Dear Subscriber,
I was just banned on Facebook for showing a clip from a movie The Producers, made in 2005, which is a well-known satire about Nazi Germany. Director/writer: Mel Brooks. I’ve been banned many other times as well, until I felt like a little boy in Catholic or Hebrew School being punished. The management at Meta, the owner, never once asked me who I am (a college professor with over 25 years teaching), why I posted what I did and what the context was, or what I believed to be important about my post. I am about to leave my over 2,000 friends forever because of this one issue: censorship. To me, freedom of speech is not about what the “status quo” believes is correct. It’s about what I, in a so-called “free speech society,” believe is correct. If the government and/or corporations begin dictating what is true and false 24/7, then I am living under totalitarianlism. I would rather be dead.
Today, on December 7, 1941, my father and his comrades in World War Two were invaded by the Imperial Japanese fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Because I was censored by Facebook, I couldn’t post my memorial to his bravery fighting facism for five years on destroyers and in submarines. He survived and I was able to be born. This corporation, Meta, cares more about their own reputation than they do about their clients and who they really are.
My new serial, Auschwitz Dancer, is being sold and distributed as a romantic fantasy and action-packed paranormal adventure. It’s very popular, and it’s not censored just because I have Jews and Nazis in it. Here’s a little part of Serial #2, which is for sale now and being directly distributed to my subscribers, who pay me $1.00 per month for new episodes:
“I hear them inside the room, and the little cot is shaking the side of the wall. I slide out of Helena’s body and become a free spirit. None of these poor, trapped humans can see me, but I can experience them. I glide over to the door to their love nest, and I can see Helena and her lover, Andrew, shiver at the cold air that my spirit brings inside this musical paradise. It is as if the music were replacing my soul, and as I slip through the door and into the inner sanctum of pure love, I believe I may have defeated the Nazis in this first round.”
Thanks for reading and being the five percent who are enjoying fiction around the world. Happy Holidays!
Because of the flagrant and repeated censorship on Facebook, please communicate to my new WT.social site instead of my Facebook account. They don’t censor indiscriminately there.
James Musgrave