The Mob, the Mask and the Masquerade

A lot of people wonder why I use my own name all the time on the Internet, to them this seems to be absurd behaviour. I can't quite remember how it came about and whether I really gave it a lot of thought, it probably just seemed the right thing to do at the time. I started with my email address, then my signature on newsgroups with links back to my website. Then a bloke decided to give me free webspace and he bought a domain name for me, without asking me he used my name. So it just sort of happened. Over a period of time I became a public person without first being a celebrity.

Using your real name is what you do if you are an academic or a politician. Some people have the option of a private identity and a pseudonym. You can use a pseudonym if your own name is a liability in some way or you just want a funkier name which rolls off the tongue well, uses less neon or allows a larger point size on the front cover of your novels or on movie posters or doesn't sound so Jewish. You can also use a pseudonym if you want to have a distinct persona as an author or performer separate from your home-life. Some authors even use separate pseudonyms for writing in separate genres. Some authors change every name in order to allow them to lie to tell a better story. If it's not your name on the front cover and the name of your village, your partner and his brother is changed would it really matter if the story actually happened in two parts, fifteen years apart, to different people? Would anybody know or care? It isn't autobiography when you change your name to write it, is it?

Some people use pseudonyms to allow them to be two-faced. A pseudonym allows a man to practice as a banker and write exposés about life in the city or write about his life in the special forces or secret service without compromising the security of former colleagues. Pseudonyms also allow gossip columnists to collect lots of inside stories by betraying the trust of people they mingle with and pretend to befriend.

A much more sinister phenomenon is the use of a pseudonym to allow somebody to conduct a vendetta of hate and intolerance without risking getting beaten up for it. Using a false name allows you to pretend to be something that you're not and to walk away from the consequences of your words and actions. It is almost unknown for anybody expressing sympathy with extreme right wing causes to use their own name, face or voice on YouTube. They act big and tough and hard behind a mask of anonymity which allows them to be a complete arsehole and just walk away from the consequences of their words. They are free to express thoughts which would rightly get them shunned from social circles and dismissed from their jobs.

Of course anonymity has been used for protection of people expressing views which could cause them to be persecuted and so I would not dream of forbidding people from using an assumed identity. Many great liberals and atheists in the past had to resort to anonymous publication and the use of pseudonyms during times when expressing such views was very risky. Today the extent of views which people are putting themselves in danger for expressing are much smaller and are much more extreme, you can't get yourself beaten up by a baying mob for suggesting that women have more rights, or fewer rights come to that, and as long as you are not deliberately provocative about how, when and where you declare it you are not going to find that your life is made intolerable by declaring belief or disbelief in a god.

So just what views these days require the use of a mask to hide behind?

Racial hatred

Religious hatred

Hatred of difference

Promotion of violence for political ends

Do you see a pattern here? Apart from people advocating allowing adults to have sex with children the only opinions which need the protection of anonymity are those which are clearly based upon hatred and those which advocate criminality, violence or oppression. Nobody needs a mask to be reasonable, only to be thoroughly unreasonable and hateful.

Being identifiable makes for responsibility. There are certain things that I can't say on my website or on YouTube that I could say, quietly, in a pub or in a private conversation or shouted at the radio while alone in my car. But those thoughts are not thoughts that I am proud of and they are not thoughts that I want my yet-to-be-born grandchildren to find out about. Politicians can't say the things that Alf Garnett could say in his living room because the whole point about such rants is that Alf Garnett did not have the power to act upon his own words. He knew that it was all entirely hypothetical, it was never going to happen so he could say whatever he wanted because nobody would ever hold him to his words or make him account for the implications of the policies he advocated because they would never come to pass. Real politicians are in a different position, especially when they are actually in office.

It is possible to play at being a politician and still get away with spouting hateful nonsense but only when you are in opposition. The last thing any BNP candidate for the council wants is to actually get enough BNP councillors elected so that they have to run the council. That would be the end of them. Similarly actually being in office would require them to wake up to reality of what is possible and what is not. A racist BNP government would find itself treated as an international pariah, which would destroy the economy. There could not be any such thing as a BNP coalition government because Labour and the Conservatives would be more likely to get into coalition with each other than with the BNP and the Liberal Democrats would rather disband than ally with racists. To get into office the BNP would need to win an absolute majority in the House of Commons, they would not be able to form a minority government, no democratic politicians would be stupid enough to allow them to repeat Hitler's strategy.

