Resistance Records of West Virginia, USA, bill themselves as "the soundtrack for white revolution". White power is where they're at. "Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River," John Denver sang. "Life is older there, older than the trees, (take me home, country roads)."
One day in virtual paradise, Suzanne "Flynn", a virtual executive with the company, lent her name to a website designed to make Ireland a nation once again. With A.L. "Byrne" of Store Street, London, she put her moniker on to a national socialist site that urges Irish citizens to "say no to a black Ireland", or any other colour - except white.
The site is still up. Its original, unwelcome, links to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael websites were stripped away late last year, as were links to the Defence Forces and the FCA that had been billed via a signpost suggesting opportunities for practical military and weapons training.
"I have removed my page because it was being misused by a bunch of racists \ try to spread lies about Ireland," says Eanna, a webmaster the site abused.
"No matter what your race or religion you are welcome in Ireland. What we do not want in Ireland is racists or bigots: the Irish Defence Forces, Permanent or Reserve, do not allow these racists to enlist."
Racism has risen almost as fast as Internet technology over the last decade. Every new byte in cyberspace spawns equal opportunities for speech that is banned on land.
But it's different on-line. Rules and regulations generated after years of racial and intra-ethnic conflict are shorn away as though the world never experienced Nazism, Pol Pot-ism or the evils of apartheid. It's a new highway for old hatreds on a global scale.
"Flynn" and "Byrne" are not contactable. Numbers ring engaged or don't exist. E-mail inquiries to their nsrus site (national socialists are us) yield a polite automatic reply saying "thank you for your input".
Yet the site publishes voices that claim to be authentic Irish stock - or "folk" (volk) as they put it.
The voices speak in words stolen from wider debate. "At present there is a moral inertia dominating the Irish Political scene," says an editorial suspicious of pregnant immigrants and critical of granting citizenship to babies born in the Irish Republic of non-Irish parents.
"If racially and culturally British 'settlers' were and are percieved \ as a threat to the Irish Identity, then what conclusions must one draw from the invasion of Ireland by Nigerians and others?"
Madness leaks through. Crazy versions of evolutionary theory give the game away that whoever is running this site is not the full shilling, although they define themselves as pure Euro stock. Paranoid delusions from an "Irish mother" trying to raise a family in multi-racial London can't but be sad, as well as bad.
Yet millions take them and their like quite seriously. The number of hits recorded on such sites is now running into hundreds of thousands annually.
And although the Irish site may be stupid - a racial stereotype they need to fix? - the sites you get to from it are so smart they could sound reasonable.
These sites lie, of course, again and again, the way the far right always does. But the very way they misuse the work of established scientists and writers - Dawkins, Nietzsche and so on - gives them a credibility that might impress.
Attempts by police forces or Internet service providers to close them down are transformed into defences of the free speech principles that ground Western societies. Critiques of their anti-social fundamentals are presented as undemocratic conspiracies fuelled by hypocrisy.
The distinction between harmful and illegal sites is key to the complex Internet debate, Internet advocate Colm Reilly told me (contact me by email, see below, if you want to learn more).
You can access watchdogs to protect your modem from, say, pornographic materials, which are harmful, especially if children access them accidentally.
But vast differences in how illegality is approached or understood make it more, not less, likely such sites will multiply.
After being dragged through French courts for allowing Nazi memorabilia sales on line, Yahoo! asked a US federal court to declare the French could not hold it accountable for breaking French law because as an American company it was subject to American law, chiefly the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Was that what the founding fathers fought for?
Different attitudes to free speech between Europe and the US mean George Bush's America has facilitated more hate speech from neo-Nazi groups in a few years than Germany allowed in four decades.
And the post-September 11th dilemma is whether the US will decide to regulate without abusing individual rights. Yet Yahoo! has effectively yielded to French law and public opinion by banning Nazi memorabilia from its auction sites.
While governments argue with each other and providers about the legal and ethical morasses, hateful and incitement-based sites multiply like head lice.
Rants pass for analysis, and one man's truth is valued equally to another man's lies. In an age when judgment was never more difficult or more necessary, the Internet debate strikes at the heart of the liberal ethos.
Free speech for all, no matter who gets hurt?
mruane@irish-times.ie