Amazon Often Rejects Porn But Helps White Racists Publish Books
Fans of racist literature looking to get their hands on a copy of Kyle Bristow’s 2010 novel White Apocalypse need look no further than Amazon.com. Thanks to the online retail giant’s print-on-demand (POD) service, the bloodthirsty white nationalist fantasy – which Bristow self-published through Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace – is available for sale on Amazon for just $17.58.
And it’s eligible for super-saver shipping.
Amazon will even help novice white nationalists get their library going. For $50.14 – a slight discount – interested readers can buy Bristow’s book together with Racism Schmacism by James Edwards, host of the unabashedly racist radio program “The Political Cesspool,” and A Mighty Fortress by dedicated neo-Nazi Harold Covington, described by one enthusiastic reviewer as “unabashedly pro-white and anti-jew [sic] and non-white.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Hatewatch.
When Amazon announced its new self-publishing and POD service in 2005, the press release boasted: "Print-on-demand has changed the economics of small-quantity printing, making it possible for books with low and uncertain demand to be profitably produced. BookSurge [now called CreateSpace] makes it possible to print books that appeal to targeted audiences, whether it's one copy or one thousand. … Thanks to print-on-demand, 'out of print' is out of date."
Amazon’s forecast turned out to be correct: It is precisely this business model that makes it possible for extremists like Bristow to get their self-published screeds – “books with low and uncertain demand” which a decade ago would have been limited in quantity, difficult to find, poor in quality, and unknown to anyone but hard-core believers – to a broader audience than ever before. It may well be that no human being at Amazon or its POD service ever actually reads a book like White Apocalypse —the book may be produced entirely by computer.
White Apocalypse is centered on the “Solutrean Hypothesis,” a theory that has almost zero support among anthropologists but bravely insists that whites from Europe managed to cross the North Atlantic to North America 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, thus becoming the real “Native Americans.” Bristow claims that the crossing in fact happened, and that those early whites were massacred by the later-arriving Asiatic people who crossed the ancient land bridge across the present-day Bering Strait. The book’s hero is a white man on a mission to give the hypothesis a fair hearing – but in order to do so, he must vanquish his “evil, anti-western” opponents at the Atlanta-based “Center for Diversity and Multiculturalism” — an organization that bears a striking resemblance to the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center. It even includes characters clearly based on Mark Potok, the director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and Heidi Beirich, its director of research. The book contains a graphic description of the Potok character’s assassination at the hands of the hero.
The “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” list for White Apocalypse runs 96 books long and includes Jean Raspail’s white nationalist, anti-immigration classic Camp of the Saints; Holocaust denier and longtime Klan leader David Duke's My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding; fiction by hard-core nativist Matthew Bracken; and works by white nationalist Jared Taylor, who edits the American Renaissance journal, and anti-Semitic California State University, Long Beach, psychology professor Kevin MacDonald.
Also listed is The 21st Century Sniper: A Complete Practical Guide, described as “a complete practical guide for any modern sniper, [including] tips and basic training necessary to become an efficient marksman.” Amazon’s teaser for the book says, “To the sniper, the battlefield is like a painter’s blank canvas. It is his job to simultaneously utilize tools, training, and creativity to deliver devastating psychological impact upon the battlefield. And it is he alone who is left with the intimacy of the kill.”
On page 195 of White Apocalypse, the main character shoots the Potok character sniper-style from a parking lot roof.
Like any private business, Amazon is entitled to determine what books it wishes to promote. The bookseller seems quite clear on some matters — pornography and books that prove an embarrassment among them.
In 2010, for instance, Amazon got 3,000 negative comments in a single day from people incensed that it had made the self-published The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure available on Kindle. (The author, Phillip R. Greaves, claimed the book was an “attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles … by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow.”) The day the comments came in, Amazon issued a statement claiming that it “believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.” But according to the Los Angeles Times, the next day, links on Amazon to the listing were rerouted to a page that said, “We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.”
Amazon’s Kindle service also has pulled incest-fantasy and other erotica and two books titled How to Rape a Straight Guy and Rape in Holding Cell 6, whose author posted on his blog a letter from Amazon stating that the books “contain content that is in violation of our content guidelines.”
Amazon does sell The Turner Diaries, a race war fantasy novel that inspired crimes including Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Written under a pseudonym by William Pierce, founder of what was once the most dangerous neo-Nazi organization in America, the National Alliance, The Turner Diaries’ plot includes a bomb attack on a federal building by white supremacist guerillas. It also features a bloody section on the “Day of the Rope,” when “race-mixers” are hung from lampposts and trees.
