In all the hoopla around professional and personal plans for the immediate
and distant future of our Cause, the matter of the seizure of my "triplets"
by Canada Customs has been shoved on the back burner - but by no means forgotten.
I have had my eye on the Queen of England for some time. I plan to zap her with a litigious surprise for daring to tell grown-up Canadian men and women what is and is not fit for them to read. Trust me that, in good time, I will get around to specifics!
Meanwhile, today's and tomorrow's ZGrams are meant to urge you all - and I mean ALL! - to put your names and signatures to a petition that Paul Fromm and Marc Lemire have put out on the Internet. The URL for that petition can be found at http://www.canadafirst.net/cafe/customs - and I urge all of you to sign that petition as a personal favor to me.
Today I will give you a taste for how people feel about this travesty of seizing legitimate historical fiction at the Canadian border - to censor perfectly responsible Canadians' reading habits. Tomorrow I will run the Canadian Association for Free Expression press release to give a double nudge for stragglers on my list. We've got a tool now to protest. It's called the Internet. Please take your head out of the sand and sign! We aren't going to win our struggle unless we stand up - to be counted!
Here is the first installment of people's discontent, as it ran in Smith's Report of June 1998. (For newcomers to my list, SR is a supplement of www.codoh.com, one classy Revisionist website - if not ***the*** finest in cyberspace . . . )
"Ingrid Rimland, who runs the Zundel(Web)site and writes and disseminates, via email, Revisionism's only daily (!) commentary, the ZGram, reports that Canadian Customs has seized and confiscated quantities of her three-volume fictional epic, 'Lebensraum!' (reviewed in last month's SR).
"Canadian authorities have been for years, and continue to be, repellent to free-minded Americans and Canadians for their habit of grabbing any of hundreds of titles that Canadian censors (with generous help from Jewish groups) deem unsuitable for their Canadian citizen-charges.
"This takes the cake, though: an award-winning novelist's fictional testimonial to her own people, one small but solid chip of inspiration and truth, unadvertised, unplugged, against the flood of German-hating celluloid and wood pulp that has spewed out for decades and continues to spew out - Lebensraum! ***snared*** at the border!
If only some of Canada's hockey teams had goalies that good . . . "
The second comment was a private one, one of many of such similar ones I have received:
"Your accounts of the ongoing persecution of Ernst are spell-binding. It's hard to believe that this is all really happening, in the midst of a total media blackout in one of the supposedly "freest" countries in the world. I am ashamed to call myself a Canadian. It seems clear that no outrage is too great for our pols or our mainline media, when it comes to obediently doing the bidding of the Hidden Hand.
"I understand that the volumes of your trilogy which had been sent to destinations in Canada have been shamefully impounded at the border in classic Stalinist style. The volumes you had destined for me are probably in that lot, as I have received nothing, not even a notice from the bureaucratic minions responsible, to tell me that they have solicitously taken action to protect me from being exposed to dangerous reading material."
Keep in mind that the books were published March 20, 1998. It took a couple of weeks for me to clear out the pre-publication orders and mail the parcels, and I assume that the first seizure happened during the first or second week of April. The books were seized on April 20 (!) and the first person notified was someone in BC on May 12, 1998. The form had the box "hate" checked!
Now you and I know that most government peons are, shall we say, "slow readers" - who in a couple of weeks would have had to read some 512 pages of Book I, 464 pages of Book II, and 576 pages of Book III - adding up to a total of some 1552 pages altogether!
Did that happen- for them to make an intelligent evaluation of "hate" in Lebensraum? Not very likely.
May we assume this seizure happened because I run the Zundelsite? May we assume additionally . . . nah! Couldn't be!
At present, we are compiling some interesting developments around this latest censorship attempt.
Please take thee to http://www.canadafirst.net/cafe/customs and register your discontent.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"It is not racist to defend those who have been falsely charged with monstrous crimes."
(Smith's Report, June 1998, p.2)