Tags: Anti-Fascism »»»» Freedom of Speech
A week ago a hate-filled group of fascist KKK nazi protesters descended on Charlottesville Virginia, supposedly to protect the existence of a Robert E. Lee statue. That statue is one of many commemorating "hero's" on the losing side of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee being a famous General in the Confederate Army. Why do we even have statues commemorating figures from the Confederacy? In the early 1900's a group of people seeking a revisionist reframing of Civil War history got these statues installed. So when a KKK fascist nazi white supremacist group takes to the street to protect such a statue, they're not acting to preserve history but to continue whitewashing history.
In any case -- the Daily Stormer website actively promotes the KKK/fascist/white supremacist cause, and was deeply involved in promoting the protest rally last weekend. Since then, the Daily Stormer's domain registration has been canceled, and they've lost several other important services from at least Cloud Flare, Google and Zoho. For awhile the Daily Stormer website was available only through the Dark Web, and later it had a .ru domain (Russia), and then they registered a .lol domain. But now their new registrar, Namecheap, has canceled that domain registration.
Namecheap's CEO, Richard Kirkendall, wrote a long blog post about his decision. In it he says that no Domain Registrar should be making such a decision but that even though he recognizes there will be a strong backlash against Namecheap that he feels he made the right decision. That's because while the Daily Stormer website deserves as much free speech protection as the next guy, free speech protections should stop when there's an incitement to violence. The content of the Daily Stormer website is clearly aimed at increasing violence and hatred and inciting violence.
https://blog.namecheap.com/inciting-violence-vs-freedom-speech/
Namecheap is a domain registrar, that offers website hosting, SSL certificates, and some other services. As the name implies their domain registration service is very low cost.
What Kirkendall describes clearly says he studied the Daily Stormer's website closely and found lots of instances of incitement to violence. As he says, that goes beyond freedom of speech and into the territory of causing greater pain and suffering.
Having determined this to be the case, he declared the Daily Stormer's activities to be in violation of Namecheap's terms and services and canceled the domain.
In my earlier posting (Attacks on anti-Fascist and pro-Fascist websites stifling free speech) I discussed this as a violation of the freedom to publish whatever you want. The principle is that so long as we're all protected by the right of freedom of speech, shouldn't we be free to say what we want? Isn't the elimination of one's person ability to speak an attack on everyone's ability to speak?
I think Kirkendell has given us a very good answer to that question. Someone once said to me that a persons right to swing their arms around stops at ones nose. In other words, freedom of speech, freedom of action, that's all great and wonderful UNTIL you start hurting other people or start violating laws.
The Daily Stormer has clearly been acting to cause harm to anyone other than a white person. Their ideology is that white people are superior to everyone else, and that it's the duty of white people to ensure that only white people survive. This ideology comes direct from certain strains of philosophy in Germany that led the Nazi Party into its virulent hatefilled actions that caused World War II and extermination of certain groups in Europe (Jews, Gypsey's, Gay's, etc).
