Would your personality have sent you to the Gulag?

I have a lot of friends from the former Soviet bloc, half of whom escaped during the brief period of detente in the late 1970s and half of whom had to wait another ten years for the fall of the Berlin Wall. I never tire of hearing their stories of totalitarianism. It's not that I enjoy those stories; the opposite -- I hate them. But what they do for me is paint a picture of tyranny at the individual level, the "day in the life" level of existence in Soviet Russia and its colonies. I understand Communism from "30,000 feet" -- what it looks like in history books. But what did it look like on the ground?

I don't know any serious political dissidents (though I've met some, including the great Anatoly Sharansky). I just know regular people who lived in the world's largest prison, and tried to stay human.

(A quick story before the point of this blog post. One of my friends, Yevgeny, attended the University of Calgary immediately after coming over. As anyone who has visited U of C knows, their spacious lawns have concrete sidewalks on them, but the sidewalks don't always follow the path of where students want to walk, so people naturally tread on the grass to take short-cuts.

But not Yevgeny. While his classmates would walk wherever they wanted, Yevgeny followed the sidewalk obediently, even if it meant taking a longer route to get to where he wanted to go. It was absurd to his Canadian friends, who quickly asked him about it.

I wish I still had the original words that Yevgeny used to tell me about that moment, but it was the moment he realized what Communism had done to him: it had made him afraid to walk on the grass.

Back in Russia, if a student had wandered off of the official sidewalk onto the lawn, some bully in a uniform -- a campus security guard; a police man; a KGB officer; or maybe someone not in a uniform, any one of countless informants or wannabes -- would have immediately accosted him, demanded to see his identity papers, and scolded him for walking on the lawn. In Russia, you stayed on the sidewalk, you didn't walk on the lawn. A trifle to Canadian students wasn't a trifle to Russian students. It was a "tell" of deviance and anti-authoritarianism. It was precisely the kind of thing that political enforcers looked for, as an early warning sign for trouble-makers.

Yevgeny had been so brainwashed, so trained to conduct himself in perfect uniformity with the state, he had become an automaton. And it was at that moment in Calgary that he realized he could be free, and that he could walk on the damn lawn all he wanted. He could stomp on it. He could roll around on it. He wasn't a prisoner anymore.

Another Russian emigre friend, Laila, told me that it wasn't just political activists who were hounded by the KGB, and it wasn't just corner-cutters on lawns and other misdemeanour offenders. She said that the chief characteristic of everyone who got into trouble with the state in Russia was not their politics, but their personality: people who just couldn't swallow their individualism the way Yevgeny had trained himself to do.

Laila said it was eccentrics who ran afoul of the law; stubborn people; odd people; people who loved being different, or people who didn't even know that they were different. People who in the West would be called "characters" -- people whose oddities would make them rich and famous, or misunderstood and marginalized. But in the Soviet Union, they were nails sticking up inviting a thousand hammers to strike them. Perhaps they wouldn't bend when told to get off the grass; perhaps they would ask too many questions; perhaps they would show other "anti-social" tendencies; perhaps they would simply rub a powerful local boss the wrong way, and be marked for petty vengeance in a system dominated by the rule of men, not the rule of law.

Recall that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's eight year sentence to hard labour was because he wrote a joke about Josef Stalin's moustache in a letter to a friend.)

I think of this and I mention this because I have been thinking about all of the people I have met over the course of the year in this fight for freedom of speech. Because "normal" people, bland people, go along to get along people,  don't usually get caught up in censorship. People who are a little bit different do.

Whether it's a Christian pastor like Rev. Stephen Boissoin, who finds religion and is fired up with such a passion that he feels compelled to share his new faith with the entire world, but does so roughly instead of smoothly; or whether it's Guy Earle, the iffy comedian who must stand trial before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for telling lesbian jokes; or whether it's David Icke, the former British soccer star who has spent the past two decades describing a political conspiracy that includes an extraterrestrial element.

My point is: I love people who are a little bit different. Or at least I love that they're allowed to be. Of course, I love my right to privacy as well -- the ability to be left alone, and to separate myself from people who are too different for my tastes. But the concept of diversity -- true diversity, diversity of views, not just a window-dressing diversity of quotas based on race and sex -- is anathema to totalitarian systems.

And while Canada's human rights commissions mouth platitudes about diversity, they're actually the enemies of diversity, hounding and grinding political and even stylistic dissidents or psychological outliers for the fake crime of not being the same, of not loving the things the CHRC says they should, and of hating the things the CHRC says they shouldn't.

I'd rather live in a society where I have to put up with the occasional nutbar on the street corner than one where they'd be jailed; I'd rather live in a society where I have to rebut books of Holocaust deniers than one where those books were burned by the government. I don't want to live in a country where "it's wrong to be considered wrong."

Which brings me to Wally Keeler. He sent me a link to this video. Again, I have no clue where this was shot -- it looks like a coffee shop, or a comedy club. It sounds small; it sounds like a lot of folks there already know Wally. I get the feeling that, like me, Wally constantly bothers people around him about human rights commissions. And he likes to jab back at them in the way he knows how -- in his case, through poetry.

I think Wally's a hoot, and one day I hope to meet him, and go to one of his shows. I got his video when I was visiting my friend Laila, and so it reminded me of what she said: in Soviet Russia, people whose personalities were too much, wound up in prison.

Wally would have wound up in prison because his personality is too big, and he's too pushy about his freedom to be different.

If Jennifer Lynch and her mob at the CHRC had their way, he's be subject to a lifetime ban on his crimethinking, just like Rev. Boissoin is.

That's the inexorable result of laws that censor words and thoughts.