If anybody ever canvasses your house on behalf of the BNP first of all consider moving. Shit, do you really live in Chavsville? In the meantime, while they and you are still there ask them how many seats there are on the council. If they can't answer this question laugh in their face. Then ask how many BNP candidates are standing. If the second answer is significantly smaller than the first one, especially if it is less than half the first figure ask them how they expect to achieve anything. Then take their photograph and ask them for proof of identity. If they get uppity at this point ask them what they have to be afraid of. Are they infringing the terms of their ASBO?

YouTube encourages people to be anonymous while they use the service. Have you ever wondered why this is? Do they want people to feel free to say objectionable things they would not be able to say in a public place? Of course not. The reason for the request that you remain anonymous is that it significantly reduces the chances that they will be exposed to the chance of being sued by some shyster lawyers who are trying to get compensation for somebody kicked senseless. They want a total firewall between the virtual and the real world, if they control their part of the virtual world and encourage anonymity they are protected from the legal consequences of people taking YouTube quarrels up in the real world. It is not about protecting you, they are seen to give advice which discharges their duty of care, if you ignore their advice and use your own name it isn't their problem if this gets you into trouble. I am quite sure that if it wasn't for the fear of being held accountable for the consequences of YouTube users meeting up they would much rather that you did use your own name as this would significantly reduce the amount of hatred, bigotry and flaming that goes on.

The culture of freely available pseudonyms, multiple email identities and so on makes it very easy for people to assume the identity of online pain in the arse. Ask yourself whether you really want to live in a world where hate seems to have no consequences.

The mob wins when individuals do not have the courage to be identified. If everybody hides away and the only strident voices come from the anonymous then the enemy wins by default. When the fascists are in control standing up and being counted is suicide. It is when the fascists are on the rise that the benefit of standing up and being seen to be prepared to support and defend liberty is at its greatest. For Americans the enemy is fundamentalist Christians and those who would use the threat of a few dozen terrorists hiding in remote “tribal areas” to justify wholesale infringements of personal freedom back home.

In Europe the enemy of liberty is Islam not Christianity. There is a threat from the criminal activities of people, mostly young men, who use Islam as a mark of us and them far more than they use it as a guide to living a decent life. These people come in different flavours from gangs of muggers at one level (low intelligence but gregarious) through to the suicide bombers (sometimes smart but rarely well-adjusted or sociable) and the silly romantics who end up travelling to Afghanistan to get shot by people they went to school with. There is another threat as well which is probably more serious in the long term and that is the rise of Islamic separatism and the drive to get Sharia law accepted as the default in what they define as Muslim communities. We can no longer afford to mess around with the idea that there is such a thing as a Muslim community as a legitimate entity. We should at once stop the de facto recognition of self styled Muslim community leaders and do whatever we can do at every opportunity to dissolve the boundaries around the Muslim community so that it ceases to have any meaning.

Multiculturalism has been a profound mistake. By trying to avoid giving the impression that foreigners were primitive savages we have forgot something extremely important: modern liberal European civilization is superior to the vast majority of alternative societies across time and space in just about every detail. Hello? We are not primitive savages. We do not burn books, behead infidels, stone adulterers, mutilate our children's genitals, oppress our women, freak out at homosexuality, condone slavery, believe in evil spirits or wish to submit to a Caliph apparently appointed by God. Five or six hundred years ago the Islamic world was no less civilized than Europe and for the most part better washed but in those last six hundred years we've done a little bit more than catch up. We have advanced significantly throughout that period and especially so in the last fifty years. And we should make it damn clear to the entire world that we have absolutely no intention of going back or of allowing even small parts of our country to fall under the rule of people who would take Europe back to the dark ages of ignorance and the rule of religious dogma as fast as they could manage it.

It is not racist or bigoted to believe that your ways are best when they clearly are. The Islamofascists have no such reticence in declaring their own superiority and they simply scoff at our weakness and lack of conviction. While morality, decency and civilization are not things it is easy to be objective about that is not a good reason to declare that we shouldn't even try and should instead just agree that everybody's ideas are equally valid. Cultural relativism is another great folly. So is post modernism. A liberal secular democracy allows people freedom to be free but it should not feel that it is obliged to tolerate the intolerant who would abolish freedom and destroy everything that is so great about our modern world.

The more people who are prepared to be publicly identified with a cause the more seriously that cause is taken. One man stood on a platform clearly identifiable by face and name is worth a thousand weasels behind masks and pseudonyms. What is the point of supporting a cause in anonymity? That is clearly demonstrating that something is wrong either with you or the cause.

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The Mob, the Mask and the Masquerade

So just what views these days require the use of a mask to hide behind?

Atheism | Politics | Memes | Mind | Matters | Interact | Feedback | Email | Links | Search | Forum | Home

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited