Month: December 2011

Recognition Forever Denied

On: By: Tony Papard

We now have, in Britain, civil partnerships for gay men and women, and soon we may have gay marriage. This is all well and good, and far too long coming, but what about all those gay couples who were in loving relationships for years and weren’t allowed to register it?

Many of these people are now dead, but there are also surviving partners like myself from gay relationships where one partner died before civil partnerships became possible.

I appreciate it is a difficult area and hard to change things retrospectively, but surely gay men and women who were in loving relationships for years should have some sort of recognition, given that they were never allowed to register these relationships?

Many, like myself and my partner, exchanged rings or tokens of our affection, and looked after each other literally ’till death did us part, in sickness and in health’. Yet we have no status whatsoever, our partnership is omitted from family trees, the surviving partner is not entitled to call himself/herself a widower or widow on legal documents.

It was bad enough not being able to announce our relationship formally to the world, having to furnish our home from second-hand stuff and things found in skips, not having a formal ceremony or honeymoon. Being in a precarious legal position all our lives together, not knowing if we could even visit our partner in hospital if seriously ill or attend the funeral if they died. My partner and myself made out simple Wills to each other, but we were never formally recognized as a couple.

If a gay couple were in a loving relationship for many years, exchanging rings or tokens of affection, then some sort of recognition should, in my view, be given retrospectively. This does not apply to heterosexual couples who freely choose to co-habit without getting married, though the option of a civil partnership should be made available to them too.

For gay men and women, however, who were not then allowed to register their long-term partnership and put it on a formal footing, some sort of recognition for their commitment to each other should now be given, whether one partner is still alive or not.

I do not know what form of wording could be used, but any surviving partner of such a long-term loving relationship should most certainly be allowed to legally describe themselves as widowed. For the relationship itself, whether both partners are now dead or not, a term should be used to indicate it was a long-term, loving and caring relationship with tokens of affection exchanged but at a time when civil partnerships and gay marriage was not possible.

Perhaps a term like ‘loving partnership’ could be used with, as stated, any surviving partner entitled to describe themselves as ‘widowed’.

I strongly object to describing myself as ‘single’ on official documents and refuse to do so. I feel widowed, I am widowed. I was with my partner 21 years and he died literally in my arms. I will not have this long, loving relationship denied. We most certainly would have put it on a legal footing if we were allowed to at that time.

For this reason I now wear the ring he gave me on my wedding finger, and the one I gave him on the third finger of the right-hand (apparently the wedding finger for Greek-Cypriots). My father was Greek-Cypriot.

I could ask my partner in Spirit what he thinks, but I already know. He has spoken to me many times since he died. Unfortunately such posthumous communications are not recognized by a lot of people. Our relationship of over two decades with the exchanging of rings should be sufficient proof, however, to anyone that we were committed to each other ’till death did us part’.

I’m now asking my partner (via his dictionary so I can’t be accused of influencing his reply)  if he has anything at all to say on this matter. I will now open the dictionary at random and point at a word or definition again at random, without looking: he is saying that there SHOULD be ‘an official rule’.

In the absence of this I shall continue to wear the rings on these fingers and continue to described myself as widowed, with a written explanation, on all documents.

 

 

Propaganda

On: By: Tony Papard

It is often very difficult to sort out what is propaganda and misinformation/disinformation and what is the truth. For instance stories related to North Korea now repeated because of the death of the ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-Il.

Clearly Western disinformation is the lie that the building on the North Korean side of the border at Panmunjeom in the Joint Security Area is just a false facade. In fact it is a real building, and Western visitors have been inside it.

Horrific stories came out of North Korea some years ago about whole families being executed in gas chambers at Camp 22, women being forced to eat poisoned cabbage and other macabre executions and experiments reminiscent of Nazi Germany. These were largely spread by defectors to the West, so disinformation cannot be completely discounted. If true, however, it means the Stalinist North Korean regime must be as brutal, corrupt and fascist, rather than Socialist, as the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia/former Kampuchea.

