DEMOCRATIC CHESS
Plain refusal of Yasser Seirawan to publish Valery Salov's 3rd letter on his website www.insidechess.com ,as well as Yasser's deceitful commentary to the correspondence maintained by the two GMs, was followed by a new exchange of letters that clarified the underlying reasons of his anti-democratic procedures.
July 24, 2000
Dear Valery,
Apologies for the lengthy delay in responding to your letter. Not to bore you with the
details but I was overly busy working on the US Championships. On Saturday night, there
was a volunteer dinner for over 35 persons and their coordination let me exhausted.
I've just read your answer which I find to be wildly inappropriate for our site. Truly you
have personalized our exchanges out of all proportion. Wiping the feces of my face?
Really, Valery you are way out of line. We will not publish your letter and I welcome you
to publish it as you see fit on your own site.
I do not understand your fervent support of FIDE's leaders of today as I find their
policies to be atrocious.
In closing, a friendly word of advice, not everyone who disagrees with you is an enemy, a
calm reasoning voice will aid you greatly in defending your point of view.
Kind Wishes,
Yasser
Dear Yasser,
In your letter from July 24, you wrote:
>I've just read your answer which I find to be wildly inappropriate for our site.<
Let me remind you that your own letter to FIDE was wildly inappropriate for publication
due to its coarsely insulting language and yet you had no scruples to publish it.
It's not only my opinion; Tony Miles, of other people, maintains the same view:
"In the course of a couple of pages he manages to describe FIDE, its policies, and
officers, as impotent, a laughing stock, serial incompetence, clownish, tawdry,
hare-brained, out of touch, ridiculous, knuckle-headed, horrendous, incapable, isolated
from reality, disastrous and disorganized!!
One gets the feeling that he opened the thesaurus at the relevant page and finished the
letter when he ran out of abusive terms."
It is written about you, Yasser! And you dare to talk about moderation and propriety? Your
motto seems to be: "My own abuse is fine as such; when they scold me, it's far too
much!".
>Truly you have personalized our exchanges out of all proportion<
As Plato said: "It's not licit to be offended by the truth." If you behave as a
brown-noser you should be prepared for some healthy criticism from your best friends.
> We will not publish your letter and I welcome you to publish it as you see fit on
your own site. <
This only characterizes you as a belligerent and intolerant person, a vehement adversary
of democracy, a sworn enemy to freedom of expression, glasnost, "open and honest
debate", peaceful coexistence, etc., as someone always "ready to slay any
thoughts of dissension". In other words, a typical egotist displaying utter contempt
towards the lives, interests and opinions of his colleague-chessplayers.
>I do not understand your fervent support of FIDE's leaders of today<
I beg your pardon, Yasser, but it's not the only thing that you don't understand. In my
last letter i had delicately pointed out to some of your major blunders. However, having
run short of arguments and got totally confused by your own inconsistence and lack of
objectivity, you have preferred to abruptly stop our open debate by having treacherously
shut me up.
>In closing, a friendly word of advice, not everyone who disagrees with you is an
enemy, a calm reasoning voice will aid you greatly in defending your point of view.<
Sounds familiar to me, where does it come from? Perhaps, Ecclesiastes, 9:17:
"Words of the wise, spoken quietly, should be heard rather than the shout of a ruler
of fools."
How nice of you to have finally come to preaching this simple maxim! Only a week ago you
were sermoning on your website in "a calm reasoning voice", "barely able to
contain your rage": "...my point was to really throw the rascals (!!) out of
office. It was a call to arms."
What a wondrous change! Maybe the time has come for you to move to the next clause:
"Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroys much good."
(Eccles., 9:18)
or the next one:
"Dead flies putrefy the perfumer's ointment, and cause it to give off a foul odor; so
does a little folly to one respected for wisdom and honor." (Eccles., 10:1)
Warm regards, Valery Salov
Madrid, July 25, 2000
PS: How about showing some signs of remorse and apologizing before your readers for having
so crassly brainwashed them?
July 26, 2000
Dear Valery,
We obviously disagree about the rules for an open and honest debate. I tried to establish
them with a regard to civility which you rejected. You preferred curses instead.
You state that Tony Miles describes my open letter thusly:
..."FIDE, its policies, and officers, as impotent, a laughing stock, serial
incompetence, clownish, tawdry, hare-brained, out of touch, ridiculous, knuckle-headed,
horrendous, incapable, isolated from reality, disastrous and disorganized!!..."
That was Tony's view. I didn't use those words. He did.
Instead of calling me "ridiculous" yourself, you answer by describing the smear
of feces in my face?
I'm certain that after you publish your letter on your site, you will not enjoy the
messages you receive for your foul writing. It is decidedly unwarranted.
Cheers,
Yasser<
July 27, 2000
Dear Yasser,
You are not original at all when you make the following remark:
>We obviously disagree about the rules for an open and honest debate. I tried to
establish them with a regard to civility which you rejected.<
All advocates of totalitarianism and apologists of the Gag Rules say exactly the same.
They never admit: "We are anti-democrats, we'll never acknowledge your rights to free
expression, your freedom to disapprove." Oh, no! Instead they always follow the same
patterns of hypocrisy and treacherously accuse thier critics of 'violating the rules',
being uncivil, incorrect, unbecoming, etc.
And at the same time they are always the first ones to break the laws of decency by
inveighing against their opponents and riding roughshod over their rights.
In my previous message to you I had mentioned an excerpt from the letter of Tony Miles:
>"In the course of a couple of pages he [Yasser Seirawan - VS] manages to describe
FIDE, its policies, and officers, as impotent, a laughing stock, serial incompetence,
clownish, tawdry, hare-brained, out of touch, ridiculous, knuckle-headed, horrendous,
incapable, isolated from reality, disastrous and disorganized!!
One gets the feeling that he opened the thesaurus at the relevant page and finished the
letter when he ran out of abusive terms."
You have reacted to it by having cut off the top line and by a flat denial of your own
words:
>That was Tony's view. I didn't use those words. He did.<
What kind of perverse pleasure do you find in such a manifest perjury? Not only you did
use every one of these words in your open letter to FIDE (some of them even twice) but in
fact Tony had omitted a great portion of your invective.
By these self-evident lies you hit an entirely new low in your evolution as a journalist:
before you were only trying to misrepresent facts and pile curses against FIDE having been
pragmatically aware of the fact that your tragically ill-informed readers had no chance of
checking the correctness of your statements. This time you have reached far beyond
coprophilically hoodwinking them: you simply spit cynically and contemptuously right at
their trustful and innocent faces.
It's extremely painful for me to witness such unwarrantable moral bankruptcy of one of my
old pals. Should I follow your advice and call you a knuckle-headed, mendacious rascal,
using your own words? Don't push me, I can't pull myself together to borrow your
vocabulary, Yasser!
I remain your faithful friend and it's my duty to remind you once again that the time of
Selihoth with its prayers and repentance has come for you!
With warm solicitous regards, GM Valery Salov<<