With the cooperation of social media, TV news, and corporate controls, accusation has been weaponized so it suffices to shoot down information outlets, to throttle voices, and to ruin lives. A threat to make trouble is all it takes. To avoid trouble, lobbing off a targeted member gives no qualms regardless how factual a charge is or is not. Leaders are forced to choose between preserving the organization by accepting known lies against someone as excuse to cut them, or face trouble from swarmed attackers who will escalate and spread ever wider an unstoppable campaign of chaos and vicious claims sufficient to destroy the entire infrastructure. If Chollie’s head is demanded as the cost of avoiding debacle, sorry Chollie.
Run afoul of the sick pups or any right wing thug group of bullies and you will be suppressed. Vile rumors are but a start toward cloned or hijacked accounts, false posts, and denial of service. Nothing is off-limits, it’s no-holds-barred to-the-death free-for-all for packs of rabid hateful bullies who love blood sport. It’s not enough to nullify someone politically, as Lee Atwater taught his disciples, it’s mandatory to destroy the person’s life and the lives of friends and family.
It has become wilding online, e-wilding. It’s gang rape and gang murder prowling for weakness or vulnerability in the form of anything they despise or with which they disagree. One move or word they don’t like and you’re targeted. There is no buying them off or joining them because you can’t beat them. The target is always destroyed.
Signal squelched equates to successful hunts and kills for the pesh: PEople SHaped predators won’t permit dissent or questions. They hate diversity, tolerance, or sophistication, preferring the crass, the grunted, degraded lowest-common-denominator approach. Education clenches their fists and curls their upper lips. They attack to kill anything they don’t understand.
Pasternak, Rybakov, and Solzhenitsyn, among many others, were oppressed, their work suppressed in Russia’s Soviet Union days, which have arguably returned to spread globally, especially in America. The work of these writers got out via samizdat, a chain of private reproductions passed by hand, each exchange risking the gulag or worse, a Lybyanka single-tap or a brick wall firing squad. Writers were sent to Siberia to work salt or uranium mines in frozen wastes, their camps spartan, their food and clothing inadequate. They were kept starving to ensure obedience. There was no place to go were any to escape; they would die frozen and starving in wilderness. Most died anyway, even in the camps.
FEMA camps are not too far off, sans arctic wilderness.
My work needs to find a samizdat outlet. Popular success seems already beyond grasp but a small readership seems a modest, achievable goal, or hope. Perhaps not, but one must try.
Found a few notes about novels from 1992 — 27 years ago. They sparked ambitions I’d forgotten. Dried, cured slivers of vision caught fire again, burning as brightly as ever.
In looking over those novels, qualities forgotten rose to the surface. Putting them into a fair copy condition would put them in reach of publication. Stead, enjoyable for, even as torschlusspanik increases. The door is now closing with increasing speed. It’s been made clear only I care. Once I’m evaporated, no one will, or could, bother with my work. It will be burned or sent to a landfill. My life of words, dumped.
Ushering my novels and short stories, novellas and letters into print is the map of the rest of my time. Isolation has been my bane, loneliness my burden in my work. No one else gets it or cares, no one understands it as I’d wish, it is mine, it is me.
That’s what makes it so hard, yet so imperative. What else can I do to avoid being nullified? Max Brod saved Franz Kafka’s work despite Kafka’s cynical despair at the end of his life. In desperation Poe trusted Griswold with his literary estate and much of it was lost as a result. H. P. Lovecraft had August Derleth, who founded Arkham House for the purpose of preserving in book form HPL’s otherwise ephemeral pulp fiction, which would appear on news-stands in WEIRD TALES and so on for a couple weeks before being pulped and forgotten for the new batch. Those few copies of Lovecraft’s Arkham House books lasted well enough to see his work rediscovered, reassessed, and reconfigured into academic approval. All because his work made it into book form.
Manuscripts are scattered, lost, burned, and landfilled. A lucky few are archived in college basements for researchers. Binding the work in book form allows at least a chance for survival on dusty, forgotten library shelves, in attics, and so on.
So now I stand at the Samizdat’s Door, carrying my work as Solzhenitsyn did, although not in tiny writing in my overcoat’s lining. Time to pass through it, so my life’s work is not eradicated, obliterated, or nullified. So it has at least a sliver of a chance to find empathetic readers curious to know what I thought, what I chronicled.
I hope to see you on the other side of the door.
• • °