Other reports by Western visitors to North Korea say things are not nearly as bad as Western propaganda would make out, with modern homes, fairly well-stocked supermarkets and shops, etc. Though recurring famines have proved a problem in some areas.

North Korean propaganda, on the other hand, makes out everything is rosy in that land, and the people all love their leaders, hence the hysterical display of weeping on the streets when Kim Jong-Il’s death was announced. Since information is strictly controlled and loyalty to the regime is the best guarantee of an easier life in such dictatorships, these public displays of grief are, perhaps, not that surprising.

In Britain there might be similar public displays, though not quite as exaggerated, of people weeping on hearing the news of the death of the monarch, despite the fact that she or he lives in splendid affluent isolation from the rest of the country and has little idea how the poorest sections of the realm live.

Jingoism is another symptom of propaganda, and the current ‘Help for Heroes’ campaign is typical. ‘Clap for Cannon Fodder’ might be more appropriate as young men, largely from poor areas of mass unemployment, are encouraged to join the military and sent abroad to places Britain has no business to be to conduct wars for oil supplies and to prop up the arms industry which in turn props up the crumbling international capitalist system. ‘Fighting for democracy’ is pure propaganda since there are plenty of dictators Britain and the West support, and only when there is something in it for American or British interests is there any attempt to depose them.

Young men have been persuaded to kill each other for hundreds of years, while their elders (generals, politicans, etc.) sit back in safety and preside over this carnage. Wars will cease when men refuse to fight and either desert, refuse to join up in the first place, or perhaps when handed guns turn round and shoot their own officers. Unfortunately too many are brainwashed into believing they must fight for their country, for freedom, democracy, our way of life, etc. when the real motives are usually quite different.

Even when some form of action is necessary to target a particularly cruel dictator or prevent atrocities it is not up to individual countries like Britain and America to act as the world’s policemen, not least because they have ulterior motives for getting involved (oil, boosting the profit-making arms industry, etc.). They also cannot be trusted – witness the Second World War where Britain ostensibly got involved because Hitler invaded first Czechoslovakia then Poland, but then happily handed both countries over to their wartime ally Stalin at the end of the War. Exchanging Hitler for Stalin was not exactly what most Poles expected and hoped for at the end of that conflict, but it suited both the Soviet Union and the West to divide Europe up between their respective ‘spheres of influence’.

Propaganda rules our lives daily. The press and media are all controlled even in the so-called ‘free’ West. D notices are sent out in Britain, for instance, to stop papers and the media publishing anything the government doesn’t want published. Fortunately we now have the uncensored Internet where information can be obtained, though this too is full of propaganda, so sorting out the truth from the lies is also problematic.

The Internet is full of conspiracy theories, the most bizarre of which claims a race of alien lizards is taking over the world under human guise. Conspiracy theories about secret powerful organizations such as the Illuminati are all over the Internet.

However if you use common sense to sort out the exaggerations and propaganda from what is likely to be the truth, you can obtain a lot of very useful information from the Internet not freely available elsewhere.

Not least in the areas of science and religion. Both these disciplines spread false propaganda, but YouTube and the Internet generally is the place to find the facts if you search for them. For instance, our orthodox science is atheistic and follows the official line of propaganda that everything happened by pure chance starting with the Big Bang, prior to which nothing existed. As unlikely as this may seem, this is the official line and any deviance from this is regarded as heresy.

However Quantum Physics sits very uneasily with such theories, since basic experiments in the sub-atomic quantum world prove that no matter at all can exist without consciousness. Therefore some form of non-material consciousness must have preceded the formation of all matter. In other words, Quantum Physics proves that something akin to ‘God’ or a non-material intelligence preceded the formation of matter, and the logical conclusion is clearly that intelligence and consciousness is at the heart of the multi-verse and separate from matter. Therefore animal and human brains are NOT the origin of consciousness which must be non-material and, as all the evidence proves, survives death of the physical body.

