LETS GIVE THE GODS A HAND

In light of the censorious boors of the progressive left that recently shut down speech at the University of Ottawa, I revisited my hard drive for this unpublished screed that I had written during the censorious swarming of Gordon Gilchrist.

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I’m not certain of the exact date when I keyed this. I never sent it anywhere to be published. Certainly not for the reign stream media. I just kept it to myself. It was keyed sometime shortly after the Jennifer Lynch cloned mobniks swarmed Gordon Gilchrist; post-modern book-burners, it was sooo retro, smelling like the moral tuts tuts of the Victorian era that reverberated through Anglo culture for decades until it was thoroughly jettisoned. There is no need to built another structure of state enforcement of our speech, our thoughts, ideas, feelings, etc.

It took decades to rid ourselves of the Ontario Film Censorship Board. It has been replaced with the Ministry of Truth; Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. They are the Ministry of Politically Correctal Behaviour, administered by the sit-up-straight-and-eat-your-veggies ilk. They also have pockets of finks in every community , ever on the outlook for stumbling bumblers, networked to swarm in time for the 6:30 local news. The moment was grave. Northumberland had to be saved from sinking into the swamp of racism that gave rise to the holocaust, Rwanda, Kosovo

What an orgy of self-righteous self-importance, NGOs panting to deep throat the microphone of community outrage, in the name of this or that, grievances thrown onto the floor to writhe before the media. Score one for the speech burners. How pathetically correct can we get? Gee daddy, I want to be a politically correct progressive when I grow up.

ATTENTION KUFARS

Saudi women are celebrating the expansion of their freedom. At a mall outside Medina, a few women were reported to have flashed some naked ankle to a small herd of foreign tourists. The high mucky-mullahs, the Saudi Shura Council, had recently consulted their holy hearts and sacred texts, adjusted their testicles, hiked up their robes and announced that they were recommending to the Great Ones that some women should be able to drive motor vehicles.

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

This is a great leap into the early 20th century. Western feminists are applauding this profound advancement of women's liberty, albeit modest, but nevertheless progress, and to be encouraged. And now for the serious part -- the following are a few of the stipulations women drivers must comply with:

1. She must be under 30 years of age
2. Her driving is conditional upon the permission of a close male relative
3. She will be permitted to drive alone in the cities, but outside the cities she must be accompanied by a close male relative.
4. She will be permitted to drive Saturday through Wednesday between 7:00am and 8:00pm

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

This kind of misogynist supremacy is not peculiar to Saudi Arabia. It is quite prevalent in the Middle East, and appears to be on the ascendency. But, of course, it is a multivultural world and political correctmess requires that we respect all cultures. But I'm a dissident - I'm with Aayan Hirsi Ali: not all cultures are equal. (What a heretical assertion!)

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

Is it a valid question to ask whether some of this misogynism is being imported into our culture, just when our own home-grown misogynism was beginning to display some diminishment thanks to the energetic social education of the feminist movement?

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

No doubt some of that homophobic misogynist culture is being imported into Canada, but I am confident of the fact that on the whole and over the lifetime of Canada, immigration has been a net benefit and will continue to be so. The problem is not with immigration - it is with ourselves as a culture. Canadians are largely no-one-in-particular-just-anyone-in-general. I'm a permanent resident in this Grand Int'l Hotel. Canada’s greatest poet, Irving Layton, wrote, “Canadians are a nice people; I can think of nothing else to say against them.”

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

The bedrock of our culture is FREEDOM [speech, assoc.] and it is shrinking in our culture because of the politically correct Text Tyrants and Censorious Caesars with their denouncement and decontamination rallies [impress Conference] [Quack, quack, diversity, quack, quack, equity, quack, quack, boo hoo, quack quack]. Peterborough displayed a fine example of the Petty Police. And the damages? So far two grown women announced that they had been brought to tears because Mr Gilchrist farted in the elevator of public service. Who needs Big Brother to enforce the Speech Codes, when "autonomous" Little Brothers [led by unelected govern mental employees] know when to swarm and gag an inept dissident politician who has no sense of political peril.

Praise Allah!
Jesus H Christ!
Jumpin' Jehovah!
Belly up to Buddha!
Let's give the Gods a hand!

Protest Cutbacks @ Northumberland Heights Hospital

Departure Lounge to the Imagine Nation

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Question authority and experts about everything

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Midtown Creek Floods, Cobourg

Behave just as badly

"At the risk of sounding like the grumpy old man I am, if it truly takes a village to raise a child, maybe the gang that invaded the pub that afternoon could find another village -- one where everybody actually wants to raise somebody else's kids"
-- excerpt from Dan Christie column

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SAMIZDAT STORAGE IN BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

In the beginning there was the word and the word was wild. Assorted authorities throughout history, armed to the teeth with coercive altruism, sought to tame the word, but language is liquid. Try as they might, it cannot be clenched in a fist. In contemporary times the escaped word found freedom and refuge in samizdat.

