March 22, 1998

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I take a lot of ribbing about my computer illiteracy, all of it roundly deserved. My computer and I eye each other guardedly.

So when I started complaining to my computer nerd about the second week of December of 1996 that my computer screen was turning blue in the face - gray is its natural color - in protest about something fishy going on, I only got pitying smiles.

Well, what ***was*** going on was that somebody out of the city of Nanaimo was blasting away at Webcom, our server - "denial of service" at 200 e-mail per second for 40 hours straight! The villain has yet to be caught.

This happened, not-too-incidentally, while our research team was doing heavy duty digging into B'nai Brith and Nizkor and other hanky panky at taxpayers' expense.

Two or three days ago, while I was focusing on Oliver to report on what was happening in the showdown between the Lone Service Provider, Bernard Klatt, and the Mighty Representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Sol Littman, my computer started getting blue in the face one more time. It also started crawling like a tired fly while downloading my e-mail, which, for the most part, were merely bounced ZGrams and hardly any personal mail, much less reports from Oliver.

Even those turned into a trickle before the day was gone - so that, by last night, I only had a handful, whereas I usually get hundreds of letters each day. Simultaneously, my connection with CTS also conked out with a groan, so that I could barely ship anything, much less a proper ZGram - which is the reason you didn't get one yesterday.

Well, this morning came a partial answer: Webcom informed me that I had exactly Zero visitors for the past 24 hours on both my accounts. (!) This cannot be, since I was visiting myself!

So something is definitely wrong - and what it is, is still a mystery.

Therefore, I have no idea what happened at Oliver - and whether or not the canceled Klatt meeting did take place after all. I only have partial information that, in the wake of the rental cancellation of the Community Hall at the behest of the powers-that-be, national television reported a press conference on the steps of City Hall but only gave minuscule time to the issues at play, instead doing smarmy voice-overs and hurling epithets like "white supremacists" etc. etc. - lest anybody miss the point.

Lapdog print media ran similar articles entitled "B.C. town gives boot to the far right" (Globe and Mail, March 21) and some such - but radio, apparently, reported a more balanced version, as per one of our friend monitors:

CBC Radio's "The World This weekend" devoted the first 5 minutes of its 30 minute broadcast to the Oliver rally: Reporting that some dozen free-speech advocates held a press conference on the steps of Oliver city hall. The report used somewhat circumspect language in an "effort" (apparent, if not real) to at least *seem* balanced, if not neutral.

This evening's broadcast led off with a Paul Fromm excerpt from a statement Fromm delivered to a throng of reporters who had gathered there. Doug Collins was prominently mentioned in the report. This is part of a coverage continuum that Canada's electronic media has given the Oliver Rally in the Valley as the work week wound down."

As happens with all such events that strangle free speech, replacing it with censorship, more and more people will notice and wonder what is really going on.

Here is one typical letter from someone who wrote in from Vermont:

"I am a supporter of freedom of speech, no matter how odious the ideas. As a child I believed that society had progressed since the days of Galileo and the Inquisition. As an adult I realize I was naive.

Unlike mass media which caters to the conventional wisdom, the Internet is a vehicle for those with unpopular or unknown ideas to communicate to a mass audience. Powerful political and economic interests oppose this and want to impose censorship by economic and legal means. If this happens, internet technology will have provided the basis for an Orwellian society and upcoming dark age.

I used to believe that Canada was a free country just north of my home. Now I question this. In my opinion, Canada is on probation."

And so it is - thanks to the Wiesenthalers.

Ingrid

Thought for the Day:

"It's when a society produces a huge surplus of wealth that the parasites multiply and become a powerful force, demanding to be supported and exaggerating their hardships, while politicians, feeling their pain, cater tenderly to their "needs." Always at someone else's expense, of course. The fewer the peasants, the more the parasites."

(Joseph Sobran in "Dependency on Government")

Comments? E-Mail: irimland@cts.com

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