Only in time can propaganda be publicly revealed as such and can the truth filter out. Hopefully, with the Internet, this process will be speeded up. More and more people are becoming enlightened and not swallowing the lies put out by governments, by official scientific propaganda and by the organized religions based on ancient and outdated texts and myths.

The 21st Century is surely the one where a lot of these misconceptions, lies and propaganda will be exposed and the truth in all areas will finally become widely known.

 

 

The Great Escape

On: By: Tony Papard

I have my mother and ‘Aunt’ Dora  to thank for escaping a terrible life in Cyprus. Back in 1951 when I turned 6 and my brother 2 my father (Hercules or Eracles, known as ‘Herky’) was planning a holiday for all the family in his homeland, the island of Cyprus.  Dora was the English wife of a Greek-Cypriot named Johnny and neither was really a relative of ours, but she was a great friend of my mother and before we were due to leave for the holiday Dora confided in her. ‘Johnny would kill me if he knew I’d told you, but Herky has only bought one-way tickets for the two boys. He wants to bring them up in Cyprus.’ My mother would  be allowed to return to England if she wished, but definitely my brother and I were to remain on that wretched island, then in the throes of EOKA terrorism against the British as the Greek-Cypriots sought not independence but Enosis or union with fascist Greece. At least it courted fascism several times in post-war history. After the civil war with the Communists, leftists were marginalized, and King Constantine’s wife Queen Frederika was a German who’d been in the Hitler Youth. Later the Greek Colonels imposed a fascist junta on the country, and tried to annex Cyprus by means of a fascist coup.

On learning of the plan to keep my brother and myself in Cyprus and bring us up as Greek-Cypriots, my mother planned to leave my father. This was not the only reason – he’d get drunk and beat her up, and in Cyprus women were treated very badly. He didn’t want a wife but a chattel. He said to her once: ‘In Cyprus we have a saying – women and dogs stay in the house!’ This was when she asked why they never went out together. He was anyway too busy gambling away the profits from his restaurant half the night and sleeping with waitresses and prostitutes, so was never home to teach us the language. He insisted this was my mother’s job even though she didn’t speak Greek herself!

My mother challenged my dad once on why he slept around and asked: ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’. His reply: ‘Yes, and I love baked beans but I don’t want them every night!’ Once when she asked for more housekeeping money he told her to ‘Go down Piccadilly and earn some!’ (Piccadilly then being a hang out for prostitutes.)

The main reason my mother was determined we should not be brought up in Cyprus was because I was under the top surgeons in the country at the Middlesex Hospital who were performing many operations to correct a cleft palate, hare lip and club foot. Apparently when my mother first told my dad he had a son, he took one look at me and said: ‘Call that a son?’

Anyway I most certainly would not have received the kind of first-class treatment in Cyprus that I was getting in this leading London teaching hospital. Having corrected my club foot, I then was left with one leg shorter than the other. Soon after my parents separated, when I was still aged 6, I broke the right leg which was already several inches shorter and had to have it in traction for months.. I also needed constant operations on my lip, palate and both legs, and this continued for many years into my 20s.

Had I been brought up in Cyprus I’d have been a cripple, and a total outcast since it is one of the most homophobic countries on the planet. It also seethes with hatred for not only the British occupiers before independence, but for the Turkish-Cypriot community who stand in the way of Enosis.

No doubt they wouldn’t have wanted a gay cripple in the Cypriot National Guard, but it is equally likely they’d have arranged a marriage to a cousin or some other girl with a large dowry. This is what they did in the villages, and the reason my father came to England in the first place. His brother had to marry the woman as my father took one look at her and said ‘I wasn’t going to marry that gorilla’.

