This is the kind of story I wish I wish the major media would follow up on. Someone with resources, an editor, full time, and a budget should tear that list of your apart. I think it's BIG news, and would love to learn more. I'd love to see some microphones in some faces Mike Wallace style, and let them try to defend their associations. Sigh...

So A.N.S.W.E.R. is selling Viagra now too?

Ahhhh - thanks for the list! Will be updating my blacklist soon as I get a chance . . .

I am growing a little tired of the word "Idiotarian". I know it's fun to say, and maybe it's fun to write. Who exactly do you mean? How broad is your "idiot" brush?

I think the word cheapens discourse.

Edward Jay Epstein?

Ross - to the contrary. As the word describes a "new" phenomenon (actually, it's a historical rhyme on the red/black leftist/fascist alliances of the 1930s), a new umbrella term makes sense. And it's hard not to love the label.

Especially after we've spent the last 70 years demonstrating just how futile, impoverishing, and bloody both of these ideologies are everywhere they've been tried. In the 1930s, one might (barely) have had ignorance as a valid defense.

My only quibble is that "idiotarian" was widened at its inception to include religious nincompoops like Pat Robertson, who bears no relationship to the red/black dynamic and arguably deserves his own term.

But "idiotarian"... I can see how he got bundled in along the way.

People who object to labels are usually objecting to being caught, and they don't like that it's easy for a label to pin them down. So they try to disarm the opposition by restricting its vocabulary. Every single person I know who objects to the label "liberal" IS one. Does the same hold for "idiotarian"?

I've been fascinated by the large group that is the intersection of neo-nazi, anti-semitic, holocaust-denial, anarchist, neo-communist etc. groups. While one would easily make the prima facie case that the ideologies are mutually contradictory, nonetheless there are a lot of people who span them. I don't fully understand how they attract each other, although it feels on the tip of my tongue metaphorically speaking. I'll have to do some more thinking.

Robin,

My take? They're united by a desire to shoot the same messenger. Staring at their shattered idols, they all blame the same set of demons for the destruction of their gods: capitalism, modernity, the bourgeois mentality. And what do you get when you cross all 3? Symbolically, you get Jews... and you get America.

If they could but kill their god's destroyers, perhaps their gods could live again and fulfil the glorious prophecies foretold. The prophecies they were cheated out of.

And so it is that the most reliable covariant in those with an unreasoning hatred of America is becoming anti-Semitism - even as fascism, the radical left, and Islamism all meld together in an ooze of apologetics for murder and rabid denunciation of their common hate.

Pointing this out hardly cheapens discourse. Indeed, I would argue that it is essential to intelligent discussion of what we're seeing before us.

As we found out on 9/11 and since, these ideas have very real-world consequences.

Go see today's post at Belmont Club on how the left is imploding.

Joe, I think you are close to my initial reaction - which is that the ideologies are meaningless veneers upon a core of nihilism, vandalism and murderous hatred.

Robin, also take a look at Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism.

That fascists would be against liberalism is a given. What's surprising -- and which constitutes a good part of Berman's book -- is on how liberals may also be sympathetic to fascist arguments. He argues that liberals (and he means "liberal" in the sense of people who are culturally of the Enlightenment, of which America and the West are the prime examples) have an heightened sense of rationality, and are attempting to apply this rationality on fundamentally irrational or anti-rational ideologies. In this case, the mental compass goes awry, and the suicide bomber appears more sympathetic than the people he murders, because how could anyone rationally choose suicide unless conditions were intolerable?

What we see then are the irrational/anti-rational ideologies (modern day fascist death cults) allied with some left-liberals, because the latter try to rationalize irrational world views, particularly in the context of some sense of social justice.

An interesting point of view, cjc, but I find that my reaction is that it is too intellectual an explanation for what I believe is a more visceral phenomenom.

At best, it describes the peripheral fellow travellers but not the hardcore of the various groups.

What the heck is University or Virginia American Studies Department doing on the list?

Or do I really want to know?

cbk

Robin, there's also a website for the Israeli community of Hebron on that list. Not every URL is ipso facto idiotarian - but if you look, that's surely the general trend, and the combinations sure are interesting.

Of course hatred is an ugly emotion worthy of serious concern and dismissed only with consequences. But my suggestion is the need to maintain perspective. This is not the first time in history that saber rattling by barbarians of one form or another have threatened the gates of civilization. Fouad Ajami makes a nuanced (and impressively lyrical) case for the transition into modernity as psychological dislocation that can be restrained from erupting into violence but only with enormous reserves of wisdom and a healthy respect for historical knowledge. Exerpt and link given below:

A century ago, in a short-story called "Youth," the great British author Joseph Conrad captured in his incomparable way the disturbance that is heard when a modern world pushes against older cultures and disturbs their peace. In the telling, Marlowe, Conrad's literary double and voice, speaks of the frenzy of coming upon and disturbing the East. "And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig . . . ."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/story.php?storyID=13852

I've read an interesting description of the political spectrum as a horseshoe, rather than a horizontal left to right spectrum. Anywhere remotely near the middle of the horseshoe, things can be seen to be opposed, and usually distant. However, most horseshoes are somewhat circular, with the two ends being fairly close together.

