Less than a decade ago, the dissemination of racist literature in most Western countries was restricted to poorly produced books and pamphlets found in small basement bookshops and on pavement card tables at markets and political gatherings. All avenues to reputable publishers were closed, making mass circulation next to impossible.

There is no doubt the relatively low cost and effort of Internet publishing has now opened a new forum for hate mongering. Organisations and individuals previously limited by money and geographic location are able to communicate freely, organise and spread propaganda; and just as importantly, a high degree of anonymity is possible - allowing the most offensive rhetoric to be aired with impunity. Not only can text and pictures be transmitted, but now audio and even video can be streamed through the Internet sites to a potential audience of millions. Spin-offs include the merchandising of propaganda materials, regalia, clothing, music and video.

The phenomenon has proved to be a dream come true for a worldwide array of racists, anti-Semites and generally hateful cranks. Reflecting the massive growth of the Internet in recent years, the number of racist sites on the Web has more than doubled since the mid-1990s, according to a new study published by the Anti-Defamation League, High-Tech Hate: Extremist Use of the Internet. The US-based organisation now has full-time staffers monitoring the Internet, as do several other international Jewish bodies, including the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.

Similarly, the diversity of cyberspace is reflected in the different slants adopted in racist websites, though there are some discernible overlapping themes: white/Aryan supremacy, skinhead neo-nazism, Christian identity and Holocaust denial. The majority of sites operate from the United States, though there are others based in Europe and an increasingly sophisticated number in Australia.

Perhaps the daddy of all racist sites is Don Black’s Stormfront, complete with its German gothic lettering and White Pride emblem. When it was created in 1995, Stormfront had links to only three other like-minded sites, but it now features extensive links to close to 100 white supremacist and neo-nazi websites. It also offers chat lines, a graphics and audio library and even a "white singles" page.

Another ex-Klan member, the infamous David Duke has gone back to his grass roots in producing the David Duke Report online, while also heading the Republican Party in St Tammany Parish, Louisiana. "The Internet will change everything," Duke writes enthusiastically in one online article, "The coming White Revolution - Born on the Internet." "[It] will facilitate a worldwide revolution of white awareness," and "spawn a political revolution around the world."

Duke’s confreres in the National Alliance - led by William Pierce, author of the racially apocalyptic Turner Diaries (an inspiration to Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and downloadable from the Net) - proclaim on their website that "after the sickness of ‘multiculturalism’... has been swept away, we must again have a racially clean area of the earth for the further development of our people. We must have White schools, White residential neighbourhoods and recreation areas, White workplaces, White farms and countryside."

Among the more extreme ‘white power’ sites is the World Church of the Creator, based in Illinois and led by "Reverend" Matt Hale "Ponifex Maximus". The home page proclaims that "the White Race" is under attack from "our mortal enemies: Jews, niggers and the mud races. We believe that RAHOWA (RAcial HOly WAr) ... is the only road to the resurrection and redemption of the white race." Its also contains links to pages "For Kids" and "For Teens", as well as the Rebel 88’s White Patriot Page, which screams that "if you’re just another filthy kike that came here to whine and complain about me being a racist, you can just GET THE FUCK OUT!"

So-called Christian Identity sites have also proliferated, employing the language of Christianity to justify white supremacy and virulent anti-Semitism under the premise that white Aryans are the true ‘chosen people’ and that Jews are actually agents of Satan. At Kingdom Identity Ministries we are told (with accompanying Bible references) that "these [Jewish] children of Satan through Cain ... have throughout history always been a curse to true Israel, the Children of God," and that "The ultimate end of this evil race whose hands bear the blood of our Saviour and all the righteous slain upon this earth, is Divine judgement." The folks at The Revival Fellowship claim "the literal descendants of the lost ten-tribed House of Israel are found today in the British Commonwealth of Nations, the United States and certain areas of north-western Europe, particularly Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Holland."

One such site, the Zündelsite which promotes German-born Canadian Ernst Zündel has become the subject of a lengthy case under Canada’s race hate laws. Dedicated to "the rehabilitation of the honour and reputation of the German people," Zündel describes the Holocaust as "an Allied propaganda tool" to keep Germans in "perpetual political, emotional, spiritual and financial bondage." In the case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, an interim ruling in May this year found that the truth or falsity of statements contained in Zündelsite would not be a factor in determining whether the complainants were likely to be "exposed to hatred or contempt" in a racially discriminatory fashion as a result.

The adjudications of the Canadian HRT (and similar bodies worldwide) are primarily directed at eliminating discriminatory conduct rather than punishing the offender, though a cyber-hate conviction was achieved this year for the first time after a Californian college drop-out sent threatening email to dozens of Asian students. The offender now faces up to a year in prison and a US$100,000 fine. Similar cases are now starting to find an airing in courtrooms worldwide, including Australia.

