Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Censorship still a burning issue in the 2000s

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Censorship still a burning issue in the 2000s

    The Sunday Independent (South Africa)
    January 04, 2009
    e1 Edition


    Censorship still a burning issue in the 2000s

    by Boyd Tonkin


    George Bernard Shaw once wrote that assassination is the ultimate form
    of censorship. That hardly counted as a joke 100 years ago. Now, it
    sounds like no more than a footnote to today's headlines.

    In January 2007, Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor, died at an
    ultra-nationalist assassin's hands. His murder came after a sustained,
    high-level campaign to vilify and prosecute those writers - such as
    Dink, or Turkey's Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk - who dared to debate the
    Ottoman massacres of a million or more Armenians in 1915.

    Just three months earlier, the author and journalist Anna
    Politkovskaya paid the same price, shot in the lift of her Moscow
    apartment block after her dogged and fearless research into the
    underside of Vladimir Putin's regime had made her one ruthless foe too
    many. As for the grotesque public killing, so far unsolved, of
    Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006,remember that the
    former KGB agent's chief offence, in the eyes of his Russian enemies,
    was to publish a book that denounced the alleged terror tactics of his
    ex-employers in provoking the second Chechen war.

    That book, Blowing Up Russia, was promptly and permanently banned in
    his native land.

    In Britain, freedom of expression hardly looks in better shape. In
    2006, only a concerted campaign by what one minister once sneeringly
    called "the comics' lobby" - in fact, a very broad coalition of
    writers, artists, lawyers, parliamentarians and (yes) entertainers -
    reined in an ill-drafted catch-all law against the incitement to
    so-called "religious hatred".

    Two decades ago, British publishers stood firm against the Ayatollah
    Khomeini's fatwa and issued a joint paperback edition of The Satanic
    Verses in solidarity with Salman Rushdie. Would the same collective
    support take shape now? Much of the media has decided to indulge in
    "responsible" self-censorship that often feels not too far from
    cowardice. No British publication, channel or station (save for a few
    rapidly squashed student magazines) allowed its readers or viewers to
    make up their own minds about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

    In many cultures, free expression remains a matter of life and
    death. From Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to Hubert Selby's Last Exit to
    Brooklyn, from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to William Burroughs'
    The Naked Lunch, a list of unbanned books includes landmark works that
    still have the power to disturb and to confront that led to their
    initial battles with authority.

    Recall (just for starters) that Nabokov's "nymphet" is not around 14,
    as many people think, when she catches the predatory eye of Humbert
    Humbert. In fact, she is 12. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
    satirises the currents in modern society that give rise to the random
    violence of disaffected youngsters. At the time, some read his
    critique as an endorsement of thugs. Many might still do so today.

    Champions of patriotic warfare will still be affronted by Erich Maria
    Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Haters of political spin
    and guile will be appalled by Machiavelli's The Prince. Believers in
    the spotless innocence of youth will be disgusted by Edmund White's A
    Boy's Own Story. Partisans of Castro's just and equal Cuba will be
    outraged by Reinaldo Arenas's Singing from the Well. Islamic
    patriarchs will be repelled by Taslima Nasrin's Shame. Feminist
    puritans will be distressed by DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover -
    and so, explosively, on.

    "Literature", as the poet Ezra Pound put it (and his own flaky Fascist
    tendencies have expelled his work from many college courses), "is news
    that stays news".

    Some readers may indulge in a little superior scorn when they consider
    the bourgeois prudery that sought to suppress Madame Bovary's
    adulterous passion, or the apartheid-era racism that tried to crush
    the compassion and solidarity of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved
    Country. But we all approve of censorship in one form or
    another. Modern politicians in fragile multicultural societies seek
    control over material that "offends" organised blocs of voters. Many
    feel glad that British laws passed over recent decades forbid
    inflammatory racist speech, writing and images.

