Keyboard bravado has no place offline
Louis Jacob discovers internet blogs laden with paranoid xenophobia, and hopes real life's not like that
Sunday March 16 2008
Recently, I have been increasingly drawn into the sweaty-fingered, murky world of the internet blog. It is a world full of possibilities, debate and opinion, but it also never fails to leave a bad feeling in my stomach.
Most of the blogs that I visit have to do with immigration or the Lisbon treaty, and the macabre mixture of sinister xenophobia and extremism which runs through them seems to me to be completely out of line with what is happening in the real world.
You wonder exactly who you're dealing with sometimes. Some of these bloggers are undeniably sharp and well informed, but they are so radical, you find yourself asking: "Where are these people in everyday life?" You wonder what gives such a blazing extremist edge to their opinions. Of course, there is no way of knowing who they are or what their motivation is.
This is partly what is so disturbing about some of these blogs. It's too much like whispering in a dark corner. It's easy to be a hero or a righteous bigot when you are sitting alone in your living room.
For my money, too many of the people who post comments on the immigration blogs appear to regard reasonable debate as an unacceptable affront to their convictions, and if you so much as question their ideas, you leave yourself open to attacks of venomous abuse. Funnily enough, these are also the ones who seem to be posting the most comments and return to the same sites day after day. These are the ones most likely to take people up on trivial things like spelling and grammar.
Some of the most popular immigration-related blogs in Ireland are platforms for a frightening, intensely creepy, paranoid xenophobia verging on fundamentalism.
One such blog has been hard at work, trying to argue that because of genetically proven differences between races, immigration and the mixing of people from different places is a bad idea. The amount of detail and research on this site is astounding. For this particular blogger, the human being is a seriously dangerous creature, a genetically programmed time-bomb who should stick safely with his own to avoid disaster.
Of course, it's all "ready-to-use" nonsense and it's nothing new. In the 19th century when the Irish were going to America and Britain in their millions, it was widely held that there was a genetic order to humanity. At that time the convention was that the Anglo-Teutonic was at the top, the Negro was at the bottom and Hibernian was somewhere in the lower-middle.
I don't claim to be clued in to the scientific low-down on all this genetic behavioural stuff, and I wouldn't want to be, but I do believe it is dangerous to apply it to any discussion on immigration.
But then, it's not surprising: the more you look into some of the most extreme (and, sadly, popular) blogs, the more you realise that they are anti-everything: anti-immigration, anti-Lisbon, anti-Europe, anti-government, anti-America -- the trick is in trying to ascertain what exactly they are "pro".
I'm reminded of the quote at the end of The Wind that Shakes the Barley; "It's easy to know what you are against, quite another thing to know what you are for."
Many of the blogs that I have visited have been informative, and I have had some decent debates with people who are in favour of immigration restrictions. But I would hope that most of what is said on the immigration blogs is nothing more than the keyboard bravado of the closet hero.
