Usurping Voices

Writers are arrogant pretenders.

We freely usurp identities, characteristics, ideas, thoughts, voices of people we imagine as characters in our books and stories. These are all part of our craft—our toolbox—of storytelling.

We step over the boundary between reality and fiction when we decide we also have the right, indeed the obligation, to speak for others. Two recent articles in the RWA’s Romance Writers Review December issue are cases in point.

Both articles address a “social” issue and make it a “creative” issue by assuming the right to tell us—their colleagues—what we should be writing.

I personally experienced this “presumption of right” while writing an American historical romance set in post-Civil War New England. I was told by another writer, “You had better be on the right side of history.”

This response shocked me and was meant to silence any disperate interpretation of history that clashed with her “accepted” impressions.

I had thoroughly researched my historical setting and was aware of both sides of the Constitutional as well as the moral arguments. I chose the path that best represented my understanding of events 150 years before my time.

A writer must always be free to express ideas, regardless of the perceived “right side” of any matter. Any attempt to silence a writer’s voice is dangerous. Attempts to place filters and constraints on writers goes entirely against our hard-won freedoms, the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights and has the odor of censorship, which we all must resist.

These writers may have had the best of good intentions in mind, but unfortunately, they both chose to suggest (dictate is perhaps too strong a word but comes readily to mind in the case of one of these articles) that we, their colleagues, follow an essentially censored path to “diversity” and “inclusion.” What they both failed to realize was that they were leading the way along the path to restriction of freedom of expression in order to placate the thought-police of “social justice.”

They also did not/do not understand that their “suggestions” assume a superiority and usurption of freedom of expression over the very voices they are claiming to enfranchise.

My case in point is a novel which became a best-selling book and critically acclaimed film written by a New York writer in which the writer, through the female protagonist, assumed the voices of domestic servants, spoke for them, recreated their lives in the writer’s imagination and had them act according to the writer’s own expectations for them in their situation. In doing so, the New Yorker took their voices, capitalized upon them, without regard for their personal reality, all in the name of “giving the disenfranchised a voice”—the writer’s voice, the writer’s reality.

Writers do that. We speak for men, for women. We speak for children. We speak for ourselves, our neighbors, our enemies and our siblings.

Where we cross the line is when we take the truths of others, altering them to our own version of reality and claim the moral high ground. By doing so, we assume the gratitude of the “disenfranchised.” We assume only we are capable of speaking for them—a particularly arrogant point of view.

We do not need to make our writing “inclusive” or change our truths to the alternative reality of what anyone else thinks or believes. If we have any responsibility as we write, it is to be always and completely true to ourselves, to speak our reality, our truth, thoughts and ideas—never to bow to the dictates of “accepted” speech, “accepted” truths, “accepted” history and never to allow anyone to determine what is acceptable content.

Once we bow, we betray all the writers, artists, journalists, dramatists, philosophers, scientists and women & men who have fought and sacrificed more than we will ever be asked to sacrifice, in the name of these freedoms. Protecting our creative freedom is crucial, regardless of our subject or genre.

Only we can accomplish that—for ourselves.

We do, indeed, live in “the land of the free because of the brave.”

Freedom is not without cost or sacrifice. Giving even a fraction away for the sake of expediency or personal comfort, results in expedited erosion of the whole, as the tide erodes the shore.

 

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Featured Book: July 25: Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915

On April 24, 1915 the Ottoman Turk Caliphate began one of the most heinous, inhuman exterminations of their fellow citizens when they systematically annihilated Armenian men, drove women and children on death marches into the Syrian desert, and committed the first genocide of the 20th Century. This terrible act led to a coverup on an international scale and paved the way for Hitler’s extermination of Jews, gypsies, disabled Europeans by the millions, Stalin’s Bolshevik henchmen’s slaughter of eleven million Ukrainians as well as the Siberian Gulags, home to many dissident Russian writers.

This butchery is only possible when political expediency takes precedence over morality. The Ottoman Turks were allies of the Germans during World War I. Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915 chronicles the efforts Germany made to hide the murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians at the behest of the Islamic Caliphate of the Ottoman Turkish empire.

“Among the Turks and Armenians both it seems pretty well known that this thing is from the Germans. Even Mr. Ehman* himself is coming to the conviction that it is the work of his own government. We all know such clear-cut, well planned, all well carried out work is not the method of the Turk. The German, the Turk and the devil make a triple alliance not to be equalled in the world for cold blooded hellishness.” 

Tacy Atkinson, American Missionary, July 10, 1915, in her diary on the day when Armenians were deported from the town of Kharpert, quoted in Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915

*Pastor Johannes Ehmann, the local German missionary

This book, by Patrick Thomas (author of From Carmarthen to Karabagh: a Welsh Discovery of Armenia) offers insights and perspectives on this vast tragic conspiracy to annihilate an entire population that is still swept under the carpet, despite incontrovertible evidence.

