September 1, 2008 at 11:56 A.M. I was just obstructed in my efforts to reach my MSN group. This usually means that "errors" are being reinserted in essays. I will do my best to make all corrections as soon as possible.
August 30, 2008 at 11:14 A.M. I was working at Critique, when I was suddenly obstructed from accessing my essays. I will spend the rest of the day struggling to get back to my group, then trying to repair the harm done to essays. No images can be posted at these blogs or at my profile. I will continue to struggle.
August 28, 2008 at 11:17 A.M. I was unable to access my MSN group this morning. I am still trying to do that. I will persist throughout the day in this effort.
August 24, 2008 at 12:30 P.M. I was just blocked as I tried to access Critique. This usually means that new "error-insertions" and other vandalism is taking place, once again, before the eyes of the world, even as America's presidential election and party conventions are "celebrated." I will struggle throughout the day to regain access to my sites. Images still cannot be posted at this blog and my book will not be sent to on-line book sellers.
August 23, 2008 at 7:29 P.M. I was just obstructed from accessing my MSN group, after posting speeches for Barack Obama and John McCain. Sabotage and vandalism are always expected, together with more defacements of my writings, despite the protections of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I will spend the rest of the evening struggling to regain access to my sites.
August 21, 2008 at 11:21 A.M. I am experiencing the usual harassment, denying me access to Critique. This means that essays are probably being altered or otherwise vandalized. When I regain access to my MSN group, I will try to discover the harm done and make necessary repairs. I am still blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (NJ)
August 20, 2008 at 11:00 A.M. I was obstructed when reading my e-mails at hotmail. For the moment I cannot access MSN. I will do my best to get back to Critique in order to repair any harm done or vandalism to the essays at that site. I will run scans throughout the day.
August 19, 2008 at 11:28 A.M. I was just obstructed in efforts to reach my group. I will persist in my efforts to post a revised essay. I will run scans throughout the day. This sort of obstruction usually means that new vandalism of the essays either has or will take place. I do not believe that such a pattern of harassment on-line can take place without the cooperation of government. (See "Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and "Today's Cuban Revolutionaries Are on the Internet.")
August 18, 2008 at 4:15 P.M. I am unable to access my MSN group. Several of my essays have been vandalized, after the hobbling of my computer last week. I will struggle throughout the rest of the day and tomorrow to reach my group in order to post essays.
An e-mail from my security system informs me that my system has been automatically renewed. How curious? I am not within 10 days of expiration. I must "reboot" my computer, or so I am told, in order for the renewal to take place. I never know whether I will be able to continue writing. However, I will try later to reboot my computer.
"Auto Protect and fraud protection" is off and cannot be turned on at this time. This means that all writings are insecure.
August 7, 2008, at 12:16 P.M. I have not yet been able to access my MSN account. I will continue to try throughout the day to do so.
August 8, 2008 at 10:55 A.M. My computer shuts off windows every three minutes or so with spyware warnings. I am running scans. I will continue to try to write today. This may have to do with my discussion of the government's organized crime investigation-cooperation of ANTHONY DELVESCOVO (allegedly "connected" to Jaynee LaVecchia and/or Senator "Bob" Menendez). See "Construction Official's Case is Dropped," in The New York Times, August 7, 2008, at p. B3.
This may also have to do with a number of public corruption scandals in New Jersey. Further developments are anticipated. Due to the computer harassment, I may be unable to write today. However, I will struggle to do so. After the scans, I will try to restart my computer. All efforts to defend against this virus have failed. I can write for three minute intervals. I will keep struggling.
Writing has been impossible, as anticipated, due to hackers, vandalizing of essays, inability to reach my sites. The first of many likely news accounts of further corruption and alleged theft of public funds in New Jersey (and elsewhere) has already appeared. Feel free to notify law enforcement in your area:
John Eligion, "Company Is Accused Of Fleecing Port Authority," in The New York Times, August 8, 2008, at p. 3. (My fraud prevention feature is, seemingly, permanently disabled.) Alleged affiliations between these ostensible "fleecers" of public money and P.A. insiders and/or N.J. legal establishment figures is "under investigation." Any word on the anticipated indictment of Senator Bob?
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971).
It is a beautiful morning in New York. Later I will walk in the city. I felt that I should try to post these words, as a farewell of sorts. I am unable to access the Internet or my sites. I cannot -- as of 10:40 A.M. on August 7, 2008 -- communicate my opinions and feelings at my home computer. I will search for another computer beginning today. I will find a way to post these words on-line.
Yesterday, once again, several of my essays were damaged. Some of those essays have been altered on so many occasions that it is now impossible for me to estimate the number of times when I have been forced to make corrections. The goal of this process, which I have experienced for years and documented extensively, is to crush the spirit of a human being. The destruction of a life and mind is a means of controlling a person by transforming him into something that is less than human. After all of his tortures, Winston Smith's greatest performance was the sincere love of Big Brother.
The mega-societies in which we live -- I am sure that the phenomenon that I describe and endure, every day, is bigger than any one country -- limit the space permitted to the human spirit in order for public authority to become pervasive and total. The aim of postmodernist governments is to replace God in the human scale of values. To argue that such an ambition is unethical or evil is absurd, in the eyes of officials, because governments define the scope of good and evil.
"Right and wrong is relative to power." There is no love. No goodness. No justice. "Money is the meaning of life." These things have been said to me by American attorneys, judges, officials. The same persons sworn to uphold freedom of speech, privacy rights, democracy are responsible for censoring a tortured dissident and intellectual, whose greatest offense is to think and speak of the collective loss of our souls and to point out corruption. I am about to commit this grave offense, yet again.