However it was one rule for my father and another for everyone else, for he also told me that a neighbor was gay when he was younger but they soon knocked that out of him by arranging a marriage to a girl. Homosexuality is not tolerated in Greek Cyprus because of the all-powerful Greek Orthodox Church, despite being a member of the European Union which outlaws homophobic laws. On my last visit there three years ago there still wasn’t one gay club or pub on the Greek side of the island, except possibly in the summer season for tourists only. All Greek-Cypriot men MUST have a wife to cook and look after not only them, but the parents. At least that’s how it used to be – the daughters or daughters-in-law looked after the parents or parents-in-law as well as their husbands. The men just sit around in the cafes all day drinking Greek coffee (not Turkish coffee, though it’s exactly the same) all day and playing backgammon.

So if I’d been brought up in Cyprus I’d have had a miserable life, all my sympathies being with the Greek-Cypriot slave class (women) and the Turkish-Cypriots. I believe they have every right to their Turkish Republic of North Cyprus – a safe-haven from ethnic cleansing which would have otherwise have resulted from Enosis following the fascist Sampson coup of July 1974 orchestrated from fascist Greece, probably with the connivance of NATO who wanted to rid the island of Makarios, thought too pro-Soviet. My father called him a Communist and removed his picture from his Hampstead mantelpiece after the Sampson coup.

I’d have been very unpopular as a cripple, a gay man, a pacifist, a leftist and a lover of the Turkish-Cypriots and their right to their own state. Also my non-Christian beliefs as a Spiritualist, virtually unknown in Cyprus.

So I am eternally grateful to my mother and ‘Aunt’ Dora (who sadly died of cancer shortly after telling my mother about the secret plan) for a fate worse than death.

I’m sure Cyprus is lovely for holidays, especially if you’re straight and just seek sun, sand and sex in Ayia Napa or Limassol, but I’d hate to live there. I do have a gay Greek-Cypriot cousin – he lives in Italy (I wonder why?) Possibly because as a Greek-Cypriot cousin living in London told me recently: homosexuality is still regarded as ‘not normal’ by Greek-Cypriots. It is totally unacceptable, and my father told me once never to take my life-partner to Cyprus.

Greek-Cypriots gays who do take their partners there have to pretend they are just friends or work colleagues.

When I was in Cyprus with two English gay friends and we visited the few cruising grounds all the Greek-Cypriots were looking over their shoulders at every little noise like frightened rabbits.

I could never live on that hate-ridden, chauvinistic, mysogonist, homophobic island – at least not the Greek part. If I had to live there it would be in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus which might just be a bit more tolerant, though no guarantee of that. At least my sympathies would be with the downtrodden Turkish-Cypriot minority rather than the Greek-Cypriot majority in the South.

Verification of ADC

On: By: Tony Papard

ADC stands for ‘After Death Communications’. There are many methods by which, so it is claimed, this occurs. However some methods are more reliable than others, and if a medium is involved, the ability of him or her to receive the messages accurately without embellishing them with their own interpretations and subconscious thoughts is crucial. According to Direct Voice medium, the late Leslie Flint, via one of his recorded Spirit voices a typical example was when this man, who died falling off a ladder, managed to convey the image of a ladder to the medium. She, however, put her own interpretation to it and told the man’s wife that she saw a ladder representing ‘good fortune’ for the lady. Hardly, unless she regarded the sudden death of her husband in this light, which was apparently not the case.

I don’t claim to be a medium, but I have had spontaneous telepathic messages from my deceased partner and others, and most of these have proven to be very accurate. Two such messages, for instance, in the months after he passed to Spirit helped me find things in the flat, one of these in answer to a specific question as to where some negatives were which I asked him the night before. They were in a most unusual place where he had put them – at the top of the larder! I’d never have found them without his help.

On another occasion, also in the months following his passing, I asked a question and it was answered the very next day via his record collection. I had the strange compulsion to pull out an album of his and, without looking at the sleeve or the label, stick the stylus down somewhere in the middle. I was unfamiliar with his record collection as our musical tastes were quite different. As soon as I put the stylus on the record, I got the answer to a question I had asked him just the night before: Should I stop writing him posthumous letters? Dorothy Squires answered for him: Love letters straight from your heart keep us so near while apart.