I became aware of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 when I was 13 years old. Many of my classmates in the 8th and 9th grades were of Armenian descent. Their parents and grandparents were victims and survivors of this hideous crime. While I was living in Wales, I was proud that this small country was one among only a very few nations courageous enough to embrace and proclaim the truth.

Patrick Thomas’s book gives graphic details of how vicious the Islamic Turks, with the help of their German allies, were to their fellow citizens. Unfortunately, we have seen this barbarity in our own time committed by men and women of the same ilk.

“A ‘Special Organization’ of criminals (including many murderers) had been recruited …[and] sent to the provinces to enforce the deportation of Armenians, with the assistance of Kurdish irregulars. … The remaining men would be rounded up, taken away and massacred. The women and children were sent on death marches towards the Syrian desert. Many were gang-raped, some were abducted or trafficked, while others were left to die of exhaustion or starvation at the side of the road. Pregnant women had the babies ripped from their wombs. Those suspected of swallowing gold coins were sometimes set on fire. Their ashes were later sifted by those looking for loot. In Trebizond boatloads of Armenians were taken out and drowned in the Black Sea.”

Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915, page 18

During World Wars I and II, many Germans refused to believe what was being done in their name. Even now, too many Europeans and Americans close their eyes to history as well as current events. We choose not to believe when the truth is too painful or hideous:

“In the eastern provinces, that is excluding Constantinople and Smyrna and other places in Western Turkey, 80-90% of the entire [Armenian] population and 98% of the male [Armenian] population is no longer alive. These figures are probably correct. They can be checked town by town and correspond to my personal impressions and observations.”

Count von Lüttichau, German official, quoted in Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915

We have been silenced and intimidated in the face of great inhumanity, over and over again. Time has come to look the past straight in the clear, though ugly, eye of truth and see the cure that history offers. Can we do less than our colleagues, Patrick Thomas and Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn? What is a writer’s job but to write the truth as she sees it?

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Featured Book: May 1

If you have not read this book, I sincerely hope you will, as it is one of the first dystopian novels to be universally recognized as prophetic and at the same time dismissed as pure fantasy, something that could never happen.

A few quotations:

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

“Big Brother is Watching You.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

And a few others from another source that are even more frightening:

“Control healthcare and you control the people.”

“Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.”

“Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.”

“Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.”

“Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).”

“Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.”

“Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools.”

“Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.”

The first set of quotations are from the featured book: George Orwell’s 1984.

The second set of quotations are from the Community Organizer, Saul David Alinsky, who inspired the 44th President and the would-be 45th. The would-be 45th was so enamored of SDA that she wrote him a fan letter.

A+ if you see the connection between the Alinsky ‘rules’ and many policies that have dominated the educational and political environment over the past 50 or so years.

Another few quotations:

“…The Frankfurt School initially opposed the culture industry, which they thought ‘commodified’ culture. Then, they started to listen to Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural Marxism could make powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public. Benjamin’s view prevailed, and Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World War II years in Hollywood. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism’s most powerful weapon….”

“…But hell had not forgotten the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set about translating the very difficult academic writings of other members of the Frankfurt School into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book, Eros and Civilization, used the Frankfurt School’s crossing of Marx with Freud to argue that if we would only ‘liberate non-procreative eros’ through ‘polymorphous perversity,’ we could create a new paradise where there would be only play and no work. Eros and Civilization became one of the main texts of the New Left in the 1960s.

“Marcuse also widened the Frankfurt School’s intellectual work. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question, saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and homosexuals – the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred ‘victims groups’ of political correctness today. Marcuse further took one of political correctness’s favorite words, ‘tolerance,’ and gave it a new meaning. He defined ‘liberating tolerance’ as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists today call for ‘tolerance,’ they mean Marcuse’s ‘liberating tolerance’ (just as when they call for ‘diversity,’ they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology)….”

Want to know more? For a full examination of how community organizers and their academic minions have shifted the balance, read William Lind’s “Who Stole Our Culture?”

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The Nasty Streets of San Francisco

Montgomery Street between Post & Sutter

All the wonders of traversing the financial district streets on a weekday in San Francisco.

This particular encampment is outside a popular Asian restaurant, an iconic often-filmed bank building, and a fashionable health gym.

It spans at least four feet of an eight foot wide sidewalk. On both ends, there are piles of rubbish, garbage, containers with leftover food.

Market Street between Montgomery & Kearney

Along Market Street between New Montgomery and Third Street, outside the Ritz Carlton Residences, the brick-laid pavement is littered with wet newspapers and plastic wrappers.

