A new computer virus is sending Nazi messages to people’s e-mail accounts. The Associated Press associates it with the “Right Wing,” a term they use to describe mainstream positions among American conservatives.
Computer Virus Spews Right-Wing Spam (AP)
A computer virus spewed neo-Nazi-tinged spam in English and German into inboxes over the weekend. The virus, first spotted on Thursday, sends out a blast of e-mail to addresses found on infected PCs.
Most of these messages contain links to news stories with content that “smells of right-wing political rhetoric,” said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of McAfee Inc.’s antivirus emergency response team. But a small percentage contain links to a Web site that tries to infect visiting machines with the virus, he said.
Among the many messages was one with the German subject line “60 Years of Freedom: Who’s Celebrating?” referencing the end of World War II. Another read: “Honorable Action” and contained a link to the Web site of the NPD, Germany’s right-wing nationalist political party. One in English carried the subject: “Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously,” referring to the Allied attack on the German city during World War II.
Ed Morrissey asks the rhetorical question,
[W]hat if the messages supported Joseph Stalin, or contained apologias and paeans to Soviet domination of eastern Europe and the days of the gulag? What if instead of neo-Nazi propaganda, the e-mail had articles about the social progress made during Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Would Yahoo! or the AP call it “liberal spam” or even “Leftist spam”? I rather doubt it; they would call it by the much more definitive description of “Communist propaganda”, which would be correct.
Technically, AP is correct in calling the Nazi/Fascist movement “Right Wing,” even though Nazi is a variant of “National Socialist.” The problem, though, is that they use the term indiscriminately to refer to conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who are well within the mainstream of American political thought. One can’t use that language interchangably.
