A few weeks ago, while I was surfing the internet with visions of heart-warming emails from back home and great gift ideas for loved ones dancing in my head, I came across the following website during what I thought was a normal search engine inquiry.
What I stumbled upon has to be among the most despicable things I have seen in all of my years on God's fragile earth. I can assure the reader that the website I mention below is sure to cause the blood to boil in even the most even-tempered amongst you.
It is disgusting.
I share it because I, like many of you, believe that the best weapon to combat ignorance and the hatred it breeds is to shine a very bright light upon it and keep it focused until it has withered away and died.
I share it because I, like many of you, know that all is not well as it relates to what Dr. W. E. B. DuBois said was the problem of the 20th century. The number one problem of the last century is still poisoning humanity into this century.
I share it because I, like many of you, believe in the Highest Power and Its grand design where nothing happens by chance or coincidence. The "irony" of my chancing upon this cancerous website during the same week that the world community, in a meeting in Tunisia, asked for the rationale that justifies our country holding all of the reins that control the internet was not lost on me. A person, a business, a governmental organization, an NGO, et cetera anywhere in the world that seeks to create its very own domain for a website can do so only with the permission, the authorization of a little-known U.S.-government-created outfit.
Please bear that fact in mind as you view the content of niggermania.com.
This perverse website is the latest seed of wickedness put together by internationally infamous bigot Gary Lauck. Here is some background on the website, Lauck himself, and, finally, the Bush administration’s “connection.”
First, the information obtained about the website itself.
Server Used: [ whois.enom.com ]
niggermania.com = [ 64.82.100.50 ]
Registration Service Provided By: RJG Engineering Inc Contact: info@zensurfrei.com
Domain name: niggermania.com Registrant Contact: RJG Engineering Inc Lauck, Gary info@zensurfrei.com
(402) 483-7238 Fax: (402) 484-6796 PO Box 6424 Lincoln NE 68506 US
Administrative Contact: RJG Engineering Inc Lauck, Gary info@zensurfrei.com
(402) 483-7238 Fax: (402) 484-6796 PO Box 6424 Lincoln NE 68506 US
Technical Contact: RJG Engineering Inc Lauck, Gary info@zensurfrei.com
(402) 483-7238 Fax: (402) 484-6796 PO Box 6424 Lincoln NE 68506 US
Status: Locked Name Servers: hearsay.earthlink.net rumor.earthlink.net speakeasy.earthlink.net
Creation date: 23 Aug 2004 14: 05: 45
Expiration date: 23 Aug 2006 14: 05: 45
Whois-Services: yqx7pph2pxp49q.niggermania.com@whois-services.com
RJG Engineering is the parent company of RJG Enterprises which “hosts” fascist/racist websites that are illegal in Europe (where the memory of the destruction that unchecked bigoted influence brings has not been forgotten).
This is how RJG markets itself to neo-Nazi groups in Europe:
“ANONYMOUS WEB-SITES ARE POSSIBLE! The domain name is registered in the name of a U.S. firm. Even our firm does not need to know your identity. (Payment can be sent with an anonymous letter with reference to your web-site.)”
Political repression is increasing in Europe! European webmasters can reduce their risk by moving their web-sites to the USA! We establish your web-site with one of the largest and most reliable servers in the USA. Pay by the quarter or by the year. We accept Euro banknotes or US Dollar banknotes, no coins.”
The German government has filed suit against Lauck’s RJG in an effort to halt this circumvention of its laws prohibiting racially/ethnically/religiously inflammatory propaganda. Lauck, incidentally, served a four year prison term during the late 1990’s in Germany after being convicted on charges of “inciting racial hatred.”
Turns out that Lauck, a native of Milwaukee and member of various neo-Nazi groups in the Midwest in his youth, was very active during the Reagan-Bush years printing racist posters that found their way up on walls and light poles and the like all across Europe and selected areas of South America (one account credited Lauck – a.k.a. Gerhard – with the production and smuggling of approximately 8 million pro-Nazi posters per year).
Now, you ask, what of the “connection” between this online poison and the current administration holding court in the White House?
First some important background information about the medium that brings anyone with an internet connection access to niggermania.com.