Samizdat is the term used in the Soviet communist bloc to describe underground publications. In Hungary, the leading samizdat publication was Beszélő [The Talker] published by Gabor Demszky. The archives of his ’illicit’ production can be found at the Open Society Archives.

Radio Free Europe reporter, Stephen Polgar, May 3, 1982 wrote in ’Samizdat in Hungary: A New Voice is Heard’: “there is already one sign that Beszelo is different from the other samizdat material available … It was run off on a duplicating machine [117 pages] and appeared in 1,000 copies. That number may seem miniscule compared with those of officially sanctioned publications, but considering that most such underground literature has been simply typed until now, it is an important innovation.”

In their introduction to Beszelo, the editors point out the gaps in information that they want to fill. As subjects of interest to them they mention strikes, censorship of official publications, independent religious groups, student organizations, personal and group activities aimed at helping ethnic Hungarian populations in neighbouring countries, and the situation of "lonely truth seekers, who cannot resign themselves to the fact that those in power are stronger. ..."

In an article by Hungarian poet, Miklós Haraszti, author of The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, he wrote, “a man was subjected to psychiatric treatment for political reasons. Its title is "Things Like That Don't Happen Here." One thousand copies! Now that is a threat to the cohesiveness of community as protected by The State.

In 1988, Gabor Demszky, and his then-wife, Roza Hodosan, were permitted to travel outside Hungary for their first time. It was my pleasure to host them for a visit to Toronto that summer. A few months later in Budapest, they were rounded up and severely beaten by the police.

Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn’s monumental documentation, The Gulag Archipelago, as well as many great novels and human rights documents pertaining to freedom, circulated hand to hand in the Soviet bloc. Samizdat gained its greatest foothold as a result of the Helsinki Accords signed by the all protagonists involved in the Cold War.

Various functionaries of The State sent out their textual assault gangs to confiscate the word in the wild. In Hungary, The State had two locations where samizdat could have a safe haven. The first was the basement of the security forces. The other was in the attic of the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), which is located in the Buda Castle Palace, declared a World Heritage Site in 1987.

On a fortuitous day in 1990, I found my way into this attic. How I managed to enter into to this secure domain will have to be untold for the time being – it would jeopardize the livelihood of two freedom-loving individuals who had taken an unauthorized person, a foreigner no less, into such a sensitive area.

The door to the stairwell was unmarked except for a number. After ascending a steel staircase, another non-descript door appears with the instruction above the door, No Smoking. How banal!

As the attic revealed itself, I found that it was more sensitive than I could have imagined – row on row of documents pertaining to the Horthyist regime.

Miklós Horthy was declareded Regent and Head of State in 1920, after having banned the Communist Party. He held that position until his ouster in October 1944, when he had a fall-out with Hitler’s forces. One would think the communists would delight in exposing the machinations of this National Socialist stooge, however, the documents being sequestered, also contained accurate intelligence reports the Horthyists received on the machinations of the commies.

The National Library accepted samizdat from the security services, but it also accepted donations. It was in keeping with their policy of being the central storage for the nation’s memory. The police could not trump this mandate, however, they could tightly control access to the memory. So the word was rounded up from the wild and sequestered on dusty shelves.

Anyone wishing to access this memory, were required to be vetted by the security police. Standards were excessively high; only demonstrable devotees of communist crap were permitted to read the ‘anti-social’ material found inside samizdat. If the potential reader is of good ideological breeding, they were then required to explain their intentions towards samizdat. Those who pass had to specify the item to be perused – no fishing expeditions permitted. The item would then be brought to a special room under surveillance. A reader could bring a single page of paper and a pencil – nothing more.

One might think all this procedure has changed since the fall of the commies. Largely, it hasn’t. The security apparatus no longer has role. The samizdat collection is now of historical importance. It has become precious. Access restrictions still apply, but they are no more onerous than a visit to access the material in the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto.

Samizdat has become respectable. It’s practitioners have found themselves in various positions of power in the Visegrád Group of nations. Samizdat has now found an honoured position in the international community.

The International Samizdat Association, founded in 1976 by the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with the mandate "to encourage efforts to make the texts of [samizdat] documents most readily available to libraries and individual scholars, as well as to support research projects which make use of samizdat materials for scholarly research purposes". Today, almost 30 years later, the goal is to encourage and support international research in samizdat, dissent and alternative culture”

Below are a few photographs taken inside this attic of samizdat. As far as is known, these are the only photographs of the place ever posted into the public domain.

On these shelves appear assorted newspapers published by the emigre community in
the West. The material here was either confiscated from Westerners at the
airport, or acquired by police search warrants of dissidents.

Tamizdat, was the name given to those publications that were published outside
of Hungary. Literally it means 'there published'.