BERLIN (dpa) – If you surf the Internet, it’s not hard to suddenly find yourself on a so-called “brown site.” There, beneath swastikas and old-style German fracture script, right-wing extremists disseminate their propaganda with impunity.
Although swastikas and rightwing extremists are frequently associated with Germany, it is in Germany where such groups have perhaps their strongest opponent: The German project “fairlink.de”, which engages young people to combat the hate sites on the Web.The group is supported by the initiative “Step 21” of Hamburg, which is itself a joint effort of large firms such as Bertelsmann, DaimlerChrysler, and Siemens. A number of prominent figures, including Federal President Johannes Rau, have become members.Since September, the young people have been split into 21 teams assigned to recording their experiences with the extreme right in the Internet. The “Tolerance Mediators”, as the youths are known, are in turn supported by 21 “coaches.”These are “people with knowledge of a particular area, who are then available to the young people as walking resources,” said television moderator Johannes B. Kerner at a presentation of the initiative in Berlin’s Schloss Bellevue.Step 21 intends in the long run to turn these observations into a “Netiquette of Tolerance.” This is an atypical approach for Germany, where neo-Nazi material is characteristically combated through an outright ban.“In spite of all the bans, extremist content is not going to disappear from the Web,” says Sonja Lahnstein, the director of Step 21. For this reason, she indicates, young people are exactly the ones suited to seek out debates with the right-wing extremist content on the Internet.And that content is getting more and more common, claims Wolfgang Cremer, the director of the department responsible for the rightwing extremism at Germany’s Federal Bureau for Constitutional Protection, based in Cologne.According to Cremer, nearly 800 German Websites featured extreme rightwing content in the year 2000. Yet just one year earlier, the number was only 300, and in 1996 it stood at 32. The contents range from mockery of democracy to illegal incitation of racial violence to “hate sites” with outright calls for murder.“From our vantage point we see the danger that the hotheads are just egging each other on,” fears Cremer.He thinks it only a question of time when acts of violence will ensue. Yet the originators of these sites are safe from the German authorities so long as the sites are stored on servers located outside of Germany.Thomas Adler of the search engine Fireball in Hamburg points to the host rights of service providers.“We can throw people out according to our personal taste.” This does raise questions about censorship on the Web, but Adler nevertheless encourages the involved youths to report the extremist right-wing content to him so that it can be removed from his catalog.The youths of fairlink.de are unified in their belief that bans “have no point, because of that special thrill of the morally forbidden for young people”, according to Robin, who lives in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.Living within the former East Germany, she has been repeatedly confronted with the violence of rightwing extremists. Ilona of Bavaria calls for an increased discussion of extreme right sites in the classroom.Yet Robin cautions that this is best done through controlled surfing, with an older person there to provide guidance. “That person can make the surfer aware of certain critical aspects.” She had good things to say about the reporting she had carried out under this set- up.Since August 2000, 21 well-known German media outlets have offered an information portal on the Net at www.netzgegenrechts.de. The platform is intended to offer “journalistic information against rightist agitation”, says Joachim Wehnelt, editor at the Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Woche and spokesman for the initiative.Through various lines of questioning, surfers can find articles on the theme of extremist right politics. This is the special competency of the media, says Wehnelt. “Earlier it was always, ‘We didn’t know that.’ We want to work against this proclaimed lack of information. Distorted numbers and images are more easily demystified against this background.”A show of civilian courage is also the goal of the organization “Webring Aktion Zivilcourage.” This involves linking various Web pages, usually from private owners, into a webring centered on the themes of violence and human rights violations. With this forum, various contributions can be discussed on issues related to “Not Looking Away” and intervention during violence.The goal of the young surfers of fairlink.de is to broaden the Internet initiatives against rightist extremism until the hate sites run out of steam.“Young people have to learn why xenophobia, not them, is what’s dumb,” says Ellen, from Westphalia. Yet in spite of all the calls for civil courage, the participants at fairlink.de have to be cautious as well: None of them wanted their surnames to appear in print.
