Kenneth McVay
Kenneth ("Ken") Neal McVay , OBC (born October 2, 1940 in Santa Clara , California) is the founder and operator of the largest website on Holocaust and Holocaust denial on the Internet , the Nizkor Project . He is considered to be one of the best experts on the Internet scene on the topics of anti-Semitism , historical revisionism and right-wing extremism , which he has been fighting against for around 20 years.
Life
In order to protect himself and his family from the attacks that he is constantly threatened with because of his commitment, McVay has published little information about his origins, youth and previous activities. He grew up in California, trained in the United States Marine Corps , married in 1961 and moved with his family to the Canadian province of British Columbia in 1967 . He has dual citizenship from the United States and Canada . He lives on Vancouver Island , but keeps his exact place of residence a secret. He has four children and eight grandchildren.
He earned his living in various activities, including seven years as a designer and operator of sawmills and as a gas station attendant. He is currently working as a web designer and consultant from his private apartment.
He lists classical and blues music as hobbies, but suffered permanent hearing loss. He is interested in motorsport and at times actively participated in motorcycle races.
The Nizkor Project
In January 1992 McVay came across anti-Semitic postings by neo-Nazi Dan Gannon by chance on the Internet . He then went to the local library and found that their claims about the Holocaust were false and fictitious. He sent the detailed reasons for this discovery to the newsgroup alt.revisionism : This gave rise to the idea of collecting relevant factual material in order to be able to effectively counter the propaganda of Holocaust deniers online.
In self-taught training, McVay read hundreds of books about the Holocaust and World War II . He processed what he had read and wrote his own web texts from them in order to inform lay people, especially young people, about facts and backgrounds of the time of National Socialism and the Nazi genocide and to be able to respond directly to Holocaust deniers. He often devoted up to 20 hours a day to this work, so that he soon had around 3,500 websites.
To the same extent as his private collection of facts, the demand from numerous network users for further comprehensible, condensed and precisely documented information on the subject of the Holocaust grew. McVay could no longer do the work alone and therefore founded the Nizkor Project in 1995, which is carried out by a team of volunteers. It is financed only through donations and personal contribution.
From this grew a comprehensive archive with exact and verified primary sources on the Holocaust and carefully prepared refutations of the arguments of Holocaust deniers. The project now offers over a million pages. This makes it one of the largest and best online services on this subject. The company's own project servers in Toronto process over seventeen gigabytes of data every month.
Education instead of bans
McVay is of the opinion that hate propaganda on the Internet cannot be effectively countered with prohibitions and laws, but only with facts and exposing contradictions, lies and falsifications. His work influenced political decisions, such as the legislation on so-called hate crimes in Canada, where he appeared in parliament in 1996.
Attacks from opponents
McVay has no particular ideological or political direction. But he faces daily personal assaults and death threats. He explains the hatred that hits him in numerous e-mails, hate speech and organized attempts at discrediting with the frustration of those affected who see their lies fully exposed by a private person who cannot be classified as a Jew or a Zionist .
Honors
Numerous university faculties in Canada and the USA link the pages of the Nizkor Project as an excellent source for their own research work.
For his voluntary work against Holocaust denial, McVay received the highest medal for citizens in the Canadian province of British Columbia in 1995 . He also received a special media award for human rights in March 1996 from B'nai Brith of Canada.
See also
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | McVay, Kenneth |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | McVay, Ken |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American-Canadian website owner and Holocaust denial activist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 2, 1940 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Santa Clara , California |