The attention given to the Zündel case raises the enduring question about what can be done to combat or minimise the impact of hate sites. The primary approach is to monitor the output, a task that has been taken up by a range of organisations with reason to be aggrieved, including the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and specialised Internet research teams such as the newly formed Operation Combat Hate and HateWatch, established in 1995 by Harvard University library researcher David Goldman.

HateWatch provides links to hate group homepages, tracks the use of those pages for recruitment purposes and provides bibliographical information on the subjects by researchers and scholars. Centralising hate groups onto one site and providing a critical context is the essence of the HateWatch endeavour, guided by the premise that exposing these groups will generate a backlash. It has also encouraged netizens to only do business with Internet service providers (ISPs) that deny access to racist and bigoted activists.

The ADL, also, has worked to pressure ISPs to refuse hosting hate sites and have had some success with America On-Line, which now has an explicit policy not to carry sites which promote hatred, racial division and violence.

Another provider, Geocities, which provides free email and Web pages, also has a no-hate page policy, as does XOOM. HateWatch lists several other ISPs with similar policies. The ADL has also made arrangements to have racial hate sites incorporated into Cyber Patrol, the widely-used filtering software that was initially developed to restrict access by school-age children to pornographic, violent and drug-related sites.

Another HateWatch initiative, undertaken this year, has been its Domain Adoption Program. Triggered when anti-abortion, anti-Gay campaigner Don Ellis registered hatewatch.com and hatewatch.net and put up a site that looked like HateWatch (but radically opposed), David Goldman engaged legal advice and charged Ellis with trademark infringement. The case is still pending, but the tactic of buying up domain names was appropriated by Goldman to help make bigoted speech harder to find on the Net. Now, HateWatch registers domains like swastika.com and nazi.net - effectively taking them out of circulation.

However, it is arguable whether such ploys can truly be effective when confronted with the irresistible tide that the Internet has become. It is in the nature of the medium that there is no easy denial of access, despite the various barriers erected - evidenced by the continuing battle to limit access to pornographic sites.

While legislation to penalise racial discrimination, hate crimes and incitement exists in a number of Western countries, no explicit laws have yet been made to penalise either the operators of hate sites or the Web servers that provide access to them, despite cyber-law’s rapid expansion in such areas as intellectual property. Even those who monitor racism on the Net agree that - free speech considerations aside - censorship is impractical in a medium where even the smallest operators can have an equal presence and new outlets are sprouting daily (HateWatch has added over 150 sites so far this year). The rapidly developing filtering technologies are perhaps the most viable practical option, though grounds for prosecution may exist under existing racial hatred laws.

Another route is to try to combat bad information with good information. A range of Jewish, African-American, Gay and other advocacy groups are creating sites that directly refute the claims and slurs found on hate sites.

One such example is the Nizkor project, founded to combat the pernicious effects of Holocaust denial, which not only rebuts in detail the claims of the revisionists but provides bibliographies, background on the denial issue and showcases original documents relating to the camps and the Nuremburg trials. Another is Klanwatch, run by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in Alabama, which not only monitors the activity of hate site operators and racist groups, but conducts educational programs to counter the effects of bigoted language and materials.

There are many other active groups worldwide using the Internet to promote the contrary message to bigotry. While all this is undoubtedly positive, it is a perverse feature of the Net that sites on opposite sides of the debate over racism (and most other topics) often provide links to their opponents as reference points. Thus, whatever issue one investigates, the complete range of opinions can be found if one takes the time. Ultimately it becomes a question of individual judgement as to what one believes - controlling the juggernaut of information and disinformation appears close to impossible - and a world of competing truths has obvious pitfalls where discriminating judgement may be lacking.

The Internet is an inherently pluralistic medium which thrives on diversity of fare - easy access to this panoply is its main selling point. It is easy to lose perspective - the sophistication of a site’s presentation may conceal that it is operated by a lone fanatic or a disintegrating organisation. Hate sites (indeed, all sites) reflect what their operators choose to believe about themselves, which often amounts to a carefully constructed facade of self-importance that does not have to compete for media column space or air-time.

Nonetheless, a whole range of ideologically-motivated violent crimes - from the brutal (and fatal) bashing of a young Gay man in Wyoming to the murder in Buffalo of an abortion doctor whose name had been listed on an anti-abortion and anti-homosexual website; both this month -have their counterparts in websites expressing sentiments every bit as violent. When sites like This Time the World extol the "towering figure" of Adolf Hitler and exhort followers to "Defy the rats and vermin at your feet! Let them feel the toe and heel of your boot! [and] Stamp them out!", there is every cause for vigilance.