In the post-Stalin Soviet Union, "samizdat" was the practice of dissident activists, artists, and writers literally mimeographing their works and handing them around hand-to-hand to avoid arrest, suppression, and prosecution. If anything could be termed "underground", this was it.
For dissenters, samizdat was life and the community blood of truth. It took courage. Over the long run, samizdat was the true reason for at least the spiritual collapse of centralized communism and totalitarianism in the USSR - certainly not Reagan, probably not even Gorbachev or Yelstin. Under the crush of totalitarianism, samizdat was freedom.
Totalitarianism is become a thinly guised reality in America. We think we have freedom of speech, but its suppression is subtle. Personally, every time I post, I know that the post is scanned by security programs and wonder if I'll get a knock on the door some black morning for expressing my thoughts and dreams, for exposing the truth, or for postulating conspiracies that may or may not exist.
American Samizdat has been around since early in the millenium. Created by the inimitable Dr Menlo, for a decade it has for me been like the dark, smoky coffeehouses in Cambridge, Boston, New York, and San Francisco that nurtured my radicalism. I feel safe there, even though contentious conversations sometimes erupt in post comments or even among the group that writes there. It is a stimulating place, where ideas and challenges to the putrid status quo are thrown like sparkling gauntlets.
Lately, it's gotten a bit lonely at AmSam. In the ever-morphing blogoswamp, writers come and writers go. Uncle $cam, a mainstay there, moved on. Although some venerable attendees such as Philip Shropshire, Mad Kane, Cicero, and Jim Benjamin are still around, we're looking for some new blood and more energy.
So . . .
If you write, whether you have a blog or not, and you're articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, and fairly left-of-center, and can take the heat in the kitchen, we might welcome your presence on our pages.
If you're interested, send me an email, and you might just get an invitation.
Be at peace.
Oh, almost forgot: you can also
visit Dr Menlo here.
