Updated 10/24/97.
McCarthy had one. Nixon had one. And it's only fair I have one. Large chunks of this are based on my old anti-CDA page, but I've decided to create, and keep vaguely current, this one.
Who gets on the enemies list? Anyone who openly professes to desire censorship of anything for any purpose. What is censorship, for this purpose? The use of force, or threat of force (laws, or threat of laws) to try to tell someone what he can and cannot communicate using his or her own resources to a willing or neutral audience. The New York Times refusing to run a story isn't censorship;a fundementalist organization threatening to sue (use the force of the State) the NY Times because they ran a story, is. I have no problem with those who express their displeasure with anothers speech by refusing to give them money -- no one is obliged to support someone else, and it is an absolute right to refuse to offer support to those who promote ideas with which you disagree. But the censor isn't concerned with what he views. His concern is with what you view. So they turn to the State, to laws, to lawsuits and threat of lawsuits, to harassment, to slander, to everything and anything in order to make sure you don't have a choice in what you read, see, or view.
What good does linking to their own sites do, you might ask? After all, won't they be a lot of self-promoting fluff? Sure they will -- but they will be what the censors think is self promoting. Nothing reveals the horror of evil more than by understanding that evil sees itself as good.
Let me elaborate. A few years ago, I was watching one of the endless documentaries about WW2 they showed on A&E ("All Hitler, All The Time!") before the Hitl...er...HISTORY channel took over that role. It was about the Warsaw ghetto, certainly a landmark achievement in depravity even by the standards of the human race. About halfway through the program, faced with endless footage of horror after horror, I suddenly wondered:Who filmed this, anyway? We are so used to an age of film that we never recall there must be someone with a camera to film it all. Clearly, it wasn't the Allies -- depending on who you listen to, they either didn't know about the Holocaust, or knew and didn't care. Equally clearly, it wasn't the Jews. Well, that really only left one alternative.
The Nazis themselves.
Now, I certainly can't claim I've never wanted to commit evil acts. I've had many a pleasant daydream involving people I don't like, toenails, and a pair of pliers. I often wonder just how tough those bank vaults really are, or just how much C4 you'd need to get rid of all of Capitol Hill in one fell swoop (OK, that last act is merely criminal, not evil). But I've certainly never acted on these impulses (I've especially never acted on the last one, all you alphabet soup types), and, more importantly, I'd hardly film myself doing them. If I were ever to give in to my darker side, I wouldn't be proud of it. Like all honest criminals, I'd hide my crimes as best as possible.
What kind of criminal doesn't hide their crimes? The kind who is so depraved, so immoral, so twisted, disgusting, and souldead as to not even realize what they are doing is wrong. There aren't many of them in human history, even given the basic nature of man. Coverups and the like are endemic to our elected officials, but, at least, they realize, like a cat, that they have done something which should be covered up, something they should be ashamed of. It takes a special kind of ethical insolvency to not even seek to hide the evidence of your wrongdoing.
And there's another reason to link to them, and I'm going to quote myself (Though I've heard you can go blind doing that)
Remembers, boils and ghouls -- the point of free speech isn't to permit speech we agree with. It's to permit speech we don't agree with, ideas and concepts we find vile, repulsive, and wrong. And there's no point in having a free society, where all views can be aired openly and freely, if we only read 'our side' of things. I regularly read the Religious Right web pages, and Radical Left web pages, and Aryan web pages and JDL web pages and all sorts of things. I'm not going to be 'corrupted' or 'contaminated' by being exposed to the ideas of those who disagree with me -- at worst, I'll have a good chuckle, and, at best, I'll learn to understand my enemy that much better.
Which brings us round and about to the sorry lot of miscreants I'm about to present to you. These are people who openly boast of their desire to commit memicide, and, in many cases, of their successes in so doing. They're like serial killers who display the bodies of their victims on the front lawn instead of hiding them in the attic.
I shall repeat what I have said many times before:There is no room for compromise, no middle ground, no talking points. These people are not 'misguided' or 'misinformed' or 'well intentioned'. They have one goal, one purpose, one dirve, one motivation:POWER. They want to rule, and they want to rule you. Don't think that just because you aren't a so-called "pornographer", the book burners will not come to your door. The censors don't really care about genuine pornography -- they want to attack anything with meaning, anything with something important to say. It's "Fanny Hill", a literary classic, which they attack, not "Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage". It's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Canterbury Tales" and "Huck Finn" and "Lord Of The Flies" that they want gone. Anything with meaning, anything with purpose, anything which tries to make people think, even the tiniest bit -- that is the target of the censors. If you have anything of importance to say, anything at all -- you will be targeted. Don't worry if your audience is small ,or limited to adults, or that you have critical awards coming out of your ears. None of these things matter to the sort of 'people' noted below. You can be next, and you will be next, unless they are stopped.
