First row (L-R): Ichi Jaehun rallies fellow protesters using custom-made signs; a protester disperses the crowd with a chain-gun; handbills for Le Pen’s election campaign. Second Row: Front National’s Second Life headquarters before the protests; chaos erupts outside the FN headquarters at the height of the demonstration; the “pig bomb” shortly before exploding.
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ront National was founded in France in 1972, with a far-right platform that included stipends for stay-at-home moms, restrictions on abortions, and a candid opposition to immigration by African and Middle Eastern Muslims. In recent presidential elections, FN president Jean-Marie Le Pen received 17 percent of the popular vote, and in December 2007, FN expanded into the virtual world with the construction of a headquarters on Second Life’s Porcupine Island.
Anti-FN demonstrations started up outside the headquarters soon after. Within a month, a number of groups calling themselves “FN Opposition” daily sent protestors to places where FN was active, especially on Porcupine Island. Sometimes the demonstrators were repelled. At other times they succeeded in tearing down the racist group’s signs. The stakes were high in this showdown. According to the Atlantic, a recent study by Sony revealed that last year $1.87 million was spent by real people on virtual goods and services. SL accounts for a hefty chunk of this, and within its economic sphere, Porcupine Island is a prime piece of real estate.
Who exactly fired the first shot is hard to say. A representative of a four-man operation calling itself “The Horrors of Second Life” claimed its group was the first to bring weapons to the protests at Porcupine Island. Ghazghkull Kulkulcan, a short, squat, hairy man wearing only a diaper, wrote in his journal that the protest had been peaceful when he arrived. He referred to it as “boring,” before being stirred to action: “I began handing out mini guns and rocket launchers to the crowd of protesters, and was completely unsurprised when they turned them on Le Pen headquarters.” Barriers around the facility blocked the gunfire, but as Kulkulcan observed, “This simply bunched all the bullets at the land’s border, causing anyone who went near it to be blown into space.”
“Neighboring buildings and grids were getting caught in the crossfire, unexploded bombs littered the landscape, appeals for calm went unheeded,” Kulkulcan continued. “It was awesome!”
Thanks in part to a steady supply of arms, by January 14 the major FN sites had become full-blown battlegrounds between ideologically opposed armies. Hamlet Au, an embedded journalist for Second Life’s New World Notes, wrote:
“The Front National headquarters was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute. Many residents had armed themselves. Multi-colored explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air over Porcupine.”
In Au’s first New World Notes dispatch he writes:
I manage to wade up to TonTonCarton Yue, who is strafing the FN building with a chain-gun usually associated with an AC-130 gunship…
“Can I ask,” I begin, “why are you shooting?”
“Because I hate Front National,” Yue tells me simply.
“If you use violence, doesn’t that reduce you to their level?”
“I don’t know,” Yue answers, after a while. “I don’t care.”
A tank—allegedly designed by the Horrors—rumbled across the island. Cages materialized to imprison combatants. A flying saucer appeared overhead, lugging a bright pink pig stuffed with a bomb. The saucer lobbed the pig onto the FN building and it exploded in a messy cloud of gore. All of the confusion and activity tore at the very fabric of Second Life’s reality, causing everything to move in a lag, a dreamscape of violence. The Horrors claimed responsibility.
Meanwhile, the noise and color of combat had begun to attract spectators, and they hurled random slurs at combatants from both sides.
FN was overwhelmed. “Vastly outnumbered and under-equipped, the [supporters] of Le Pen decided to bring in the cavalry,” Kulkulcan reported. “Or to put it another way, they called the police.”
But Second Life has no official police force. According to Kulkulcan, the uniformed officers that rolled up in black and white squad cars were actually FN goons in disguise. But not everyone knew that, and the “police” presence helped quell the violence. By then, however, the main FN building had been reduced to rubble.
In the wake of the fighting, FN abandoned its Porcupine Island headquarters and, on January 16, quietly put down roots on Axel Island. By this point the anti-FN demonstrators had divided into two main groups—Second Life Left Unity and Anti-FN—and subsequent protests of FN activities remained relatively peaceful. A few racist residents staged stunts in the days following FN’s defeat. One FN supporter turned up at the Second Life mosque wearing a Le Pen t-shirt and was “disappeared” from the islands.
On January 16—Martin Luther King Day for Americans—a glowing image of the slain civil rights leader rose high in the sky over the former battlefield. Ichi Jaehun, a masked, raven-haired girl who had braved the gunfire in January, busied herself designing placards and signs for Anti-FN. And all across Second Life’s lush, busy islands, there was a calm—the kind that precedes any storm.
DAVID AXE