[arp242]

The only reason I know "torch walks" and "far right" are somehow associated is because of this whole suckless thing that keeps coming back. Not everyone has the US news cycle intravenously injected. In my home town there's a yearly torch walk to celebrate the end of the occupation, and this hasn't changed because of Charlottesville.

As for "all the other information that has surfaced about suckless": there really isn't anything other than that hostname. I have actually asked the person with that hostname directly twice, and they opted not to answer. I agree it's not a good look, especially in the context of some other posts from that person. But it's not a good look for that person, not for all of suckless. If you look at all Python devs, or all Rust devs, or all HN posters, or all people 1.86cm in height: there's bound to be some unpleasant people there. It's just how things work.

And if you're going to make an accusation as serious as that then you really need to do better than "surely it can't be a coincidence..." Personally I'd say that a community which coalesced around a particular view on software also happens to have similar extreme political views as something that's rather unlikely.

The entire reason this whole "suckles are Nazis" thing is even a thing is because a single person kept bringing it up on HN, Lobsters and Twitter. As near as I can tell, it's a pretty successful campaign from one exceedingly toxic person with a grudge.

[9283409232]

I mean, having just learned about this drama, it sounds like they might be Nazis? Or at least have Nazi tendencies? Sounds like you have to chalk a few things up to coincidence to not even consider the possibility.

[arp242]

Like I said, the only "coincidence" is the torch walk thing. This isn't Elon "I am just throwing my heart out, and oh I also built the world's leading platform for antisemitism and retweeted antisemitic posts" Musk we're talking about here.

[jdiff]

It's not the only coincidence, though. One of their hosts is named after Hitler's military headquarters, and one of them has been known to go off about "Cultural Marxism," a very specific term most often used to covertly slip antisemitism into the conversation.

[slithytoves]

> One of their hosts is named after Hitler's military headquarters

If by "their" you mean a suckless.org host, no, that's not true. A hostname in the outgoing mail headers of one person posting to the mailing list was "wolfsschanze", i.e., a machine on that user's LAN, not a suckless.org server. The person in question was FRIGN. This got attention because he personally repeatedly pestered Lennart Poettering, who noticed that string in the mail headers and called it out on Twitter. https://web.archive.org/web/20190404160024/https://twitter.c...

Lennart correctly noted that this hostname was one person's laptop, but this morphed in the public consciousness to "a suckless host is named after Hitler's HQ".

> one of them has been known to go off about "Cultural Marxism,"

This person is also FRIGN. Specifically it's a reference to this lobste.rs comment: https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_ze5ccy

I hear these same two things repeated over and over as evidence of nazism within suckless (example, the Wikipedia talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org), but it is one person (who, granted, maintains at least one suckless.org project https://suckless.org/people/FRIGN/). I think badly of him as a result, but I don't see any reason to disbelieve the multiple Germans who tell me that torchlit walks are a common German tradition, or to tie it to the Charlottesville march, which was extremely untraditional in the region it took place in.

[kelnos]

The thing that always bothers me about the "it's just one person" defense is... well, what about the other prominent members of the community? How do they feel about this person's beliefs and behavior?

I work on Xfce in my spare time with a small group of other developers from around the world, and if I learned that one of them was a neo-nazi, I would immediately call for them to be expelled from the community. If the other maintainers refused, I would step down and leave the community myself.

To me, any other response would be tolerating and accepting neo-nazism, to the point that I would assume and expect outsiders would suspect the entire development team is ok with neo-nazism. None of that is ok in my book.

[slithytoves]

> I work on Xfce in my spare time with a small group of other developers from around the world, and if I learned that one of them was a neo-nazi...

I think FRIGN is odious but my judgment is that a gross edgy joke (the hostname) and one reference to "cultural marxism"* isn't sufficient to call someone a neo-nazi. Well, more importantly, believing it isn't sufficient (as I do, and I suspect the suckless people do) does not mean people like me or the suckless people are, as you word it, "tolerating or accepting neo-nazism".

*Despite Wikipedia's only page on cultural marxism being a redirect to "Cultural Marxism anti-semitic far-right conspiracy theory", it is not unusual to rail against cultural marxism in normal conservative circles, including respectable anti-Trump anti-anti-semitic circles like National Review and Tablet. See for example https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus... ; but I don't want to veer this thread into off-topicness, only to provide evidence that complaining about cultural marxism doesn't make someone a neo-nazi.

[MrJohz]

What about the comments from metux/Enrico Weigelt? (https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...)

He seems very comfortable repeating what is essentially the propaganda of Neonazi groups like PEGIDA.

I agree that we should be sceptical of extreme claims. Maybe it's a coincidence that they did their torchlit walk just after the Charlottesville march. Maybe it's just one of them who is willing to use Nazi references when naming his devices. Maybe it's just a weird fringe that posts Neonazi propaganda online. But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture, and the more it behoves us to take this picture seriously.

[slithytoves]

> What about the comments from metux/Enrico Weigelt?

Yep, that seems straightforwardly bad. Even so, I don't consider metux a suckless.org guy, but rather a deplorable person who contributes to multiple projects, one of which is hosted on suckless.org. The link you posted was from a Devuan mailing list.

Someone else used the example of Xfce, but suckless.org is a much more informal place that basically is a collection of separate projects with a similar aesthetic.

> But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture,

Sure, judgmments like yours are reasonable. I wouldn't begrudge someone choosing to avoid suckless over it, or even publicly voicing concern about the suckless community. But it's tiresome when every comment thread ostensibly about dwm, dmenu and st receives wild accusations of suckless.org being a community of nazis.

And I really think there's zero evidence of the torch walk being anything at all.

[arp242]

Again, as I already said, that's the server of a single person. Not "their" (community) server. The post about the "cultural marxism" on Lobsters was the same person, posting on his personal account. And again, as I have already said, I was not impressed by this either. But you can't just extrapolate that to all of "suckless".

[MrJohz]

The unhinged rant about how WW2 was the fault of everyone but Germany, how the AfD aren't the far right, how Holocaust denial should be legalised, and how the far left are trying to destroy Dresden - that is from someone else (metux).

Having one far-right loon in your team might just raise some eyebrows. A second, however, shows a pattern.