    Those for whom Holocaust denial represents a uniquely vile assault on
    truth welcomed the legal shaming of David Irving - though not, to be
    fair, his 2006 jailing in a hypocritical Austria.

    Even the bravest standard-bearers of liberty had their blind spots
    when it came to censorship. John Milton's 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica
    remains the most forceful English blast in favour of the unsupervised
    freedom to publish.

    It claims that killing a book is as bad as killing a man, for "who
    kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who
    destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as
    it were, in the eye". Note Milton's qualification, "good": the first
    in a long line of provisos with which free-speech champions sought to
    head off the menace of proscription by an appeal to moral or artistic
    merit.

    Fast-forward to 1960: the successful arguments of Penguin Books in the
    Lady Chatterley trial still turned on the "literary value" defence
    allowed by the Obscene Publications Act.

    Milton also had a sticking point: Roman Catholicism. Catholic
    propaganda, he thought, exempted itself from the protection that the
    state ought to offer authorship because it amounted to treason: a
    deep-rooted attack on the values of the nation and its culture. So,
    too, for many liberals now. The fascist or the racist puts himself
    outside the free-speech pale, and so deserves ostracism or punishment.

    American mainstream thinkers said the same of communists in the
    McCarthy era. Now, a young Islamist radical who holds up a scrawled
    banner calling for the beheading of some infidel may face a charge of
    incitement to murder.

    Only in one disputed territory - the depiction in print of sexual acts
    - does the early 21st century in the West seem significantly more
    permissive an age than those preceding it. Even here, anomalies and
    arguments abound.

    Christian campaigners, not long ago, tried to enforce the removal of
    mass-market British editions of books by the Marquis de
    Sade. Authoritarian societies - from the Rome of Augustus to the Cuba
    of Castro - have often bothered much less about escapist erotica than
    about literary challenges to the power of the state and the person of
    its leaders. George Orwell knew his history when he filled the
    "Airstrip One" of Nineteen Eighty-Four with cheap gin and cheap porn
    to pacify the proles. Trend-setters of the 1960s liked to believe in
    the "subversive" power of sexuality on page, screen or stage. A
    century earlier, they would have had a point: witness the scandal of
    Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, and, indeed, the prosecution of Madame
    Bovary. In the interwar years, British law still proudly made an ass
    of itself by putting works such as Radclyffe Hall's tortured lesbian
    romance, The Well of Loneliness, in the dock.

    After the Lady Chatterley trial, the floodgates formally opened - but
    the creative well dried up. Only among gay authors in the West did
    written sex hang on to its edge of danger and defiance - from Edmund
    White in the US and Reinaldo Arenas in Cuba to Jean Genet in France.

    Reading the great banned books of other times and other climes will
    hardly sort out the dilemmas and contradictions that recur in the
    history of public speech. It might, though, help us to understand that
    the sands of taboo and transgression, of heresy and blasphemy, are
    forever shifting. Within a generation, Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's
    The Rainbow moved from being proscribed to being prescribed.

    Other novels travel in the contrary direction. In 1900, Harriet
    Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery saga Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed to millions
    one of the noblest, most influential books since the Bible. By 2000,
    it had become a byword for patronising ignorance. Our shibboleths and
    scapegoats will no doubt look as bizarre to future critics.

    "Let there be light," say writers. In answer, the powers that be treat
    them not as the salt of the earth but as a law unto themselves, merely
    concerned with filthy lucre. All those phrases, as it happens, come
    from a much-censored author: from William Tyndale's magnificent
    English translations of the Old and New Testaments, which have left a
    deeper mark on everyday English speech than any other text. And what
    happened to Tyndale? The Catholic authorities, not content with
    burning his heretical work, burned him at the stake in Flanders in
    1536. In cultures where the written word is banned and burned - even
    forbidden versions of the Bible - then living men and women will often
    follow. Ask the grieving family and colleagues of Hrant Dink.
Working...
X