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magazine under Ken Whyte. Although my previous book was an international best-seller, the manuscript of Crimes and Mercies was turned down by 23 publishers. And let us remember that this has nothing to do with the quality of my writing, or of my research, or of any anticipated financial loss.
    Are these rejections a conspiracy? Or did fear outweigh greed in editorial offices throughout the West? Or was it a sudden attack of editorial likemindedness? Whatever, for three years I suffered the censorship by rejection slip of the proscribed writer.There is no freedom of the press in the West, only freedom to own the press.
    When I said to Stamler, ‘Why would they go to all this trouble over a book of history?’ He said, ‘They wanted to know who you were working for. Especially when you went to Moscow.’ I said, ‘It’s obvious who I work for. I work for my readers.’ He just laughed.
    In the West, many of us in our innocence had thought that the fall of the Soviets would only reduce world tensions as it liberated a great nation. This has begun to happen, but the repressive habits of Soviet society, like a mutating virus, have spread into our own institutions.
    In 1997, I published an earlier version of the Appendix above.
    Although the book was published in Canada, the UK, Germany and Korea, and has sold worldwide on the Internet, no one anywhere commented. So I took the information to a former Cabinet Minister, now a highly-placed judge, who gave me lunch and passed me on to a civil liberties outfit, who gave me half an hour, and a cup of tea. I also passed it to the Writers’ Union of Canada and PEN Canada. Nothing.
    We hear much about the troubles of Salman Rushdie because he is threatened by Islamists, but almost nothing of the men held without charge in British, Canadian and American jails, for many years, deprived of lawyers, some in isolation. The suspected terrorists in Canadian jails are not even alleged to have done or plotted anything, because most of them have never been charged. In the one case recently investigated by Mr Justice Dennis O’Connor, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was released with an apology and it was revealed that he had been arrested, deported, vilified and tortured, by mistake – a mistake American security officials are still denying, despite Arar’s full exoneration by the Canadian government.
    The publisher of Other Losses , Stoddart, also published By Way of Deception , a denunciation of Israeli dirty tricks by VictorOstrovsky, a former Mossad agent. Soon after its publication, Stoddart’s offices were broken into, files searched, but nothing taken that was financially valuable. The next night, Ostrovsky, wary of hotels, which he was sure were watched, stayed with my wife and me. Since our house has no electronic security, Victor leaned paddles against doors and windows, which he said was much more effective, since Mossad and the Mounties can easily disarm electronic devices.
    The one thing that these and countless other illegal uses of power have in common, is that they were not necessary. But the absence of cause is not the worst thing about the many new laws and changes to old ones in our ‘new, security-conscious age’. Their worst effect on us is that they are the beginning of the destruction of our free societies, because police snooping frightens people, and a frightened people is a docile people.
    Having studied the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in the 1930s, I see frightening parallels between the Weimar republic and our own democracies. The Nazis rose to power because they were determined, well-organized, violent, cynical and better informed than their more democratic opponents, who did not know how to defend themselves. Their opponents wavered, and then they were done for. The determined neo-cons in the USA, and the power-hungry fear-mongers in Canada and elsewhere, have abolished or damaged institutions that we still believe protect our freedom and our