Jul 27 2006
The Old Chat
Since George W. Bush has been signing about 800 ‘work-arounds’ on existing American Legislation – 200 more than all American presidents combined before him – it is safe to state that The American Constitution is crumbling. There is also little doubt that Americans have elected this president in a democratic fashion and it is even more obvious that they are enthusiastically exporting that same kind of ‘democracy’ to the rest of the world, and by doing so cause a genocide that is turning the stomach of any civilized being.
As you know I run a site called AmeaNet.org, mostly visited by Americans. The last two years they seem to be almost obsessively focused on ‘Freedom of Speech’. I do not see a lot of freedom of speech taking place in the US lately, but this may very well explain why they are all logging on to a Dutch server instead of an American one.
A few weeks ago I deleted a distasteful set of photographs on the forum. On one photograph Brazilian women were showing off their breast implants and on the other Turkish women, properly dressed to represent their Islamic belief, were waving flags. This was all in the context of the World Cup soccer, of course, and the poster called for a comparison. ‘Who would you rather have as your supporters?’ I thought it was degrading. I would have left the pictures up, because I hate it when they call me a censor, if not for the fact that currently so many Muslims are being killed for no reason at all. I am not advocating terrorism (Israeli or Arab) here, but there are too many civilian casualties for this war – or these wars – to be called other than a genocide.
In my view the gentleman who posted these pictures acts, thinks and talks like a true American with all the patriotism baloney that comes with it, but he is in fact of British descent. I knew he would try to start a row over my moderation of his post on the discussion board. He had already tried that two months ago in defending our beloved xenophobic Danes with their lack of respect for Muslim traditions. I was tired of that. So, I kicked him out and one of his friends with him, because from experience I know that if you leave one of a pair sitting there, the other one will continue the same crusade you kicked the first one out for. They were both none paying members, so I did not care too much. In fact Americans make up for 75% data traffic of my sites and only 5% of my income, so at times I would rather see them leave.
Boy, did I miscalculate that move! Everybody was upset. Nobody had any idea why I thought the pictures were distasteful. Usually the forum members stay on the forum. They rarely spread out to other AmeaNet sites, but now I had them coming to the old chat. For many days in a row I was cursed at and insulted as though they were being paid to do so. It reached a peak two days ago when somebody compared me to Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Osama Bin Laden, all in one go.
One would think that there would be some support coming from the French, but no, the only French woman (about 55 I guess) in the chat had a background on the barricades. She enjoyed a solid Communist upbringing and apparently later converted her radicalism into feminist ideology. We all know that feminists have their own reasons to hate Muslims. True feminists insist on ‘liberating’ Muslim women, even if that means: against their free will. From that perspective they are no better than the paternalists of the 1900s who also thought they were chosen by a higher authority to decide what was best for women.
Although she had not seen the pictures the British American had posted, she aired strong opinions, of course. After the British American had replied to that with ‘Vive La France’ you can imagine there was no stopping her either. In the end I had to close down the ‘old chat’ which has been there for almost ten years.
Nobody is waiting for an opinion coming from a webmaster of an adult site, but what I see happening between all these nationalities on my sites is that this almost full-blown ideological war is not about terrorism, it is not about oil, it is not about Bush, it is about one of the steepest hills we ever had to take in history.
With a world becoming smaller every day we are forced to lose our nationalism to become World Citizens and although that would be best for most of us, we keep clinging to our local superiority feelings. Suddenly the Swedes are explaining why herrings are best eaten with whipped cream, Americans try to convince us that everybody wearing a beard is a terrorist and the French will always stay the French. They will try to gain political power through ideological onion soup, whatever the conflict is and they will keep looking for new opportunities to restore their antique agricultural society to its former glory.
Onion soup makes me fart.
(As you can clearly see, I am not making a lot of progress becoming a decent World Citizen either.)