From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Wanna hear a good Holocaust joke? Or a rib-tickler about lynching? How about starving Ethiopians? You’ll bust a gut.

I spent an eerie couple of hours recently on the wrong side of the sicko line, checking out hate sites and hate jokes. What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead . . .

I won’t go on, but we have to think about this. Hate crimes and hate speech are, you could say, democracy’s paradox. Let’s start with a definition: An “ordinary crime” (as though there could ever be anything ordinary about, say, murder) morphs into a “hate crime” when it’s primary or, perhaps, entire point is to amplify speech, perfectly legal in and of itself, that targets and dehumanizes a particular group. Indeed, a hate crime is a perverted form of altruism in that it isn’t generally committed for personal gain, but rather, for social intimidation and control.

I would add that hate crimes also reflect values that are socially marginal. James von Brunn, who had once blogged that Hitler’s worst mistake was that he didn’t gas the Jews, walks into Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle and opens fire, killing a security guard. The judgment against him is instant and visceral: He’s a violent loner nut. Look at his eyes. He’s not there. His humanity has been replaced with an ideology of hate. And this judgment begins to generate both fear and counter-hatred.

I confess to those emotions, especially as I wandered through some of the sites that would have stoked von Brunn’s fires, like, oh, tightrope.cc, with a logo that proclaims, “It’s not illegal to be White . . . yet” and flaunts an illustration of a hand holding a noose.

Click on “n-jokes” and you’ll find the humor equivalent of snuff porn or graphic photos of dead Iraqis: a hundred or so short jokes, which I took the trouble to categorize. The biggest bunch of them, a good 30 percent, could be called “murder is funny” jokes, celebrating lynching, gas ovens, starvation and he-men, a la von Brunn, shooting off their rifles. The second largest category, about 25 percent, sucked humor out of the gross dehumanization of the target subjects (African-Americans, Africans, Jews, Latinos and Chinese). A small group of jokes extolled the joys of slave ownership, with the rest of them resurrecting various long-dead ethnic and racial stereotypes.

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