Globetechnology: Canada signs protocol against Web racism — Department of Politicos that do not get it. What about countries with their own domains whose culture is based on racism? This is laughable. And who is going to define racism? Will this include doing something about the Mexican sites telling “Whitey” to get out?

OTTAWA — Canada has joined an international crackdown on Internet racism and its links to terrorism, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler says.

He was in Strasbourg, France, yesterday as Canada became the first non-European country to sign a protocol to fight hatred on the Web.

related book:

LESS THAN A CENTURY AGO nobody would write or wish to read a book about racism. Indeed nobody was aware that such a thing existed, for the word does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) of 1910.1 The term racialism has been around a little longer: It first appeared in print in 1907.2 Does this mean that racism did not exist before the twentieth century? In fact there is a consensus that it originated in the nineteenth century and has its intellectual roots in that century, although some scholars give it a somewhat longer history. Most of those who have expressed an opinion on the subject claim that racism, more precisely described as “scientific racism,” was an offshoot of the ideas about evolution that developed in the nineteenth century. Since racism is thought not to be attested earlier, conventional wisdom usually denies that there was any race hatred in the ancient world.3 The prejudices that existed, so it is believed, were ethnic or cultural, not racial. In this book I shall argue that early forms of racism, to be called proto-racism, were common in the Graeco-Roman world. My second point in this connection is that those early forms served as prototype for modern racism which developed in the eighteenth century.

Since racism, ethnic prejudice, and xenophobia are so widespread in our times and have played such a dominant role in recent history, it is obviously important to understand how these phenomena developed, as attitudes of mind and intellectual concepts. Group hatred and bigotry are found in many forms throughout human history, but I shall attempt to show that there is a red thread, or rather, that there are a number of red threads that can be followed from the fifth century B.C. onward. Racism, properly understood, can be claimed to represent sets of ideas, the roots of which may be found in Greek and Roman society. On the other hand, I certainly do not claim that we are dealing here with the specific form of scientific racism which was a product of the nineteenth century.