This is a series of posts I did on Right-Wing of the Gods about an incident that began when I got an e-mail from an alleged Neo-Nazi calling himself Appius Claudius Priscus, who had been silenced on the Nova Roma boards. The man's real name is apparently Joseph Keller, and copies of my posts can be found below. A nine post long tangent seemed to be a bit much on what is, after all, not my personal blog, so I decided to move them here and make them into a small webpage which, nine posts later, they practically were.

1. A fair hearing for Appius?
2. Appius II: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your computer
3. Appius III: The Empire Strikes Back
4. More censorship on the Nova-Roma list I
5. More censorship on the Nova-Roma list II
6. More censorship on the Nova-Roma list III
7. More censorship on the Nova-Roma list IV
8. My take on Appius
9. The Pagan Underground and the Moral of This Story

Was Mr.Keller actually a neo-nazi? At the time of this writing (December 19, 2006 at 12:57 am), I'm not so convinced that he was or is. While I won't endorse all of his positions, I will say this much for him - he has a consistency lacking in many of his detractors. Consider, for example, the Nova Roman official who defended the practice of denying freedom of speech to Nova Romans on the basis that the ancients didn't recognize the right to such, but insisting on the female franchise within Nova Roma, despite the fact that the Roman Republic never recognized that right, either. What one is left with genuinely is a pick-and-mix, a conceptual shifting from one set of assumptions to another as the needs of one's argument dictate at each step, producing a construct that genuinely is incoherent because it can not survive in the mind of the reader examining it, without the assistance of his amnesia.

Yes, the recognition of the right of women to participate equally in society is part of modernity in the nontrendy sense of the word; so is a recognition of the right to freedom of expression, based on solid arguments that have stood the test of time for centuries. Arguments that we're now supposed to forget, I take it? While I would agree that there may be solid, common sense based arguments for excluding a racist from a private gathering, we should remember that Keller's racism is a side issue, something that came up as one of his opponents went digging for dirt. The real issue, arising in the context of a self-styled micronation that claims to be modeling itself after the Roman Republic, is Keller / Appius' opposition to allowing women to vote in that micronation; no reading between the lines on this one, the principal participants themselves have said as much. Regardless of what one might happen to think of such an idea, this is not at all the same thing as arguing that women should be silenced or excluded, and so the social contract argument I raise toward the end of this doesn't serve quite as well as a rationale for what is generally, if reluctantly, admitted to be what this was really about - an attempt to silence the politically incorrect, antifeminist side of that argument. Once again, the Starhawkians and their radfem and Politically Correct allies collectively got their way and silenced their opposition, through their usual tenacious underhandedness.

Keller, regrettably, gave them a tidy excuse for doing so, allowing them to silence debate on a debatable issue, momentarily. One should note that as one of their stated reasons for taking action was to silence a point of view on that issue that they personally didn't care for, that the issue of voiding the social contract applies to them with, if anything, greater force - they may now legitimately be silenced themselves. They have not merely declined to invite somebody whose views they find obnoxious into their own gatherings, they have actively campaigned to get others to do so as well, with far more coercive effect, and that makes all of the difference in the world, as anybody who became familiar with the antics of our Politically Correct friends during the 1990s knows all too well; the difference between choosing to not hear something oneself, and trying to ensure that nobody else can hear it at all.

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