Monday, January 26, 2004

Go to the HOMEPAGE

Got an essay for you today about assignation of guilt. I Think it is interesting. But also, I want to tell you that I have blogged up several things on their own pages. Both of the essays I put here a few days ago now have their own homes, and over the next few days I will publish all of the essays I wrote in the hopes of stopping the railroad I was being forced to ride on. I think today’s essay speaks for that a little.
The "First Essay To The Courts" written as a part of my original 92-page report, turned in to the courts on October 7th, 2002 can be found “HERE
And the “Letter To The Upper Courts” , written on December 18th, 2002 is “HERE
In addition to these two, I will be making public the essays that were turned into the courts on their own pages too. I guess it is my goal to make the whole of the case as public as possible. The reason I want to do this is to make the people who have been torturing me for the last twenty months JUSTIFY THEMSELVES PUBLICLY, just as they have demanded that I do the same. And also to help gain compensation, which is desperately needed. And no folks the correct answer is not to make a lawsuit in Poland because, obviously if you have been reading me, there is no justice in the Polish justice system for me.


An assignation of guilt.

I mentioned in a previous essay about a game that is played here in Eastern Europe called “who’s guilty?” Again, the way the game is played is that when something happens that draws attention to people, rather than to address the problem directly, people here prefer to try and point a finger at the person that created the disturbance. In this way, they are saved the responsibility for any actions that might need to be taken and therefore, be free from THAT edition of the game.
So I have been thinking about this because I find that I have to deal with this court meeting that is coming up on February 10th in Warsaw. What I am thinking is that there is a connection between what has happened to me here and the game of who is guilty. I will try to explain.
Now I have been involved with this for 20 months now. Twenty months of accusations, obligatory trips to the court and disruption (and destruction) of my life. And in all that time, the only thing I have ever tried to get through to these people is that this torment of perpetual accusation they have inflicted on me, was based upon an original accusation that was a lie. The problem is, that the court had already taken up the task of doing the tormenting. Because of this, they have needed to justify their own actions in handing me this abuse by accusing me in my life of all kinds of miserable things. They are justifying their own actions.
I got a lot of this in Poland when I found that people were saying that I was socially “unacceptable”, that I was behaving poorly with them and that they found that they did not like me. My first reaction to that was to say, “Don’t like me? Let me go!” If you don’t like me, why must I remain here? Why keep me as a prisoner of your world. This for some reason was too difficult for people to understand. I was miserable, I hated my life. I was sitting there, unable to do what I said I would do. My girlfriend and her family, my family, my associates all suffering; my time, my money all disintegrating day by day, and I have to here how people do not like me in Poland because I refused to make them happy. I don’t go to their parties. I don’t laugh with them or give them presents or work for them of help them make money.
So that’s how they play the game. I lost because the guilt was on me. This doesn’t in any way have anything to do with being guilty, it simply means that the weight of the accusation was placed on me. And because of this, I had a remarkable time making the only point I wanted to make: The original claim that allowed all of these vipers, vultures and sycophants into my life was false. I had a hard time making that claim because to accept what I was saying would be to put the same weight of accusation that was placed on me on a cop., and this is something they simply refused to do?
Now why don’t they? Well, one argument is that this extra weight would make it impossible for the cop (or a prosecutor or an aspirant judge or lawyer) to do the job. The extra weight of perpetual observation and accusation would hinder their abilities to do things, don’t you know. Well, this is an argument. Perhaps more of a justification than an argument, but it is something that would be said.
But what about my ability to do what I do I the word? Why is this fair to me?
We have ways of dealing with social obligations in the world. Normally in such situations, people are allowed to make bail: You pay a little money, and you are not obligated to leave your body behind. In Abraham Lincoln’s time, one could avoid entering the army by paying for an exemption. But this was denied to me, setting up a situation where I was completely unable to do the things I had been doing. I was, for all intents and purposes imprisoned. I know that Poland says: Well, Mr. Goodman, you were free to move about the country as you liked. You were not behind bars. But I say I was because I had no business in THAT country. I had business in the next country to the east, and I had some friends and associates who have very, very little money, sitting there waiting for me to do what I said I was going to do. This was not only imprisonment, it was torture because in all of that time that I had to deal with this imprisonment, the people that were imprisoning me were openly and knowingly refusing to deal with the simple true that it was wrong for them to be in my life in the first place.
And ironically enough, I must also suffer judgment as to my actions as far as what I did about it? Well folks, I did do something about it, and I am still doing what I can do about it. What I did is I told them about what was happening in writing, stamping the papers I was turning in so as to make sure that the information in hose papers were known and then making it publicly known that I had done these things. That folks, is what I did to fight for the return to an incredibly small life for the last 20 months. Was I successful? Well, as of this moment, I apparently was not. I can say this because the court, regardless of its upcoming decision, decided it was well within their rights to sit there FOR EIGHT MONTHS WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING BUT ASSIGNING A DATE TO TALK ABOUT THIS CASE AGAIN. And I am sorry folks, but I was not even told that this is what they were doing. So, just to make this all clear again:
1. Some guy hits me with a car and then hangs on me the false accusations that inspire a court investigation.
2. They don’t even let me hear about why I am held for six weeks and demand that I live there without legal work while they play this game.
3. The guy who originally accuses me commits more crimes against me while the original investigation is going on, though this is ignored by the judges,
4. The case, without evidence or witnesses is sent to the court anyway after four months of failure,
5. The court itself, while the original accuser commits even more crimes against me, allows for a six month process just t come to a completely contrived decision against- the whole time of which I was never permitted any information about the process and
6. After I appealed this judgment, they sat and did nothing for another 8 months.

And the whole of this time without ever officially even accepting the fact that the original accusation was a lie.
I have been thinking lately about the volume of work I have done while I am here. I am not sure altogether, but I think the whole of the body of information that has been generated because of all of this, might be getting close to million words. In case you are not the sort of person who things about these things, a 400 page book is about 140,000 words. Now I know that Being Had, after the edits of course, at about 175,000 words. Pod Kablukom, the English version has 18,000 words and the Russian version just a little less. I now my letters to Borus and to friends probably average… Oh, I don’t know, I am pretty verbose… maybe 400 words each? Maybe, as an average. Let’s say three hundred. I wrote about 1000 of those. There were the essays, each about four to six thousand words each. The short stories about Belarus I was writing before I started the book. And then there were the three plays that I wrote while in Poland…
Maybe a million words? No? Ok half a million. And I am not counting the work done here for this blog group. And all of it just to make a few small points. Seems like a lot, doesn’t it? And none of it, NONE… OF… IT, even remotely as useful to the world as it would have been if the court would have done even the reasonable thing of letting me go back to my business while it dealt with its own job of covering for this thief of a cop. None of this was even one gram as useful as simply allowing me to make my little bike shop here. Such a life, eh? And the finger of guilt here is not only on me; who’s life has been made better in this? Who has gained even slightly?
So, is the correct question to ask: Who is to blame for this? This question of course setting of another round of the same bullshit. Or perhaps would the correct question be: What are we going to do about this?
I’ll give you an answer to this question, tomorrow.

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