Censorship
The exams are finally over, so, lo and behold, another blog!
'Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, for ever.'
-Nadine Gordimer, 'Censorship And Its Aftermath’, 1990
If you want to know what defines an era, look no further than the authors, artists and activists who fell foul if it. Their works will show you what the people of the time could not deal with. Censorship is as old as civilisation itself - and the drive to suppress as strong today as ever. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that assassination is the ultimate form of censorship, and recent events seem to be bearing that out. On January 19th of this year the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink died at an ultra-nationalist assassin's hands. His murder was a subsequence of the high profile and vehement campaign to vilify and prosecute those who had the courage to publicly and candidly debate the Ottoman massacres of 1915, in which a million or more Armenians died. Dink was in high level company, Turkey's Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had criminal charges brought against him after discussing the same issue.
Just three months earlier, the author and journalist Anna Politkovskaya paid the same price; her public assassination came following her detailed and persistent research into the underside of Putin’s regime. Her dedication to the truth causes her to be shot in the lift of her Moscow apartment. When Alexander Litvinenko was publicly and grotesquely killed in London last November, it was stated by his Russian enemies that his chief offence 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.
Following such events, the British media and politicians became increasingly smug in their moral superiority. Freedom of expression was praised, and the suppression of thoughts and ideas was publicly denounced. However, censorship has been becoming increasingly more common in the UK as well. Last year, 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 entertainers - reined in an ill-drafted catch-all law against the incitement to so-called "religious hatred". However, the same government that devised that measure refused to act when several existing laws were broken when a hooligan gang claiming to act for the Sikh community forcibly shut down the Birmingham Rep's production of Behzti (Dishonour) by the young British writer Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. "No one from the Home Office was prepared to defend the playwright," noted the National Theatre's director Nicholas Hytner, "even after she was threatened."
It has been seventeen years since books were burned on the streets of Britain; the last was Rushdie's Satanic Verses. However, British publishers took stood firm against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa and issued a joint paperback edition of the Satanic Verses to display solidarity with Salman Rushdie. This would be unlikely to happen today. The press in the UK has subjected itself to a particularly rigorous form of self-censorship. During the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, not one British publication, channel or station published or displayed the cartoons. It was a legitimate news story but the press refused to publish them and by doing so did not allow the public the freedom to make up their own minds concerning the cartoons. Every journalist had seen them; they were freely available over the web and had been published by media across the free world. In the UK they were too scared of the reaction that might follow to exercise their freedom to publish anything, controversial or otherwise. It can be argued that they have the right to refuse to publish something they don’t feel is newsworthy, but that argument could not have been successfully used to defend them. It was the most high profile case regarding the right to freedom of expression in recent years yet the press censored the publication. Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Currie in 1786 'Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.’ When the press gives away its freedom, what can follow?
The right to freedom of expression is as important today as it has ever been, not just in Britain, but across the entire world. When university students in Beijing were shown a video of the Tiananmen Square demonstration, they were amazed. They had never heard of or seen it before. The lone student attempting to stop tanks was one of the defining images of the twentieth century, yet it had been so well censored that well educated students had never seen it. It is incredible that in one of the most rapidly growing countries in the world, in a country proud of its educational systems, students have been prevented from seeing the power of a single person.
In the US, books are being taken out of schools. In a study conducted by the American Library Association, 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the focus of ban attempts. Also in the US, the Harry Potter series have been publicly burnt and reviled. According to author Berit Kjos, ‘The biblical God doesn't fit into Potter's world of wizards, witches, and other gods. The Harry Potter series teaches an Earth-centered spirituality, the same religion as what the witch religions teach in the San Francisco area,’ she said. ‘It is a religion that is very real and is spreading throughout the country. It makes me very uncomfortable when [children] are immersed in topics that make witchcraft very exciting. It can be very confusing for them.’ Is it just me who thinks this is maybe just slightly ridiculous? I simply do not believe that children are this susceptible. In many western countries it is also a crime to claim that the holocaust did not happen. This is patently ridiculous. The holocaust was a tragic and evil slaughtering of millions of people, it is through seeing what lengths people will go to in order to deny the truth, that we can ensure something as heinous does not happen again. Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 to the Institute of France, 'If a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.' I cannot help but believe this is the case. As the next generation of press, politicians, artists and workers, we should be defending the right for all to speak, write and draw anything without the fear of censorship.
'The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.’
- John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, 1859
'Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, for ever.'
