Television HATE.COM
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
How do you say something bad about a
guy who sticks up for Jews and blacks?
With trepidation. But well see.
Some years ago one of the several liberal magazines I subscribe to
sold its list to the Southern Poverty Law Center. So for what seemed a long
time they sent me their fund-raising letters -- each emblazoned with a grisly
photograph of a young black man, his dead body lashed to a tree and twisted in
several directions.
He was the victim of a Southern lynch mob. The fund-raising letter
made it clear that lynch mobs were not a relic of history but a live threat to
black people today, and if I didnt want to stand by and let this go on, I
should send some money.
Today Morris Dees, the co-founder-director of the Southern Poverty
Law Center, has expanded his field of operation.
In September he brought suit against Richard Butler, the
82-year-old leader of the Aryan Nation compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, based on
a 1998 incident when members of Butlers private security force chased and
shot at a mother and son driving by in a car. The attackers were sent to jail;
but Dees seeks to bankrupt the group and close it down, charging that the
pro-Hitler rhetoric of old Butler inspired his goons to go on a rampage.
Dees conviction that hate rhetoric moves
dangerous people to murderous violence inspires the new HBO documentary,
Hate.Com: Extremists on the Internet, (to be broadcast Oct. 23). It
was produced in association with the center.
There are, Dees says, now more than 350 hate sites -- some
targeted at children. Being a child has become an increasingly perilous stage
of life. When I was 12, the big threat was comic books. Today at 12 Id
have to worry about video games, rock and rap lyrics, R-rated movies, Internet
porn, and now Web sites trying to seduce me into becoming a Nazi.
Dees focuses on a half-dozen hate groups and their leaders -- like
Stormfront, Christian Identity, World Church of the Creator and readers of the
race war novel The Turner Diaries. Dees attempts to demonstrate that
some of the worst people of our lifetime were moved to their monstrous acts by
clicking onto these Web sites.
Benjamin Smith, 20, who killed two minority persons and wounded
seven in Illinois, was a follower of Matt Hale, 29, founder of the World Church
of the Creator. Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the government building in
Oklahoma City, and the white guys who dragged the black man James Byrd to his
death behind a pick-up truck in Jasper, Texas, read The Turner
Diaries.
OK. But what is the value of this HBO documentary as
journalism? I fear that the producers simply brought this product to HBO, and
HBO bought it because of its cant-go-wrong thesis -- that Jews and blacks
and gays are victims -- rather than for its journalistic quality.
There is no attempt to put any of its evidence in
perspective or context. Were there no other bad influences in these
killers lives? We cant even read the evidence when the camera zooms
in -- with spooky, ominous music in the background -- on an evil Web page. All
we see is I HATE NIGGERS!
A standard network documentary would present historians,
professors, lawyers from both sides, political scientists, other journalists
and others to help us come to our own conclusions -- not whether hate is
bad (we all agree on that), but whether the appearance of hate messages
on the Internet is such a threat to democracy that we should rewrite the First
Amendment to shut them up.
I asked HBO for a list of 350 hate sites, and they
referred me to The Hate Directory (www.hatedirectory.com), a Web site
with a list of hate sites compiled by Raymond A. Franklin in Maryland. And
its a long list. Heavy on Holocaust deniers, but including feminist
groups like SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). A third of the sites I tried
werent there any longer. Only one site was listed as anti-Catholic.
HBO claims they got access to the powerful but elusive
hate group leaders for interviews. Yet these elusive leaders are
the type that will never shut up. An anti-hate site
(www.hatewatch.org) has a 1997 interview with the Rev. Matt Hale of the
World Church of the Creator, where he says stuff -- Jews look like rats, want
to mongrelize the white race by promoting interracial marriage -- that
demonstrates only one thing: Hes nuts.
As are just about all of the targets of Dees latest
investigation.
His concept also demonstrates the most naive notion of what the
Internet -- indeed all journalism -- is and how it works. The whole point of
the First Amendment is that democracy is a messy business that must allow a
thousand ideas to jump up, including those that are abhorrent to the rest of
the society, so that the odd but good idea will have a fighting chance to be
heard.
Why does this HBO documentary seem such a
mishmash?
Part of the answer goes back to my visit to the Southern Poverty
Law Center headquarters in Montgomery, Ala., a few years ago, and to my visit
with a reporter friend at the Montgomery Advertiser about the same time;
and to conversations with journalists and lawyers active in the anti-death
penalty cause; and to articles on Southern Poverty Law Center in The
Progressive (July 1988) and The New York Times (Sept. 9, 1992), and
to a Pulitzer Prize contender series on the center in the Montgomery
Advertiser (throughout 1994), and the newsletter Counterpunch (May
15-31, 1996).
Morris Dees is not quite what he presents himself to be.
Since his college and law school years, he has been, above all, a
genius not as a civil rights activist but as a direct-mail marketer. He sat out
the civil rights movement and he made his first million dollars selling
cookbooks and doormats in the mail.
In 1972 he worked for George McGovern and got his hands on his
mailing list. With these new contacts, Dees newly founded Southern
Poverty Law Center began to grow. As Gloria Browne, one of the few black
attorneys to work at the center, told the Advertiser (Feb. 13, 1994),
The market is still wide open for the product, which is black pain and
white guilt.
He has built one of the richest charities in the nation, with
assets (the Advertisers 1992 figures) of $48.1 million (compared
to, for example, $3.2 million at the ACLU), and spends less than a third of the
centers annual income for its charitable causes. In response to critics,
center co-founder and current president Joe Levin rejects the charge that that
Dees keeps raising money the center does not need. He told me that all
fundraising materials for several years have included a statement on the
endowment, which has risen to $116 million, so donors know the charity is
already well fixed. Of the $29 million raised last year, he says, $26.5 million
was spent on programs and administrative costs.
Although Dees did civil rights litigation in the 1970s, since the
1980s he has pursued relatively few civil rights cases, preferring to chase
high-profile, easy targets, like hate groups and the relatively toothless Klan,
portraying his work dramatically in newsletters as if he and his staff were
risking their lives.
One of his mid-1980s letters reads like a rough draft for the
script of Hate.com: He describes the South as a region plagued by
armed Klan military forces [that] freely roam our wooded hills from Texas
to North Carolina practicing with military-like weapons to kill niggers
and Jews in a race war they are planning (Montgomery
Advertiser, Feb. 13, 1994).
In 1992 he alienated most of the national civil rights leadership
by backing Edward E. Carnes, an Alabama assistant attorney general known as the
states chief defender of the death penalty, for federal appeals court
judge.
Dees admitted to The Progressive in 1988 that the
Klan thing is winding down and he was looking for new areas of influence,
especially in education. In the 1990s he produced a series of videotapes,
called Teaching Tolerance, which were distributed free to
schools.
Hate.Com flows naturally from most of Dees
previous career. He focuses on a real problem and packages it to suit his
purposes. If the problem is nuanced, complicated -- for example, the limits we
might put on free expression are seldom clear -- he provides a prism, based
partly on fear, through which we can view the issue: The Internet is out of
control; hate groups are poisoning the World Wide Web. His Southern Poverty Law
Center, with your help, will save you.
So, watch the show. Check out the Web sites. But think twice
before you send him any money.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is the Jesuit community
professor of the humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J.
His e-mail address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, October 13,
2000
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