In the table below, I rate each group with 1 to 3 burning books. This isn't a measure of the severity of their censorship;all censorship is wrong. Rather, it's a measure of how important censorship is to the group -- that is, are they primarily censors, or is censorship just a hobby? For example, the Christian Coalition and the Wiesenthal Center only rate one burning book -- both have wide agendas. On the other hand, the OCAF rates 3 burning books (and an oak leaf cluster) -- they do nothing but censor.
'Scope' is how broad the group is. A National group attempt to affect policy throughout the nation. A state group (duh) attempts to affect policy within a state. And a local group....well, these are small minded, unbearably petty creatures that want to 'clean up' (with blowtorches and napalm) their 'home towns'. Their members probably spend a lot of time crouched in the bushes, peering in windows for any sign of Evil Thoughts.
New! Someone suggested, quite rightly, that the infamous Church Of Scientology be added to this list. I would like recommendations for two things -- one, a good 'pro scientology' home page, because I believe in giving the Devil his due, and, two, a good page explaing all the sordid details about these weirdos.
Well, without further ado, the table.
| Name | Rating | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| American Family Association |  |
National |
| Right stinkers, this lot. Among the primary architects of the CDA. They claim to see penises on Disney video boxes and think TV ratings (already odious beyond words) don't go far enough. | ||
| Morality In Media | |
National |
| Three books-a-blazing for this lot! Their homepage is a hoot -- despite having been an active force for censorship since 1963, they insist they aren't censoring. Here's their reasoning, and why it's wrong, so you'll know how to deal with it when some slack-jawed yokel presents it to you and pretends he thought of it himself. According to them, censorship consists solely of prior restraint. However, due to the sheer volume of material produced by the press, TV, and radio, prior restraint has become a practical impossibility. So modern censorship consists of letting anyone publish anything, and then imprisoning those who offend the powers that be. To a certain extent, this is worse than traditional censorship, because it means you never know if you are a criminal or not -- so you self-censor in desperation, and that's what the slimeballs at MIM want.
Oh yeah...MIM was founded in 1963 by a Priest (duh!) trying to 'clean up' television. In Nineteen Smegging Sixty Three? What the hell was 'indecent' on TV in 1963? Sheesh. |
||
| Simon Wiesenthal Center | |
International |
| Never let it be said that in our diverse, heterogenous, culture, that censorship is solely the perogative of White Christian Males. Since we are a free society, Jews can burn books right alongside their Christian Brethren. The SWC is not evil incarnate, but they are hypocritical and censorious, just the same. Hypocritical because they claim to oppose laws banning hate speech, when in fact, they simply know such laws cannot be passed in the United States, so they don't use that tactic here. In other countries, such as Canada and Australia, they vigorously support the passage and enforcement of 'hate speech' laws. Censorious, because they believe the best response to bad ideas is a boot to the head. It's very disappointing -- let's face it, arguing with Nazis is like shooting turkeys with their heads cut off, or something, so there's hardly any reason to run from the fray. | ||
| Jewish Defense League | |
National |
| As with the SWC, their agenda is a lot wider than censorship, but unlike the SWC, they're very upfront about their support for it. Go to the 'Nazi Alert' section, then the 'Official Policy' section...it's spelled out, quite clearly, what they believe. Sigh. | ||
| Family Research Council | |
National |
| More of the same. Not as amusingly lecherous as the AFA, nor as froth-mouthed as OCAF, these little goosesteppers are an almost perfect example of the 'mainstream' bookburners. Total slime, IOW. | ||
| OCAF | |
State (OK) |
| Another three book winner. There's obviously something in the water in Oklahoma. These cretins are a perfect example of what I discussed above, how censorship is about the suppression of ideas, not 'filth'. As of this writing (9/7/97) the OCAF is engaged in attempting to declare "The Tin Drum", an Academy Award winning film about Nazism, to be 'child pornography'. There's more about this on my Rants page. | ||
| Christian Coalition | |
National |
| The granddaddy of them all. The CC paints itself as a 'respectable' organization, so it tends to downplay its censorious activities. However, it is a primary motivator behind takeovers of school boards, funding of far-right candidates, etc. If there's book burning going on, you can bet there's a CC representative standing in the shadows, handing out matches. | ||
