BATTLING CYBER-NAZIS

Magazine: Progressive, May, 1995

By KIM GOLDBERG

Section: ON THE LINE

Nanaimo, British Columbia

Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and other far rightists have discovered the recruiting potential of the Internet and have pitched camp in various electronic discussion groups on the worldwide computer network. But their efforts have been stymied by a Vancouver Island man who, armed with a keyboard, has spent the last three years waging war against the cyber-Nazis.

Ken McVay, a fifty-four-year-old convenience-store clerk and self-described "modern junkie," is vehemently opposed to censorship and chooses instead to counter the peculiar rendition of history presented on alt.revision-ism and other groups with historical facts--mountains of them.

"Hatred like this should be out in the open where we can deal with it intelligently," says McVay, who is not Jewish himself but bulldogs the Holocaust deniers "because these guys offend my sense of humanity."

His obsessive cyber crusade has produced the Nizkor Project (from the Hebrew word for "we will remember"), an immense electronic database of Holocaust information which McVay and his Net compatriots dip into nightly to flatten the latest batch of brain waves on alt.revisionism.

"Lying is cheap, and when the lies can be told to a potential audience of millions, the attraction of the Net is overwhelming," McVay says. (The Internet reaches an estimated 30 million people.)

Unlike the raunchier and unabashedly racist screeds found on alt.skinheads and alt.politics.white-power, participants on alt.revisionism attempt to cloak themselves in scholarly respectability and scientific objectivity, making their views more palatable to Net newcomers.

(White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger prefers to park his modem in the low-brow alt.politics.nationalism.white and crow about WAR's recent Net recruits and the "big things in the making" on the "WAR Internet front.")

Frequent contributors to alt.revisionism include Greg Raven (associate editor at the Institute for Historical Review), Michael Hoffman II (editor of Revisionist Researcher magazine), and Ross Vicksell of CODOH (Committee for Open Debate On the Holocaust).

The revisionists are looking forward to big things on the Net this year. In a fundraising newsletter last December, the Institute for Historical Review (the California-based command central for the international Holocaust denial movement) announced its five goals for 1995, including: "Make IHR materials available to millions around the world on the Internet . . . fast, around-the-clock access to the best revisionist materials."

In January, Hoffman told his Internet audience that his out-of-print comic book, Tales of the Holohoax, could finally be reprinted "thanks to generous support from a legion of enthusiastic children and adults recruited here on the Internet."

McVay's self-funded archives and aging computer equipment got a boost from the United Church of Canada last fall, which agreed to collect tax-deductible donations for the project.

All files in McVay's thirty-five-megabyte Nizkor archives are available by e-mail. To receive the index send e-mail to majordomo@veritas.nizkor.org with the single word "lists" in the message. Or search the archives via gopher at jerusalem1.datasrv.co.il. For more information, write to "Nizkor Project," Committee for Racial Justice, 103-1290 Homer Street, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6B 2Y5.

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Source: Progressive, May95, Vol. 59 Issue 5, p13, 3/4p, 1bw.

Item Number: 9505091788