Caught in Coventry?

CSL once wrote an essay proposing to "send" bad newspapers "to Coventry".

"Kleon" he argued, poisoned public opinion by the fact of being read. If not read, he would not have any power to hurt by his lies. So, let us send "Kleon" off to Coventry.

Well, there is a risk of trapping someone in Coventry because you think he is a liar, and not giving him a chance to reply and defend himself. Jean Madiran complained about that back in 1962.

My publication has the form of a blog. Any text is typically a blog message: as such it can be commented on. If you have a blogger account. On my main blog even that is not required.

If anyone says my claim to disprove evolution of mammals from a common ancestor by the fact of diverging chromosome numbers is wrong, he can says so on the comments of my blog messages about that. As long as the comment is personnally polite and contains no blasphemy, I will not delete it because it contradicts what I said. Repetitions I may delete, but not the mere fact of contradicting me. Dito for my claim that Galileo and Einstein were wrong.

But as long as people "send" me off "to "Coventry", this is not happening.

If anyone says I am out there first and foremost to establish totalitarian fascist tyrannies by making Jews and Moslems scapegoats, it is in a first step a mere question of counting my 1037 and even more blogposts (I have added since I made that count) and then counting how many of them deal with Jews and Moslems. Then count how many deal with atheism, population control, school compulsion, attacks on parents' rights in either homeschooling or retaining custody, psychiatry's attacks on individual liberties, the proliferation of false diagnoses that serve the purpose of bloating the purses of psychiatrists and of psychopharmaceutic industry, and so on. Then count how many deal with pleasant subjects, such as food, wine, music, language. Then look exactly what I say against Judaism and Jews, against Islam and Muslims, and exactly what I say for Franco or for Dollfuss. Or, for and against Mussolini.

Again, as long as people keep "sending" me "to Coventry" this is not happening.

If anyone claims I try to reestablish Inquisition, but about my fads, that is a lie. What I have said for Inquisition is that Albigensians were blaspheming enough to deserve death penalty - they were also destroying human society, by the way - and that Inquisition gave many of them a second chance, by detention with access to wide reading: a very much more pleasant way to "think again" than the one currently offered by psychiatrists.

If anyone claims I support blasphemy or sacrilege, or that I make sacrilegious claims about myself, this too can be excluded by the fact of what I wrote. At least by a good second reading of some messages. I did praise "Life of Brian" as an allegory about Father Bryan Houghton. On same message I added an admission of being wrong after looking up the text of "always look at the bright side of life". There are parts of that song that are clearly blasphemous in the context, and I do not at all support them. I did defend Susana Maiolo for a) limiting the sacrilege to the celebrant, not the host, and to a minor moment in Holy Mass and b) being hardly put to it if her spiritual advisors insisted she had to submit to psychiatry. I was maybe wrong about her too. I have read she told the Pope she wanted him to care about "the poorest". If she meant victims of psychiatry, that report is incomplete. If she meant people who lack means of subsistence, she was ignorant of what the Church is already doing. At least she did not go off about it on a TV show claiming "the Pope would be her hero" if he sold the Vatican and gave it all to the poor. Of course, Sarah Silverman did not commit sacrilege, but she recommended a course in which sacrilege could very easily be the next step. And that not limited to a minor moment of Holy Mass.

If anyone claims, that I am NOT being sent to Coventry, I claim that is duplicity. I have friends on FB who answer me politely. I have readers. But I have time after time insisted that I want my blogposts to be printed (in context of subject and language, with comments, I might add).

So, why do I not go to the publishers? GKC once had to insult the publishing group of the paper he wrote for in order to get back his independence. The "Cacao Press" was systematically suppressing part of his thematics. JRRT was published in half by Sir Stanley Unwin: Silmarillion no, Lord of the Rings yes. Up to this day, the manuscript of Silmarillion that was ready for publishing at same time as LotR remains not published as a complete and continuous text. The work published as Silmarillion is partly reworked, but also very much shortened. And since then Christopher Tolkien has been making money by publishing partial completions in tidbits: Unfinished Tales, History of Middle Earth, all very scholarly, but frankly a bit too scholarly to be readable as a continuous whole. When Ballantines (was that them?) made a "pirate copy" of LotR, Tolkien recommended not buying it. Having Ballantines publishing Silmarillion manuscript might have been feasible? Was Tolkien too loyal to Unwin? Was he already reworking it? Or was he simply disgusted at the idea of having Silmarillion published in American spelling ("blest" for "blessed", "color" for "colour" and so on)? I do not know.

