Singing for Freedom (and Winning)
Throughout history, people have stood together for freedom - and won!
First, Happy New Year to you, your family, and to those you love. In fact, Happy New Year to everyone! This is the first Not Your Donkey post in 2023, a series of essays written to encourage people to bray freely for democracy. The foundation of democracy is free speech. Without free speech, all other freedoms die - so bray freely. Or, in the example I’m about to share, sing for freedom.
As we in the West live our fairly comfortable lives compared to people suffering from war, it helps to remember that we are able to enjoy these freedoms because many people — throughout history — stood firm and even lost their lives for our right to live freely without government overreach.
For me, 2022 was an inspirational year thanks to the Canadian Truckers and the many other uprisings around the world (such as the farmers in The Netherlands). It also was a year that people began to see what the World Economic Forum (WEF) is all about - despite being told by “experts” that those of us who are awake and don’t support the WEF’s Great Reset agenda, we’re all just a bunch of conspiracy theorists.
This opening of the eyes for many people is just the start, and 2023 promises more awakening as we see what our elected leaders have done to our democracies in pursuit of an agenda that no one voted for.
My relatives and friends sang for freedom
I’d like to start the year with inspiration from the film, The Singing Revolution, a movie about the people of Estonia and how they freed themselves from their Soviet Russian occupiers. This occupation made possible decades earlier through a secret deal between Hitler and Stalin.
When you look at this short trailer, remember this: when the Soviet Russians marched into the Baltic countries in 1944, they made it illegal to own a national flag. Years later, in 1989, when Estonians stood up to reclaim their freedom, pretty much every flag you see in this film is one that had been hidden away back in 1944. As a result of this invasion, my grandmother and mother became refugees. My grandfather became a prisoner in a concentration camp in Siberia.
Living in North America, it’s hard to understand the simple and yet profound bravery of hiding your country’s flag when you’re told by the tyrant Stalin not to be proud of your heritage, your ancestors, and who you are.
In 1944, my cousins refused to destroy their Estonian flags and hid them, knowing full well that if a Soviet found out, they and their families would be sent to suffer (and even die) in Siberia.
The Singing Revolution involved the three Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1989, 2 million brave Baltic souls created the longest human chain in history, weaving through the capitals of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and sang for their freedom. “The Baltics are Waking Up” was the song. Together, these three small Baltic countries were claiming their right to be free from the Soviet Russian Empire.
And the three little countries won.
Here in 2023, thousands of people in the Baltic states — including my relatives — have opened their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Our own families have paid the price of Russian invasions and we well know the value of freedom.
Freedom is Won, Over and Over Again
Throughout 2022, not only did we see Russia invade Ukraine, we also saw uprisings around the world, from the farmers in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Canada. Many people are rising up not against a foreign invader per se but against foreign influences that our politicians have chosen to align with. People like you and me don’t make up the World Economic Forum. We don’t have a seat at the table, but billionaires and multinational corporations do.
When I went to Ottawa to support the truckers and the Freedom Convoy in February 2022, few people in my circle of friends — who are mostly liberal and certainly never get their hands dirty when they work at their computers in their comfortable homes — knew anything about the World Economic Forum. Nor did they have a clue that Canada was getting ready to implement legislation to severely restrain our right to free speech. But each and every trucker I spoke to knew exactly what the WEF was all about and the moneyed interests behind it, plus they were well aware of the pending legislation to restrict free speech. My friends all have university degrees. Most truckers I met don’t. But it was the truckers who knew what was going on, politically.
By the way, I don’t have a college degree, either. Maybe, these days, that’s the secret to being an informed and engaged citizen? Don’t get a university degree?
In some ways, the WEF is a more insidious occupation of the mind than Soviet rule because for a long time, its influence on our politicians was hidden from view. One big credit that I give the truckers in the Freedom Convoy is that for the first time, many people — even those with university degrees - were finally exposed to the influence of the World Economic Forum on our democracies and no longer easily look away.
The “Disinformation” Disinformation Campaign Led by Politicians
Back in November 2020, the Canadian Prime Minister dismissed the “Great Reset” as “disinformation” even though he spoke directly of covid offering an opportunity for a reset during his United Nations speech just two months earlier.
In one segment [of his UN speech] Trudeau says, “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.”
Sounds good on paper until you realize that nobody voted for the Canadian Prime Minister (or any of the other political leaders affiliated with the WEF) to fulfill those global mandates, nor to use the trauma of the pandemic to accelerate anything on the WEF’s agenda.
In support of Trudeau, many corporate legacy media outlets and their “fact checkers” (funded by Bill Gates, George Soros, and other Clinton donors, to name a few) claimed that right-wingers were pushing this global reset in yet another conspiracy theory — as if the great unwashed masses couldn’t read or do a Google search. After all, earlier that same year the head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, had published “Covid 19: The Great RESET” (in July of 2020). I have a copy of the book. Its content alarms me.
