Koanic Times

Back in 2023 I wrote a post about another post I wrote in 2015 on the topic of forgiveness. As a prime example, I referred to the case of a repentant former Nazi. (Let's be precise: the man had abandoned his dead-end path of his own volition and atoned for his past through public confession and self-condemnation. Such gestures are extremely rare in the judgemental, regardless of their imagined justification for their bigotry, but many in the Internet community chose instead to proceed as if he'd been caught out being an active Nazi by upright citizens who had brought his case to pubic scrutiny.)

In 2022, person or persons unknown outed my article as "hateful", or at least hate-adjacent, whereupon Google fenced it off from search engine indexing and slapped a locked gate on visitors already possessing the link, requiring a second Google sign-in to read it.

This is effectively a take-down, with the added benefit to the taker-down that the piece wasn't literally taken down, perhaps to puncture potential lawsuits.

The whole experience was Orwell-grade surrealism, but I have more important practice, so I posted my mystifiction over it and moved on.

And now it's happened again.

This situation too involves a Nazi reference, but this time the questionable motivation is Facebook's.

Now in the dock: last week's post, consisting of photographic testimony to Nazi vandalism and a call to arms (or at least a proper Zen hell-no) from Canadian literary lion Félix Leclerc.

Facebook's swift condemnation of my anti-Nazism began the instant I posted the link to its server. Within seconds I was informed that it contained offensive content and so had been removed.

This all happened so fast I suspected malfunction, and reposted.

And seconds later, got zapped again.

Given the speed of the response, it's likely that some artificial stupidity-powered hate detector simply saw the swastika and panicked. The boilerplate notice – identical both times – contained a link to something or someone higher up for reconsideration. I immediately complied, certain this possibly human judge would see without difficulty that:

1. The photo documents a criminal act and couldn't possibly be taken for glorification of Nazis or their ambitions, and:

2. The Leclerc quotation below it reflects both the author's and the poster's combative attitude toward totalitarianism and ideologised narcissism.

The next day I received a response, informing me in the same Hal-esque tones that my monkeyshines would remain barred from the service. It too offered further escalation, though frankly, given that my trust in humanity and its instances was exhausted decades ago, I'm just not that invested in it.

Speculation on the origin of such eerie hostility is pointless; the space in which these ghostly arbitrators spin being so far removed from objective reality as to render any attempt to fathom it a waste of time and effort more productively spent on the cushion.

So at the risk of further discipline, let me make my position on the Nazi issue crystal-clear to anyone who might have been disturbed by last week's meditation:

• Nazis are a thing again, and they can be neither ignored nor placated without sacrificing our integrity.

• The global Zen sangha is therefore called to confront them with greater honesty and courage than we did last time.

Because that brought irredeemable shame upon us.


(Photo of 1878 Japanese painting of Fudo Myō-ō, possibly by Kano, courtesy of the Library of Congress and Rawpixel.com.)