| Enough Is Enough | |
National |
| What does a bimbo do when she starts getting a little long in the tooth? She renounces bimbohood and becomes an anti-porn crusader. Donna Rice, whose only claim to fame was being able to boink Gary Hart and not laugh, is the primary spokesbeing for this sordid little organization, which manages to mix irrational MacDworkinism with odious Fundementalism and come up with something worse than either. Bring a sea-sickness bag if you visit their site -- it's organized around a 'nautical' theme that is just too cutsie-poo for words. | ||
| Library Watch | |
Local |
| A perfect example of how the WWW grants every small town nogoodnik a global forum -- and how, thus, petty thugs who might terrorize a small community can be held up to global ridicule. Mr. Chris Williams, who proves that the 'PhD' after his name really does stand for 'Piled Higher And Deeper', apparently has nothing better to do with his time than try to harass the local DA into arresting random librarians, apparently on GP. It's good to know there is no theft, murder, vandalism, or rape in Medina, so that the local cops can spend their time reading books and looking for naughty words. | ||
| National Coalition To Protect Children And Families | |
National |
| More of the same, more of the same, more of the same. These groups all tend to blur after a while. I'm thinking of writing a Tablemaster table to randomly create names for them. I honestly think all of these groups have the same 500 members...each member founds their own group, and the other 499 join. | ||
| Pro-Family Network | (?) |
National |
| A new one, I just found them from the Mediocrity In Media page. Like most fundementalists, their web page is a mess --- let's face it, laying out HTML requires logical thought, and censors are incapable of thinking at all, much less thinking logically. At the moment, their site is pretty much the usual 'lists of links to lists of links', but I'll keep an eye on them -- any friends of MIM are enemies of mine!
They have a link on their page entitled 'Population Control -- Is It Necessary?' Given the intelligence displayed by the authors of this site, it is not only necessary, it ought to be applied retroactively. |
||
| Concerned Women For America | |
National |
| As I go through these things, page after page of narrow minded banality and blatant deception (Aren't Christians supposed to tell the truth? I'm sure there's something in the Bible about being honest, somewhere between Lot raping his daughters and Solomon bonking a few hundred wives), I find more and more evidence that what we're facing here is basically a single, small, block of ignorant savages with a lot of faces, all of them repugnant. Check out, for example, http://www.cwfa.org/archive/familyvoice/lead_porn0397.html, which is the Constipated Wierdos For America's essay on net porn. It's 99.99% identical to those on the sites of the American Fascist Association or the Fascist Research Council. The same lies, the same almost indescribable technical ignorance (This page talks about a 'newsgroup' called 'hardcore for amateurs'. Boy, wouldn't that give the namespace-nazis fits, if it only were so.)
These people -- and I used the word 'people' only because I can't think of a species of animal I want to insult by associating it with CWFA -- can't tell the difference between a web site and a newsgroup, yet, they consider themselves qualified to tell Congress how to write laws governing the net. If it wasn't so sickening, it would be funny. |
||
| National Coalition To Combat Internet Pornography | |
National (in their fevered imagination) |
| One of the great running gags of the Internet -- the saga of Paul "What's a Link?" Cardin. Former Webmaster of the OCAF, Paul has struck out on his own, to form an organization with a totally different name than the OCAF -- and not much else different. Was he kicked out of the OCAF? Did he resign? The world may never know... | ||
Special Dishonorable Mention section...I am hesitant to add this to my main table, because David Burt isn't directly advocating laws -- but he is a censorious bastard, and a look at who he links to and who backs him is more than enough to damn him in my eyes. I may expand this section if it becomes necessary ,but I do feel it is necessary to draw a line between those who say, "I think you shouldn't do that" and those who say, "If you do that, I'll call the cops."
| Filtering Facts | |
National |
| Filtering 'Facts' -- a page run by one Mr. David Burt, otherwise known as "librarian with a matchbook". A loud and consistent advocate of installing filtering programs in libraries, despite the fact that a)his library has no Internet feed, and, b, based on many conversations with him on mailing lists, he's about as technically literate as my mother, and that's not much. | ||