In other words, the extreme left and extreme right may be on opposite ends of the horseshoe, but they are mirror images and in truth are quite close together.

This metaphor works really well in practice - other than the nationalist tendencies of the Nazis, can anybody see any real political differences between Hitler's murderous gangster empire, and Stalin's murderous gangster empire? Sure, Hitler was more organized and rapid in the way he killed off Jews and Gypsies... but Stalin starved off the same ethnic groups, only more slowly, and murdered his 100 million or so victims largely for political reasons.

I don't know if the far left and far right are growing closer together thanks to the war. I think they've been very close all along, with differences visible and relevant only to dogmatic true believers in one or the other camp.

I'm interested in knowing how democraticunderground.com escaped the list.....

pbs.org

I knew it!

Hello Joe Katzmann, hello all!

Here's our little story of truth. Feel free to read it, to talk about it and maybe - think about it. Guess it's worth a guess and the best: this is reality!

Around April 2003 some swedish/bulgarian Antisemites started spamposting various URLs of our satire website gagarama.de in guestbooks, messageboards and blogs worldwide. To make it short, the actual "message" of these spamposts is pure radical racism.

From start on we redirected these spam referers to various info pages, step by step we've added various more info pages, where we informed our users about this spam campagne, about antisemitism and about the appearance of antisemitic Anti-Imperialists and Anti-Bushists.

Oktober last year we've had enough of all the idiots using our satire for their own radical politcal activism - we've shut down gagarama, took a rest and relaunched our website again a couple of weeks later. Before the relaunch we trashed most of the anti-nazi-pages which became a major part of our website through the year 2003 - Gagarama is satire and NOT political activism of any kind! We left only one page to redirect the spams to, a short but pretty clear statement on how we think about antisemitism.

Here's an example of what we write on those Pages/Images which have been linked by the mentioned Antisemites:

Note: This page/image has been spam posted/linked in hundreds of guestbooks, forums and message-boards all over the world. Please note that Gagarama is NOT responsible for this nor for any kind of spam! Also note, that the antisemitic and racist context of the mentioned posts is totally against our believes, against our ideals and against our will anyway!

Btw: No matter what we write or do, we just can't stop all idiots world wide, who are abusing and violating our website, sad as it is. Gagarama is not a "little bit antisemitic", it's not at all and our biggest advantage compaired to many others is: we can look in the mirror and not feel ashamed but feel proud on the fact, that we do NOT just run a website where we care about our own profits and nothing else!

Yes, there's is an ideology of idiotarianism and NO we do NOT belong to those who share and propagate this nor any other ideology!

To the Bottom line: Shure it's anyone's right to set up such a black list like this one on windsofchange.net. I'm honestly glad that at least somebody is reacting on these hate campagnes while the majority is simply ignoring it. But Joe, you know what I've told you in more than one emails. Now it's up to you to deside what's wrong and what's right. Like back in the "old days" Nazis are trying anything to suggest a big audience that shares their ideology and hate. It's nothing new, that Nazis are using foreign names, positions and now foreign websites to discredit and denunciate innocent people, especially those who have strictly opposite points of view. Joe, you got to know yourself if Nazis deserve to win this perfide game.

My guess is, sometimes it might be better to accept the fact that there is black and white but also grey!

Kind regards - freedom and peace to all!

Mat Sane
Gagarama.de

Btw: Yep, my english is not the best, sorry for that and thanks to those who rather care about what I say instead of how! ;-)

I would love to know how this list was compiled. As the webmaster of cilicia.com and the only person who has a cilicia.com email address, I can easily say my site has never had any hate material on it, with the exception of some random anti-semites that would slip through and post before I could delete it. That happened on a couple of occasions when they assaulted my message board, but it was CLEARLY not tolerated, and the entire other 1,000 page site has never had anything that could qualify it for this list... so I ask, why is cilicia.com on there, and when will someone actually visit these sites to decide if they were fairly included?

Does anyone know the FARC's Policy toward the Latin Tridentine Mass?

[JK: No, and it's utterly irrelevant to the post. Rest is Deleted.]

Raffi, the list is what was harvested from the neo-nazi spam post. The precise reason any specific web site is there is hard to say - but they were probably pointing at the spams they had left on your message board. So it may not say a lot about you, though thanks for clearing this up.

In other cases, where they cite far-left sites without message boards - that says a lot more.