Such communications can’t be dismissed as mere coincidence, nor could one coming telepathically to me while on holiday in Tunisia. On a coach tour we stopped at a rather uninteresting place, but a telepathic message told me to turn right. I did so, and found a lovely little bay I would otherwise have missed.

More recently I have tried to obtain ADCs by ‘tuning in’. The trouble with this method is, unless you’re a very good medium, you are never sure if the messages come from Spirit, from your subconscious or a mixture of both. Accomplished mediums like Colin Fry, Tony Stockwell, John Edwards and Sally Morgan are able to obtain very accurate and evidential messages. Mine are much more hit and miss. Some things prove to be accurate, others less so. Many I can’t prove one way or the other.

Earlier this year I attended two physical seances, and at the second one I got a message purportedly from my deceased partner. Messages received by me since telepathically tell me this was indeed him. I cannot, however, take it as conclusive proof because these telepathic messages could be influenced by my own subconscious.

As to the seance message itself, it contained some accurate information and some which was more obscure and had to be interpreted. The voice, actually little more than a whisper, was nothing whatsoever like my partner’s voice on Earth. I am told this is not unusual for Spirits using ectoplasm to speak for the first time.

On balance I think the communication and materialization (albeit in the dark) was real and that, as he said later in a telepathic communication, very difficult for him to achieve and probably not worth all the effort on his part, nor on my part getting to the venue in an isolated part of the country.

Another method I use regularly is randomly opening an old dictionary of his and seeking mainly confirmation of the messages I receive telepathically. This is more evidential, as I have no way of influencing which definitions and words my finger hits upon when opening the dictionary and pointing randomly.

Other people are experimenting with methods such as ITC or Instrumental Trans-Communication – voices, pictures, text, etc. received over telephones, mobile phones, computers, televisions, etc. Also photographs received paranormally at physical seances, etc. All of these methods need to be perfected, but some remarkable things have been received.

The only thing I can recall of this nature happened to a friend of mine. While caring for a terminally ill old man, they were discussing the possibility of an afterlife, and my friend said: ‘Well nobody’s ever phoned me from the Other Side to say they arrived safely’. The old man eventually had to leave his flat and go into hospital, where he died. The landline in the empty flat was cut off. At the time the old guy died my friend received three missed call messages on his mobile phone from the cut-off landline in the empty flat: ‘Reg calling…. Reg calling… Reg calling…’ He assures me the phone number had not yet been allocated to another subscriber, and there was certainly nobody in the empty flat.

I will persevere with my attempts at channeling and receiving messages, trying to sift out my own subconscious thoughts. I’ve experimented with friends and had some remarkable hits. Connexions with the Carolinas, for example, for an American friend of mine living in the mid-West – I had no idea she had any connexion with that part of the States before. Only recently I told a friend on the South Coast that he’d recently either had a fall or seen someone falling over, and this proved accurate – just in the previous week he’d seen a woman fall coming out of a shop.

Another remarkable communication, can’t now remember if it was received telepathically or via my partner’s dictionary, concerned a friend of ours. I was about to go on holiday to the USA and I was told while I was away this friend would become very seriously ill or have an accident of some sort. So strong was this message I phoned my friend before I left and told him about it, and to be very careful. When I returned he was seriously ill in hospital, on the point of death in fact, with septecemia. Fortunately he recovered, but it was touch and go.

Finally, I’ve just consulted my partner via his dictionary and asked him how accurate the messages are I received by tuning in and trying to channel. The reply was that I have to ‘intensify the degree’ to which I tune in and filter out my own sub-conscious. The true messages from Spirit will then ‘show up’.

Was the physical materialization and verbal message real, even though it didn’t sound like his Earthly voice? It was ‘blemished’ by his inability to recreate his old voice. Next time, if there’s an opportunity, it will be more ‘polished’. The first attempt was just a ‘small piece’ of evidence, quite ‘meager’ in fact.  He’s now saying ‘almost laughable’ presumably because it was in the complete dark and his voice was so subdued. It was him without his human covering, he says via the dictionary, but it was a real connexion with him.

