Battle on the Internet
His home is in a small coastal town north of Victoria, his weapon a
rickety self-built personal computer, and his only support a meagre
income from his job as assistant manager of a gas station. But on the
ethereal ground of the Internet, 54-year-old
Kenneth McVay is a
warrior with global reach. His cause: fighting the neo-Nazis, racists
and anti-Semites who have discovered the power of the worldwide
computer network.
Groups and individuals who dispute that the Nazis
systematically exterminated an estimated six million people, most of
them Jews, have made increasing use of the Internet to proselytize
their beliefs and recruit new adherents. Their contributions, often
anonymous, to such Internet discussion groups as alt.revisionism and
alt.skinheads are frequently vitriolic."The Holocaust is a big lie,"
asserted one recent writer."I wish there had been a Holocaust and that
we could have another one."
McVay spends hours each day monitoring the
Internet discussions for such assertions and countering them with
detailed references to a personal collection of more than 1,000
computerized documents, including survivors' testimony and evidence
from the 1946 Nuremberg war-crimes trials.
"I provide them with the
facts, with the citations," says
McVay."The project never ends. We
get one or two new Nazis every week."
McVay has received help, in the
form of research and additional documents, from supporters who include
Eli Rosenbaum, chief war-crimes prosecutor for the U.S. justice
department. But money remains tight, and his aging equipment is
consistently on the verge of collapse."The whole system is in
jeopardy--everything is at risk on a minute-to- minute basis," he
says. Last week, however, a group of Vancouver-based admirers
persuaded a local charity, the Committee for Racial Justice, to raise
money for
McVay's Fascism and Holocaust Archives--and his one-man
crusade may now become a full-time job.
© Copyright Maclean's Magazine (Oct. 17, 1994), p. 6.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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