by Peter O'Donnell » 08/ 11/ 12 7:06 pm
Just a few thoughts in the aftermath of this very successful fund-raiser.
As I've told the Fourniers, I am committed to finding a way to make some money from some application of my noggin, which is going to take some luck as well as skill, since I am rather old now (63) and was left in less than an employable condition by the circumstances of blacklisting in one area, and reduced health in the area last enjoying my tax contributions (courier driving). From now to eternity, it is going to have to be interest on investment, in the broadest sense of the term investment, unless you fancy the likes of this old geezer waiting tables at the nearest White Spot (the managers there don't, so no worries).
I recently discovered that the old blacklisting machine, while rusty and perhaps in somebody's garage, is still working well enough to crank up a storm of Smith-hatred, as in the days of my youth (and middle age), should I ever develop the conceit that I am employable or at least likeable and not the absolute Darth Vader of climate science (a role that I am actually quite proud to play). I speak in riddles to some extent, although I've made clear the rather mundane and ugly facts in previous posts. There is nothing very new about it, the establishment in Canadian (and apparently now global) climate science "have me on their list" and while the list may be short or long, I don't know, it is effective in my case and that's all I really need to know about it.
At times it makes me angry, and that anger sometimes tends to focus on my citizenship, which has never been much more than a very bad joke played on me by the lies told to my parents about what a good idea it would be to emigrate here. Left out was the part about preferential treatment being given in the public service to the native born and especially to the scions of the long-established half-choking on the dust of an Ontario concession road (yes I know about them and about the secret code too). But being of a conservative frame of mind, I thought, well I am better than this, I will work my way through this obstacle. It never happened. I haven't changed my assessment, but there was only ever one man who could overcome the world, some of you might overcome clumps of ten or twenty, but my challenge was always to overcome a country or even the world, and it never felt comfortable on my shoulders. Despite never failing at challenges that I set for myself, I failed at everything the country said I must do, which always reduced to, become somebody else, not you.
How does this fit in? It probably doesn't, I wanted to explain why I felt so out of shape around the middle of this summer fundraiser. It just seemed to me that the entire situation was (and still is) ridiculous, that we should be paying lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars (and yes it does add up to that over the whole lawfare campaign) -- for what? -- to settle a bun fight in the cafeteria where our main "offence" is not to be them -- the same crime I just described in my account of blacklisting -- that's all it is, really, that we dare to be articulate and not be like them. It offends them, and sends them off on a mad hunt for "Nazis" who don't exist, "racists" who aren't there, but more to the point, non-liberals and perhaps non-Liberals, who definitely ARE there. That is our thought crime. We are no different from five or ten million other people in Canada, fifty or a hundred million in America, tens of millions in Britain and other western countries. The details of what we believe might vary, but what is so very different here, is that ten or twenty of us have been almost randomly selected, because we came a bit closer to the hive of the mother bee perhaps, or because we seemed just that little more defiant, that little less malleable. So as an example to the others, we must be crushed under the Stasi heel of those who dream secret communist dreams for our future. They are not just a bit different, they are a lot different, even from the masses who adored Trudeau and who adore Obama today. Those many unconcerned people are just stunned, useful idiots, unaware of history and its harsh lessons. They wouldn't know the Gulag from an Old Navy sweater sale. You could mention holocaust denial to them and they wouldn't know there was a holocaust nor that you could deny it. You could mention Mao -- and he would be a fashion icon.
But our adversaries are a lot smarter than that. They see themselves as being at or near the top when the revolution is finished. And we will be first into the ground, of course. But then many others will follow. They always do, communism is not for everybody.
I know how big an issue it is. It reaches up to the highest heaven. When the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1988, one of its more articulate spokesmen, Georgi Arbatov, gave a talk in Toronto at the theatre in Convocation Hall. Over two thousand people were there, mostly the sort of useful idiots I have mentioned, Toronto Star readers and the like, but also, hundreds of recently arrived dissidents, those who had recently found their way out of the glorious fraternal union of the peoples and the Soviets, to capitalist Canada. They were not just in opposition to Arbatov's droning lecture (all the usual lies about perestroika and glasnost and peaceful co-operation) but they wanted to shout out heaven's denunciation. The evening ended when one man, apparently Latvian, called out in tones that even Arbatov could not ignore. He went home, I suspect, a broken man, because either he spoke Latvian, or the Latvian had learned enough Russian, to tell him exactly what he thought of the U.S.S.R. Within three years, there was no Soviet Union, just its broken pieces.
And in that spirit I hope that one day, there will be no lawfare, just its broken pieces.
To get to that day, we will need a lot of money. It makes me sick, to be honest, how much money this all costs, and what good could be done in the world with that money. And I will even make this open appeal to our persecutors, can you not connect with the humanity you profess to represent, to see that what you are doing is stupid, pointless, and a pandering to your own enormous egos? Who the hell do you think you are? (Sorry that should have been in Latvian, or Russian).
But I suspect they will not rest until they think they have silenced us. That won't happen. Some lawyers will get rich instead. Let's make it our lawyers, if that has to be the case. I hope I can do it all myself. If I could do it myself, I would. It's that important to me. Not to win some bun fight, but to get past the smoke screen of "defamation" and refocus the national discussion on real political issues, because right now, what we have is a charade, issues half repressed, half disguised. There is no open and frank talk, and there needs to be. We are being slowly strangled by the ever-tightening cords of political correctness, which is just a politer and more North American form of communism.
Be ready to give again, this ain't over.
)