Lotta’s Fountain – 1906 landmark a favorite tourist site and now a litter bin.

At the junction of Third, Market & Kearney, Lotta’s Fountain is a landmark tourist attraction which is featured in many films set in San Francisco, including several by Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, the Michael Douglas and Karl Malden classic series, The Streets of San Francisco.

Every day of the year, visitors are taken to this island on the busy streets to hear guides describing the fountain’s origin and function during the 1906 earthquake.

At the entrance to the Metro Station, on the same corner as the world famous Palace Hotel, across the street from the sunny plaza of the McKesson Building, a man begs for change every day, scoots along the street in his wheelchair, using his feet to propel his vehicle, to the nearest coffee chainstore to spend his

Market Street at New Montgomery Metro Entrance – once a planter, now a garbage bin.

panhandling gains. Behind him, is what remains of a planter that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority has abandoned from its once beautifying effort to this:

Some San Franciscans claim that their city is doing very well, thank you. Those of us who battle the litter, the beggars, the needles, the homeless off their meds, the stench from the gutters and drains, the dog messes (at least we pretend it’s dog mess), the acres of garbage and the dangers of physical bodily harm from all of the above, have a different opinion.

Farewell to a city that is one of the most expensive for residents while offering “sanctuary” for criminals who are here illegally, giving $300 a month to each homeless person (estimated to be about 795 homeless people per 100,000 residents [approximately 7,200]) of taxpayers’ money, (about $2,146,500 every month), satisfying the agenda of supervisors who justify their tax-grab, appease their constituents, and defend their rising requirement for more money, while ignoring the rising property crime and the disappearance of the people whose work built this once naturally diverse, working class urban paradise.

The city of neighborhoods of my childhood has been transformed by so-called liberal policies into a decaying relic that pretends to be the flower of Utopian Urban Life.

 

 

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A Day to Unite the Civilized World – Again

 November 13, 2015

Vive la France et les Français.

The 1776 foot high Freedom Tower, July 2015, an appropriate response to Radical Islamic terrorism.

 

 

 

Freedom Square, NYC July 2015 – From the Ashes, the Phoenix rises stronger than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon.com’s Tribute to France, 11/13/2015

 

Today, November 15, 2015 – the French Air Force has made their appropriate response to Radical Islamic terrorism.

This is mine.

The people whose lives were lost on 9/11 will never be forgotten.

 

 

 

 

 

From just a few of our friends.

 

 

 

One of the Remembrance Pools in the footprint of the Twin Towers, Freedom Square, Ground Zero, NYC July 2015

 

 

 

 

The final words of those who were killed by jihadi cowards were of love for their friends and families. I honor them and the memory of their heroism by remembering, and calling out those who know what was done and who among them are committing these crimes but do nothing.

 

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

 

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September 11, 2001 – Honor but Always Question

In honor of all those who were murdered on this day, September 11, 2001, may they and their loved ones find peace. My most heartrending memory of this terrible event were the phone and email messages of love sent by the victims to their families and friends.

There are still unanswered questions about this event:

• Why was there no mention in the Main Stream Media, then or at any time since, of the total destruction of Building 7, which collapsed in its own footprint, as did the Twin Towers?
• Why, despite reliable eyewitness accounts to the contrary, the authorities still claim that the perfectly round hole in the Pentagon was caused by a plane when there was no evidence whatsoever of plane wreckage?

There are many other questions and serious accusations abound. My concern is that Media silence on these and many issues will cost American lives, now and in the future.

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MSM & Women’s Rights Advocates Ignore These Facts

A few days ago, Kate Steinle was murdered at a popular tourist location less than six miles from my home. Her killer was a five-times deported, recently released felon awaiting another deportation hearing. (http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Pier-shooting-suspect-had-been-released-from-S-F-6365228.php).

A young woman, living just 20 miles from my home, was brutally raped and beaten by a gang of young men and so horribly injured that she will never fully recover (https://www.baycitizen.org/news/crime/hearing-reveals-horrific-details-crime/). Prior to this, not far away, another girl was sexually abused and her humiliation made public, causing her to commit suicide (http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/calif-teen-commits-suicide-after-alleged-rape/).

Women and girls who are trafficked into my state are raped as they cross the border, their underwear hung on ‘rape trees’ in a neighboring state(http://www.latina.com/lifestyle/news-politics/rape-trees-found-along-southern-us-border) as trophies by the ‘coyotes’ who tattoo them with bar codes to facilitate their sale into sex slavery and subsequent rental for sexual services (http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/branded-by-a-pimp-sex-trafficking-victim-speaks-out/).

There are several unifying details in all of these stories (the very tip of the gory pile of crimes committed within the past few months).