The internet, very simply put, is a network of computers that can interact with one another much like a group of children do on a playground during recess. Like children speaking the same language, computers are able to “talk” with one another via internet protocols, or IP addresses. Every computer that surfs the web has an IP address, which looks like a foreign telephone number to the untrained eye. These IP’s can, to even the mildly trained eye, reveal, for example, where its particular computer is located.
Again, this is a very simplistic view of a complex picture.
The IP addresses, in turn, are allocated and managed by domains. The control of all domains is in the “care” of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN.
ICANN was established in 1998 by the United States Department of Commerce. When created by the Clinton administration seven years ago, ICANN was to be emancipated from DOC control in 2006. Six months ago, the White House decided that it was no more ready to relinquish control of ICANN than it is ready to let go of the naval base at Guantanamo.
Also involved in this mix is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) whose services are currently being handled by ICANN on contract, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU), from the U.S. government.
In its online media kit for the recently held summit in Tunis, the ITU stated in a primer document on the internet that “the final authority for changes or modifications to the root zone file, which is the top level of the domain name system, is the US Department of Commerce.”
Again, any entity anywhere in the world that seeks to create its very own domain can do so only with the permission, the authorization, the blessing of the United States government.
So, if the U.S. government both directly and indirectly is the sole gatekeeper of all that is on the world wide web, how does one explain the existence of niggermania.com?
Of course, the initial concern of those who may try to see the legal justification of allowing such hate-fomenting websites to exist, those who cite the freedom of speech protection afforded by the First Amendment, those who naively believe that the Bush administration is allowing niggermania.com to continue to operate because of the former’s respect for the Constitutional rights of the latter must take into careful account the following.
Earlier this year, ICANN gave the green light for a brand new internet suffix to join the ranks of the .com’s, .net’s, .org’s, et al. That new and approved net suffix is .xxx which, as one can deduce from the “letters” chosen, is for websites containing “adult content.” Within weeks, the White House did what it does best: it yelled “how high” when the ultraconservative Christian Right ordered it to jump. The Bush White House wasted no time in pressing the seemingly independent ICANN and its “parent company” the Department of Commerce to shelve the .xxx internet option.
Yes, the Bush administration can make things happen and they can make things not happen. Remember, this is the same administration that was able to circumvent the annoyances of the separation of powers and the United States Constitution by effectively pushing through legislation that became the Patriot Act in an expedited period of law-making time in autumn 2001 before said bill was placed on the administration’s table to sign into law.
For those of you that find this all too hard to believe, just take advantage of the fact that you live in a one of the fortunate few countries that has an incredible internet saturation rate relative to most of the world and log on. If you do not have access to the internet in your home, a library card is all you need as virtually all U.S. libraries have internet stations available free of charge. In other words, compared to most people in the world, getting online and visiting websites like niggermania.com is not hard for us.
According to ITU, the aforementioned United Nations agency for telecommunications, the United States has eight times as many internet users as the entire continent of Africa. While the total number of 22 million internet users for all of Africa may sound impressive, the initial impression begins to wear off when one thinks of Africa’s total population. When that staggering figure is taken into account, the actual 3% internet penetration rate for the African continent begins to make more sobering sense.
These figures are mentioned in this column because the absence of digital realities for nonwhite peoples around the world (the internet, mobile and fixed line telephone figures for Central & South America and the West Indies are comparable to that of Africa) makes the tacit consent afforded dangerous hate-mongers like Gary Lauck by the Bush administration even more troubling.
With the strong desire of the intolerant neoconservative elitists to have their “do-boys” in the White House install a junior-version of Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court, it is imperative that people finally begin to realize that the wool that was so gallantly and selflessly removed from our eyes by the likes of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, et al has been pulled back down over our collective consciousness.
Indeed, if the thought of niggermania.com staying online one more day does not bother the reader enough to telephone and email the local and Capitol Hill offices of his/her Representative and Senator demanding redress, if the sight of crude Klan-esque “humor” on his/her computer monitor does not arouse sufficient indignation to email everyone and his Mama in an effort to “get the word out,” if none of this elicits such a response then this writer sincerely hopes that all of our abused and oppressed ancestors will forgive our complacency and not curse our cowardice.
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