My final letter to the editors of Free Inquiry:
Thanks for your response and your offer. I am afraid I need to explain some more. Bear with me; there won’t be any more letters and emails.
I have plan A and plan B.
Plan A was my request that FI publish my piece as an op-ed. It is a reasonable request, I think, given that I used to edit the American Rationalist for 14 years.
You are not likely to ever get any other submission from “former editor(s)” of AR: one of them will never do it again, and the rest are all dead. (I don’t know what Mr. Joshi has done to AR, by the way. I suspect he has trashed it.) This is another reason I thought you would publish my op-ed. I have a fond memory of the magazine I edited for so long and of the many intellectually free, fearless, articulate writers I had brought in and published during my tenure.
That’s one reason.
Another, equally important, is the circumstances of my dismissal by Tom Flynn (and possibly by some other shady players from the Center for Inquiry). I don’t know them and today, after 13 years, I am no longer interested. I believe they are all dead anyhow. Like Flynn.
What I do know now is that many secular humanists like Tom Flynn don’t treat their fellow human beings, let alone their fellow humanist colleagues, the way they are supposed to treat them: with compassion and understanding. With “humanism.”
But what happened to me in 2010 is what typically happens in an inhuman corporate American environment: CEOs and directors/managers in general act like human hyenas: they don’t hesitate to fire their employees without any good reason; they fire them to satisfy their megalomaniac egos and/or to follow their hidden agenda. They do talk a whole lot about humanist values, but in real life they don’t espouse them.
Tom Flynn acted not much differently than a typical corporate thug. He fired me without giving me any good reason. I was told that someone called Joshi would do “a better job” editing AR. But the fact is that against all odds, I did keep AR afloat for those long 14 years and, if treated with some respect and given some support from the Center for Inquiry, I would, most likely, have developed AR into a viable, truly humanist, independent publication, not compromised by political correctness, which mars so many so called “free media,” including Free Inquiry.
Still, I had nothing against somebody else editing AR, but I was hoping I would be treated the same way Tom Flynn would like to be treated. (What, by the way, happened to the Golden Rule at Center of Inquiry?)
I could have been offered the option of becoming a contributing editor. Or a senior writer. But hell no. Such a sensible humanist compromise solution was not available in Mr. Flynn’s moral universe. I had to be kicked out immediately, even though at that time, in 2010, it so happened that I was reeling from being fired from my college job by local corporate thugs. Flynn knew this, and yet he had no qualms stabbing me in the back by also firing me from my editorial job. In a couple of months, I lost two jobs and would never have a chance to find another one. And I got no support from my humanist colleagues. I was, after all, just another cog in a corporate secular humanist machine.
The college corporate establishment in New Mexico punished me for promoting secular humanism and for offering the first course in secular humanism ever taught at a technical college (“The American Humanist Tradition,” which I designed entirely by myself and taught as a General Honors course at CNM in Albuquerque). But Flynn didn’t say a word of support, he couldn’t care less about my contribution to secular humanism and the heavy price I eventually had to pay.
What has happened to me is an example of what I call “inhumanist” secular values. I have provided some more details of how I was abused in my unpublished letter to a fellow secular humanist, Margaret Downy. I will now publish it. I will also publish my essay I wrote for my magazine “Adventures in Freedom” in 2011: “American Apparatchiks, I Salute You!”
“Old sins have long shadows.”
Although I still love secular humanism, I don’t love quite a few secular humanists. Tom Flynn spent his life ranting about secular humanism, yet he himself, when facing a challenging situation, acted as a typical corporate thug—not as a secular humanist. He defaulted to his real self. He would, in addition, never condescend to read my book Adventures in Freedom and to write even a short comment. Neither would anybody else, in fact, whether from The Center for Inquiry or the American Humanist Association. My book, a study in American secular humanism, was completely ignored. Only Richard Bozarth wrote a full review, any review. (It’s available on my website: kazdziamka.com)
And now plan B.
Frankly, I was not surprised by your or Editor Fidalgo’s refusal to publish my article on Russia’s “Potemkin army,” to use Joshi’s goofy phrase. Well, it won’t be published. It’s regrettable.
As a result, I have activated plan B. I have already published my op-ed on one of the most influential and popular independent military blogs: sonar21.com, edited by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson. Larry has emailed me to say that my piece is also available on several other platforms, Telegram, for instance, or Substack, and has already been picked by other portals.
Ma’am, to accept your offer to abbreviate my article and to publish it as an LTE is out of the question. It’s either published as an op-ed in its unabbreviated form. Or it is not published at all. Thank you, but no, thank you.
Here’s the link to my article on sonar21.com:
As a secular humanist, I wish you and FI well. Adios.
Dr. Kaz Dziamka