Referring to me as a "pseudo-intellectual" is not discouraging because an intellectual, for me, is only a life-long student. The one thing I know about myself is that I am a student. My words are written in sand. My essays may be destroyed at any time. Each morning dozens of "errors" are inserted in writings that I have struggled with great care to compose, sometimes working for hours and days, weeks and months on a single sentence or paragraph. There is no other word for such efforts but "work." The energy and resources devoted to the infliction of suffering on a person whose crime is independence of thought and the free expression of his opinions reveals the depravities of power-hunger in some people and their sick need for domination of others. This appetite for power is enhanced by our newest technologies of sadism.
Do you speak to me of ethics, Stuart Rabner? (See Meditatio ad Malum et Caritas, "Habeas Corpus," and "What is homeland security?")
The experience of torture (I believe) at the hands of Cuban-American Fascists protected by their friends in the American legal system or its most corrupt managers (in violation of the U.S. Constitution), is a graduate education in the politics of the real world. Far from discouraging or destroying my values, this nightmare has confirmed my sense of their urgency and truth. Winston Smith's greatest achievement would be to persuade Big Brother to love human freedom, respecting the dignity of men and women, by demonstrating that -- even when faced with enormous pain, rape, theft -- we may still affirm our humanity, asking that the worst be done to us and not to our loved-ones, while insisting on dignity, pride, and the reality of goodness.
At my final hour and always, I will insist that 2 + 2 = 4. I love a few people in this world, including at least one woman who needs to know that she cannot lose my love. I will find a way to write that message, no matter what the cost to me may be. The defeat of Orwell's nightmare vision of the future is to replace Winston Smith in room 101 with Robert Bolt's Sir Thomas More, who confronts totalitarianism with humanity's "adamantine sense of self" and indestructible dignity. (See "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
Perhaps respect can no longer be expected by Americans from their government officials. However, respect is still demanded by the American people -- and all others in the world -- as the first ingredient of political association. This respect is guaranteed to all under the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, as well as the United Nations Charter signed and largely created by the United States of America. (Thank you, Eleanor Roosevelt.) Rights and respect are not a gift of the State. My rights are not negotiable because they are "inherent" in my humanity. My freedom and rights are part of what I am, not merely things that I have.
This is what it means to be an American or a human being. We decide on the meaning of our political identity, not government officials acting without our consent, secretly, or without the sanction of law. Government always has the power to violate my integrity, as a human being, but government never has the legitimate authority to violate my rights.
My computer has been battered, repaired several times, subjected to a relentless assault. My security system has been disabled and made ineffective. But then, much the same may be said of me. I have been violated and severely damaged. My psychic "security system" has been under attack for many years. Maybe I have also been injured beyond repair. All of us will be, eventually. I may be denied the means to write -- like a man whose oxygen supply is cut off -- in order for "experts" to observe one person's fascinating death throes and agony. I will hold on and persist in my struggle.
My inspiration is (and always will be) Jefferson and Lincoln, FDR and Dr. King, Kennedy and Clinton (refusing a politically-motivated attempt to undermine the franchise of voters), Reagan at the Berlin Wall, even Yeltsin before the tanks and China's current miracle as well as the transformations taking place in Cuba. There is always hope. I think of Nelson Mandela and smile as I type these words.
Inducing anxiety and stress, threats to family and one's peace of mind, can force a person into himself, imprisoning the "subject" in an externally imposed silence. Silence and apathy are the co-conspirators of illegitimate power, as are secrecy and surveillance. A new attack shuts off my windows operating system, regularly, as I try to write these sentences. (A letter was apparently deleted from the foregoing sentence, then restored to it.)
I have decided, after nearly 20 years -- noise fills my room again! -- of what I can only describe as psychological torture, to reaffirm my commitment to this struggle to think and speak freely in opposition to all attempts to control, discipline, coopt, "subjectivate" or manipulate the human mind and spirit by reducing a person to the status of a "thing." For any Jewish person to lend him- or herself to imposing such evil on another human being, after the events of the twentieth century, is tragic and discouraging. It saddens me to know that such horror is possible. I am not a slave. I am not a laboratory animal. No person is or can be.
My ability to communicate may be taken from me at any time. It has been taken from me in the past at irregular intervals, illegally. I cannot avoid expressing my disgust and dismay at the actions of so many members of the Cuban-American community and their friends, at corrupt judges and tribunals in the Garden State, for what they have made of the gift that is the U.S. Constitution. My great comfort is the certainty that what this document says of human freedom and equality for every person, under a government of limited powers, cannot be destroyed or made untrue by anyone. (See "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")
How can I believe in America after what I have experienced? It is my American independence that tells me that what I have suffered is evil. God (or love) is beyond the control of laws and men, as are all fundamental ethical and spiritual freedoms of human beings:
"We cannot give up on utopian hope or socialism. We cannot give up on progress. They are not less apt in light of what we know about the bad side of human nature. They are more necessary."
This is the crucial insight:
" ... To accept the world as it (more or less) is, is to help to prolong a state of grave danger. This world, accomodating and countenancing too much of what is not to be tolerated -- plain, persistent injustice, stark, avoidable human suffering -- is a world very receptive to present and future atrocity, a world overpopulated with bystanders. It is one in which the idea is harder and harder to resist that just anything may be done to people while others look on; and there be no consequence. As long as the situation lasts, it degrades the moral culture of the planet. It poisons the conscience of humankind."
Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference (New York & London: Verso, 1998), p. 120.
