another open letter. this time re: takedown of draft magazine from amazon yesterday. started with a typical redshill-style coercive antic executed by an upstart button hero and was followed by a more professional ‘doubling down’ by mauren after i’d replied such essentially editorial decisons will result in my taking down all draft issues as a result.

hope this is found enlightening for many.

Hi Mauren,

so I regard your email as being the ‘official’ confirmation of Vaisakh’s earlier decision to block the draft literary magazine issue from being available for sale on Amazon by a higher instance within the Amazon framework? Is this reading correct?

As I clarified earlier, there hasn’t been an issue for many years with this. All I have done is tweak commas and republish the ‘culprit’. What changed?

As to your ‘guidelines’ as such – well, I have to say as long as it isn’t stated what specifically triggered the alarm bells – what is it? the dwarves offering sweets to the goddess, her not wearing any pants, the hideous cretins imprisoned between her legs in an earth buried trail emanating from the horizon, the ghostly fun fair without humans entertained in it whatsoever? – I do not feel confident publishing anything anymore in the future with you guys. Most of the things I know and say can be ‘bent’ to infringing empty ‘guidelines’ if taken out of intellectual discourse that is art and fiction. If sticklers and hypocrites are at work hiding behind their pathetic buttons.

Mind you – you didn’t have a problem listing a publication that was specifically produced as ‘pornography’ (Rear Entry by Eros Comix / Fantagraphics) as apparently having been authored by me – even though I have only been contributing with 5 pages as a graphic novel ‘illustrator’ (authored anonymously by an ex-girlfriend) and it has de-facto been authored – uncredited, as editor in chief – by Michael Dowers. And I’m certain this hasn’t changed at all. Listing is still up and deceiving just fine, lol. (And I don’t have a problem if credits are adjusted and depicted accurately for listings as this to be available on Amazon.)

Which is to say while you make a fuzz about first class artwork that is not at all considered ‘pornographic’ by anyone with a fine art education (slandering it insinuatingly, not daring to do it explicitly, as if it wasn’t clear to anyone how professionally and considerately this artwork has been created) – you turn a blind eye on the really important things such as those of copyright and credits.

And here comes the greatest irony of our present discourse – the plot twist that only those who read with a pure heart were able to see from the get-go – pieces of art such as this (as well as other artworks along those borderlines using people’s buried anxieties and desires, stirring psychological undercurrents both of vileness and goodness) raise precisely the entire issue of child abuse and women objectification – opening wide the darkest abyss – in a literary context that has the full backing of professional psychology.

Wouldn’t you then call this present head-slapping episode ‘hypocrisy’ by human standards and ‘professional misconduct’ by intellectual ones? What is an author of literary fiction today if they’re lectured by rogue unprofessionalism pretending to uphold ‘content guidelines’ while in reality they’re with self-righteous impunity enforcing extremely serious censorship of creative expression and thus partaining editorial license to an independent author’s creative work?

And what you’ve taken upon yourselves goes much further: Almost anything that is not insignificant and bland – in the end indistinguishable from AI generated pastel-tinged pseudo-content – can be taken off the sales-shelves if a breach of the ‘official narrative’ by the socially engineering main stream is to be detected. 1984.

Furthermore, taken out of context of the entire body of work by an author, a single artefact created by him or her can not be dismissed without dismissing the work in its entirety. It loses its meaning without the context in which it was created. Any literature class in school would probably have made this clear during their first opening session. So who or what is Amazon?

If the apparently sexually explicit take of some of my imagery isn’t evaluated by troubling a content moderation team with a required professional expertise in psychology, art and literature , then I’d have to say Amazon has failed utterly in providing a sales outlet for any literature and art that has still the edge that scribes (and artists) traditionally were making the foundation of their guild and craft. Without being confrontational and inquisitive – oftentimes devastating to the status quo as a logical consequence thereof – literary writing (traditional writing if gnostic composition of scripture is regarded as that, which I certainly do) ceases to have any justification whatsoever, and thus ceases to exist (except perhaps being prepped as a globohomo pastime requisite to feel somehow highbrow when cloaking oneself in such shallow label as being ‘literary minded’ or ‘art connoisseuring’).

In closing I’m stating the obvious that you as a content moderation team should have ‘seen’ from my work before embarrassing yourself: the issue of child sexual abuse is the most pressing and the most repressed from public perception of all the topics out there. Our modern Empires have been blackmail-glued by the underhanded undercurrent of drug and child-sex trafficking. I have talked about it at length and in details and raised it extensively wherever an opportunity arose in the past twenty years or so. As a matter of fact, the essay from a couple of months ago – “On MK Ultra and Sex Slavery” only scratches the surface of the discourse that happened with my commentary work on Twitter during the past two years or so.

And the even deeper primordial battle of the sexes and the revelations of the Goddess tradition is tightly interwoven in most of the content I have ever been publishing.

This email I will disclose as widely as I can in the literary form that I often use, that of an ‘open letter’. And I’d also take the opportunity to ask for this to be raised to even higher instances within the Amazon content review framework. Maybe it can meet common sense and justice eventually?

Regards,

Reinhard Schleining

Winter 2024