• The Main Stream Media ignore all this evidence of the threat to the citizens of the United States. Why? If latina.com is horrified by what is being done to women, why aren’t the MSM equally outraged?
• Although so many of the victims of these crimes are women and girls, there is no collective outcry from other women. Why aren’t women’s rights advocates outraged?
• The vast majority of the these savage acts were perpetrated by a particular ethnic group, the MSM rarely mention either the ethnic group or their legal/illegal status as residents. Even some of the more conservative news outlets will not say “Illegal Aliens” – most stick with the innocuous “immigrants”.

Immigrants are people who chose to leave their homeland to make a new life in another country, embrace the traditions and laws of their chosen country, enrich their new country with their energy and talents, and make an effort to assimilate into the civic life of their new home.

Many of my family emigrated to the US before it became a country. More recently, members of my family emigrated legally, standing in line, paying their fees, submitting to medical examinations, providing stacks of legal documents, waiting for appointments, waiting for letters, waiting for interviews, waiting for approval, giving their word that they will never become a burden on the public purse.

Illegal Aliens have already broken the laws of the country they have invaded, are already a burden on the public purse, too many of them are here to steal, sell their drugs, provide the dregs of society with gross services at the expense of their trafficked victims.

Their presence drives down the wages of American workers, displaces Americans from low-skilled jobs, and the MSM repeats the absolute lie that they do the work Americans won’t do.

I have cleaned houses. My mother cooked school meals. My father picked potatoes. My husband has waited on tables. My sons have scrubbed hospital floors, flipped hamburgers and stocked shelves.

I consider Ann Coulter a hero.  She tells the truths that sycophantic politicians, so-called civil rights advocates and lily-livered news outlets refuse to tell.

We have to ask, “Why?”

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Review: The Camp of the Saints

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Prophetic, timely, a difficult book but compelling read. Fittingly finished reading this book today, 14 juillet, Bastille Day, but I wonder if the French revolutionaries of 1789 would be in The Village or on the beach.

View all my reviews

This book speaks entirely for itself. I cannot fault its logic, as it is. There are many notes struck that are resonant at this time in our history. Written in the 1970s, The Camp of Saints reflects what the Wall Street Journal has, this very day, claimed is the worst time since the 1970s.

I will not forget the experience of reading this book and am glad I did.

 

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Re-Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes & Why Writers Could Be in Great Danger

I am reposting this blog from Kristen Lamb because she has written about issues that are so critical to writers and citizens that I hope all my readers will have an opportunity to read this and think about what she has said.

Something Wicked This Way Comes & Why Writers Could Be in Great Danger.

My comment on this blog post was:

“I am rarely offended by anything or anyone but I am terrified by the trend to assign ‘special status’ to some groups while denying the same protection to others. While some of us are not allowed to offend ‘Special Status Groups’, others of us are not allowed to be offended.

“This is an fundamental inequality of which we have always been warned by philosophers such as Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And is clearly established as a civil right in the U.S. Constitution’s first 10 amendments, especially the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment, and yet, increasingly, this Amendment is being eroded so that it applies only to specified ‘Special’ groups.

“We are in grave danger of being silenced to the point that we are afraid to speak out about anything for fear of being labeled intolerant or bigoted, among other erroneous epithets. This can only result in even further division and eventual backlash. Political correctness began its insidious erosion of intellectual freedom in the US in the 1960s. If we are not free to write and express our thoughts and opinions, we are already imprisoned.

“As to the ‘special’ aspects of honors evenings, how are we to compete in this exceptionally competitive world if we constantly coddle our children, so as not to make them feel bad? I have to ask if this is not an attempt to destroy them with kindness? My favorite advice to my children was “Life is hard and then you die” – they have all grown up to be decent, productive, happy and loving young men.”

If we do not protect our freedoms now, they will be lost for generations.

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Freedom of Speech & the Tyranny of Cyber Opinion

When I was a young writer, my mother gave me good advice: “Never put in writing what you don’t want people to read.” Now that I am employed in a law office, that advice is reinforced on a daily basis. Every word must be scrutinized with the matters of law and interpretation firmly in mind.

This is a hundred times more critical on the Internet.

However, the freedom of speech is too important to be undermined by the actions of those who disagree with any given personal opinion. As Voltaire declared, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The recent vilification of Brendan Eich for expressing his personal opinion in the form of a political donation is only the latest example of the infringement of freedom of speech by those who disagree with him. In my opinion, this can only be seen as another form of fascist bullying.

No matter how much our opinions may differ, none of us have the right to silence anyone. Neither do we have the right to hound another person into submission. Those who do this are guilty of the same behavior of which they accuse others.

The more we attempt to silence one voice, the easier it becomes to be silenced ourselves. And if we allow others to be silenced, we have no right to claim the freedoms granted by the Bill of Rights for ourselves.

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