Only by constant practice can we, who channel, get accurate messages unembelished with our own interpretations and ideas, and can the Spirits communicate accurately with something approximating their voices on Earth via Direct Voice and physical mediumship.

Home and Car Ownership

On: By: Tony Papard

It is frequently brought home to me how our society judges people by what possessions they have. First of all, a nuclear family, which rules out gays for a start. Then by whether they own their home and a car. If, like me, you fail on all three counts you seem to be left out and regarded as the poor relation or friend by many people.

The fact that you were born or became gay due to your genes/upbringing and you’re quite happy not to have a wife and two kids, and that you consciously chose not to have a motor vehicle or own your own home doesn’t seem to carry any weight. In our society respectability and acceptability require you to at least own your home and a car – then even gay couples are accepted.

Cars are not only very expensive to buy, run and maintain, but are anti-social and extremely damaging to the environment. I owned a motor vehicle over 30 years ago but since getting rid of it I can honestly say I’ve never missed it. In inner London it’s an expensive status symbol that sits out in the road all day, virtually useless. You can’t park it anywhere without it costing you a fortune, and the traffic in London is so bad that even without the Congestion charge it’s no fun driving.

Fortunately transport in inner London is very good and runs thru the nite. Also free to the disabled and pensioners, and I can use my Freedom Pass on buses all over England and Wales.

As to owning your own home, this isn’t anti-social or damaging to the environment, but it can be very damaging to your pocket. Not only keeping up mortgage payments but having enough money for maintenance of the property, insurance, repairs, etc.

Added to this is the problem of what to do with the property when you die. A real headache in my opinion. If you have no children, who do you leave it to? If you have more than one child the same problem arises, and believe me it really is a problem if one offspring is still living in it as the family home. I know people who have been made homeless because the parents have both died and they are forced to sell the family home where they’ve lived all their lives in order to sell it and share out the proceeds with siblings. Their share of these proceeds are usually not enough to buy another home, or only a tiny flat or caravan.

How much better it would be for everyone if we had a Socialist government which provided good cheap public transport in rural and suburban areas as well as in inner cities so that cars were truly a luxury and the environment could be protected.

Also if this government and Socialist local authorities would provide decent council housing at affordable rents to everyone who needs them, with the option to own them or pay a reduced rent after several decades. This would remove the need for worrying mortgages and repair bills, and the real problem of young people forced to move far away from neighborhoods where they grew up in order to try and get on the ‘property ladder’.

While you can regard owning your home as an investment, since the price of property is likely to rise or fall all over the country the value of your home is really only paper wealth, and can only be realized if you sell it and don’t need to buy another home to replace it. With cars it is even worse, as they lose most of their purchase value in the first year or so.

I was extremely lucky to have got in, with my gay partner, at the last innings for council housing. This was in the late 1970s when the local Labour council (soon to replaced permanently by a Tory one) was giving gays and single people council flats in tower blocks in order to get families with young children out of them.

Now, due to Thatcher’s policy of selling off council homes which has continued ever since, and due to councils not building many more to replace those sold off, council homes are like gold dust. In my block the only people who seem to get them are single mothers from the ethnic communities. Gay men don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting one.

So the reality is in today’s society many people are forced to buy homes they can’t really afford to maintain and pay off the mortgage, and also forced to learn to drive and acquire at least one motor vehicle because public transport in rural/suburban areas is non-existant or extremely infrequent and inadequate.

Also there’s the social stigma of not owning your own home and a car. You seem to be regarded by many as an outcast from decent society, or as a second-class citizen. The fact that you may be perfectly happy living in social housing and using public transport does not seem to be recognized by a lot of people. Status symbols are everything in our materialist society it seems. A wife or husband and children included. Oh, and in rural/suburban areas church-going also helps.

A friend of my mother’s who was single all her life did at least own her own home, but was ostracized by her village even in her old age because she was an atheist and so didn’t go to church.