Speaking Up, Singing, and Standing Together
My own form of speaking up for freedom has been to research and write and, in the past, make presentations to government inquiries.
I’m very ashamed to say that back in 2014 I had seen our right to free speech (and free thinking) being slowly crushed, wrote a book called “Notes from a Blonde: Why This ‘Anything Goes’ Multiculturalism Has to Go” and within weeks of publishing it, pulled it off the market out of fear. I told myself at the time that I’d pulled the book because it contained a technical error but, somehow, for nearly 10 years, I never got around to fixing that technical error and republishing that book.
This year, I’ll be republishing Notes from a Blonde (for free) through Not Your Donkey. To give you a taste of what I was writing nearly 10 years ago, I’ll provide the opening and the closing of the book here in this post. Here we go.
“Notes from a Blonde”
Opening Chapter: No Apologies (excerpt)
Here’s what I’m not going to do: I’m not going to apologize for being blonde, blue-eyed and Caucasian.
I’m also not going to feel personally guilty for the hundreds of years of sickening oppression that some Caucasians heaped upon the Aboriginal peoples of the world as well as on Africans and Asians.
Why?
For two reasons. For one, I wasn’t there so I bear no personal responsibility. I can’t change the past. I can only acknowledge it and work to build a better future.
For another, my Ancestors weren’t there, either. My people are Estonian, the indigenous people of the part of Northern Europe now called Estonia. After living on our own land for over 5,000 years, Estonians then spent virtually all of the last 900 years being oppressed by one brutal empire after another – Germans, Russians, Soviets. Each of these empires did their best to crush our culture, language and ways of worshipping right out of us and yet, somehow, we held on while also embracing the 20th and then the 21st century. Estonians, after all, claimed their freedom and then immediately invented Skype and yet still honor nature as the powerful and supporting force that it is.
When I think about it, there’s actually a very sound third reason as to why I won’t apologize or feel guilty for being Caucasian. Throughout the last several hundred years, there were many, many Caucasians who didn’t tromp around the world smashing cultures and building empires. Instead, they were busy inventing things like the printing press and the electric stove and birth control and penicillin, as well as pushing for social changes like the right to vote, the right to workplace safety, the effective distribution of wealth (decent wages) and environmental protections. In Europe and North America, millions of people worked to improve public health, defeat corruption, fight slavery, and try to pull power away from a handful of privileged men into the hands of all people.
It took far too long and far too much effort, but the West finally got around to granting human rights to all humans regardless of which “earth suit” they showed up in, male or female.
So, for a lot of reasons, I’m proud of the West and I respect the time and effort and sometimes bravely lost lives of those who came before us, people who worked to make my life – and your life – better.
Heck, remove all the political advancements and just think about hygiene and indoor plumbing for a moment. Just that deserves applause. If you simply focus on the indoor plumbing part of those incredibly advanced things that Westerners have brought to the world, all of us here – even people in public housing – live better than the kings and queens of yesteryear. If there’s nothing nice you can say about the West then at least give a little nod of thanks when you’re standing under a warm shower or soaking in a hot bath or getting up at 3:00 in the morning on a terrible winter night to use the loo.
For all its faults and as-yet unfulfilled dreams, the West is the envy of the world – an envy that has translated into millions upon millions of people from other places scrambling to get here by any means possible.
Closing (excerpt)
In a Western democracy, people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe. About religion. About politics. About whether the sky is blue or not. About anything at all.
In the West, people have the responsibility – each one of us – to function as citizens who uphold the Western ideals of free speech and equal rights and opportunities for all.
We who live in the West live in the best place on earth. Let’s work together to keep it that way. To do this, we must talk openly and fairly with one another because we can only find our way to a brighter future that draws upon all of our cultural strengths if we permit ourselves to speak from our hearts without shame.
Yet I am ashamed - ashamed that my Estonian grandfather stood for what he believed knowing he’d either be killed or sent to Siberia and yet here in my comfortable Western life, I panicked about publishing a book describing the downfalls of full-force multiculturalism in Canada, pulled my book off the market, and hid my thoughts away.
My New Year’s Resolution
Once a week, I’ll send out a full chapter of Notes from a Blonde. I’ll also publish it (along with two other books I’ve written) in case you would like to read it as a book.
Do you have new year’s resolutions in support of free speech and democracy? I’d love to hear them because it’s when we stand together — and sing together like the people of the Baltics — that democracy prevails.
Bray freely! Democracy deserves it.
Maret Jaks
Happy New Year! I love your take on all things freedom. Please write some more about Estonia and it’s parallels to the challenges we face today.
Love this documentary! So powerful!