As for me, I am disgusted at having my Swedish work respelled ("av" for "af", "över" for "öfver", "häst" for "hest", "hjärta" for "hjerta" and so on), which would be the case if I turned to an established publisher in Sweden. I am also disgusted (anywhere, any language) at the idea of a publisher telling me "ok, we'll take this and that, but we refuse your geocentric and creationist ravings and your rants about psychiatry" and that being all to it. The deal I have offered does not forbid a publisher to make such a selection, but it does exclude him from the kind of monopoly on my work, or those of my essays he publishes, where he could stop an amateur from publishing same essays in more complete context on paper. And as for risk of getting the paper publishing done by amateurs done badly, I have of course a dislike of having my work published as a heap of papers with staples in one corner, which loses first page after five handlings ("falls apart as soon as you look at it" one ex-flame - now married to another - complained about the compendia in our Latin Institution - guess why I liked her sense of humour?): but then I also give instructions for doing it properly.

I have also noted the post office bank account number where I axcept tips by people gaining something on publishing my texts on paper.

If in spite of these explanations, someone still wants to "send me to Coventry", because he thinks I am "mentally ill" or "alcoholic" or even "a pervert", I would like to know what he bases that on. Or, if he is the kind of guy whose political correctness is allergic to all I stand for, let HIM ignore me if he can, but why should Christians do so? If they think they protect me against persecutions, by hushing my writings down, have they any idea what that kind of secrecy exposes me to? Is it pleasant for a Christian to confront in 2007 a man saying "Mashi, Mashi" by responding a drawn out "ouiii?" and pointing to the Church where the real Messiah is in image and in Sacrament and after that be dealt with by Christians as someone lacking sleep and by Jews as a hope? I waited for them to say something more in a hope of correcting them about me, but now it seems Jews who wait for the Messiah are waiting for an appearance in 2012 - shall I keep waiting till then to clarify things?

Someone NOT "sending me to Coventry" could help me, simply by reading what I wrote against Judaism, about Jesus from Nazareth being the real Messiah. Look at the label ICXC + NIKA. I have argued Jesus was no Essenian, but Simon the Zealot an ex-Essenian. I have argued for traditional dates and authorships of Gospels by how they refer to enemies of Our Lord - "Jesus said: 'woe to ye Pharisees and Sadducees ...' " vs "Jesus said to the Jews: 'woe to ye ...' " in Gospels before and the one Gospel after Jamnia. I have argued that Isaiah ch. 11 (which Jews have used to argue against Jesus as Messiah) was fulfilled by the Church in Jerusalem and in Samaria, by the exiled Church doing mission in Pella, by this founding the Palestinian Christendom - and by the Holy Sepulchre. Among other things.

Is it pleasant to be more than once confronted by strangers with a nostalgia for militant fascism, if one agrees with sensible admirers of Mussolini that brutality was only justified by the brutality of the red and by being less than that, and that xenophobia in brutal forms was never part of his ideology at all? If one sympathises with the French army in Algeria, and even more the victims of Rue d'Isly, but thinks Franco was pretty sensible when he arrested an officer of OAS and exiled him to Baleares or Canary Islands?

Someone not "sending me to Coventry" might save me from that.

I think some honesties - like detestation of masonic intrigue - could usefully be learned by present day political thinkers from Maurras. I do not think this is happening when some people seem to be trying to found a new Cagoule around me.

But if you insist that what I write in text is unworthy of a Christian, why not play my music? I have not stolen themes, when I borrowed one I said/wrote so. And if some of them are "insufficiently original to form intellectual property" I hope for one thing that that is not the case with the compositon as a whole, for another that the service of making the composition, though some material may be considered trite by people knowing the répertoire, is making accessible a thing of beauty deserving of some kind of recompensation.

Hans-Georg Lundahl,
29/XII/2010 in Christmastide,
fifth day of Christmas,
in Baudoyer/Paris IV