-Nadine Gordimer, 'Censorship And Its Aftermath’, 1990
If you want to know what defines an era, look no further than the authors, artists and activists who fell foul if it. Their works will show you what the people of the time could not deal with. Censorship is as old as civilisation itself - and the drive to suppress as strong today as ever. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that assassination is the ultimate form of censorship, and recent events seem to be bearing that out. On January 19th of this year the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink died at an ultra-nationalist assassin's hands. His murder was a subsequence of the high profile and vehement campaign to vilify and prosecute those who had the courage to publicly and candidly debate the Ottoman massacres of 1915, in which a million or more Armenians died. Dink was in high level company, Turkey's Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had criminal charges brought against him after discussing the same issue.
Just three months earlier, the author and journalist Anna Politkovskaya paid the same price; her public assassination came following her detailed and persistent research into the underside of Putin’s regime. Her dedication to the truth causes her to be shot in the lift of her Moscow apartment. When Alexander Litvinenko was publicly and grotesquely killed in London last November, it was stated by his Russian enemies that his chief offence 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.
Following such events, the British media and politicians became increasingly smug in their moral superiority. Freedom of expression was praised, and the suppression of thoughts and ideas was publicly denounced. However, censorship has been becoming increasingly more common in the UK as well. Last year, 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 entertainers - reined in an ill-drafted catch-all law against the incitement to so-called "religious hatred". However, the same government that devised that measure refused to act when several existing laws were broken when a hooligan gang claiming to act for the Sikh community forcibly shut down the Birmingham Rep's production of Behzti (Dishonour) by the young British writer Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. "No one from the Home Office was prepared to defend the playwright," noted the National Theatre's director Nicholas Hytner, "even after she was threatened."
It has been seventeen years since books were burned on the streets of Britain; the last was Rushdie's Satanic Verses. However, British publishers took stood firm against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa and issued a joint paperback edition of the Satanic Verses to display solidarity with Salman Rushdie. This would be unlikely to happen today. The press in the UK has subjected itself to a particularly rigorous form of self-censorship. During the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, not one British publication, channel or station published or displayed the cartoons. It was a legitimate news story but the press refused to publish them and by doing so did not allow the public the freedom to make up their own minds concerning the cartoons. Every journalist had seen them; they were freely available over the web and had been published by media across the free world. In the UK they were too scared of the reaction that might follow to exercise their freedom to publish anything, controversial or otherwise. It can be argued that they have the right to refuse to publish something they don’t feel is newsworthy, but that argument could not have been successfully used to defend them. It was the most high profile case regarding the right to freedom of expression in recent years yet the press censored the publication. Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Currie in 1786 'Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.’ When the press gives away its freedom, what can follow?
The right to freedom of expression is as important today as it has ever been, not just in Britain, but across the entire world. When university students in Beijing were shown a video of the Tiananmen Square demonstration, they were amazed. They had never heard of or seen it before. The lone student attempting to stop tanks was one of the defining images of the twentieth century, yet it had been so well censored that well educated students had never seen it. It is incredible that in one of the most rapidly growing countries in the world, in a country proud of its educational systems, students have been prevented from seeing the power of a single person.
In the US, books are being taken out of schools. In a study conducted by the American Library Association, 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the focus of ban attempts. Also in the US, the Harry Potter series have been publicly burnt and reviled. According to author Berit Kjos, ‘The biblical God doesn't fit into Potter's world of wizards, witches, and other gods. The Harry Potter series teaches an Earth-centered spirituality, the same religion as what the witch religions teach in the San Francisco area,’ she said. ‘It is a religion that is very real and is spreading throughout the country. It makes me very uncomfortable when [children] are immersed in topics that make witchcraft very exciting. It can be very confusing for them.’ Is it just me who thinks this is maybe just slightly ridiculous? I simply do not believe that children are this susceptible. In many western countries it is also a crime to claim that the holocaust did not happen. This is patently ridiculous. The holocaust was a tragic and evil slaughtering of millions of people, it is through seeing what lengths people will go to in order to deny the truth, that we can ensure something as heinous does not happen again. Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 to the Institute of France, 'If a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.' I cannot help but believe this is the case. As the next generation of press, politicians, artists and workers, we should be defending the right for all to speak, write and draw anything without the fear of censorship.
'The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.’
- John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, 1859
Labels: book burning, censorship, journalists, press, UK
posted by The Young Contrarian at 7:50 pm
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