But the sheer volume of video files posted to the
site each day makes it practically impossible to
police all content. As a result, particular videos
are normally only removed as
a result of a user complaint. "We remove the offending content and
send users a warning notice for violating our terms
of use," says Jennifer Nielsen, marketing
manager for YouTube. "Users who repeatedly violate
our terms of use have their accounts terminated,
all of their videos removed and they are
permanently banned from YouTube." Racist extremists are hardly likely
to be deterred by such mild consequences,
particularly because most live in countries with
criminal penalties for possession or distribution
of such Internet propaganda. By using American
video-sharing websites, foreign extremists like
Germany's National Democratic Party (NPD) make it
vastly more difficult for legal action to be
brought against them in their own countries. The NPD, a neofascist political
party, frequently posts newscasts of Hitler
memorials and
Holocaust-denying
speeches on U.S.-based video sharing sites. Last
December, for example, after the NPD posted glowing
reports on YouTube of a highly publicized
conference of Holocaust
deniers hosted by
Iran, the British paper The Independent described
YouTube as "a favorite neo-Nazi website." While YouTube operators now have
scrubbed the site for those NPD videos, more than
350 other NPD clips are still available on YouTube,
and the party recently announced plans to launch
its own video-sharing website, based in America.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of
propaganda, would be proud.  Donate
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