Aurora Citizen

Council Watch #18 – by Richard Johnson

I had to share a posting from tvo’s website. It sure does make you think… where do we draw the line and who should decide ?

Salman Rushdie: When censorship is mislabelled respect

Posted on: 25 November 2010 by Allison Buchan-Terrell

In the fourth chapter of Salman Rushdie’s new book Luka and the Fire of Life, Luka – the main character, a young man on a quest to save his father from eternal sleep by bringing the fire of life back from the World of Magic – comes across “a strange, sad land.”

And our hero is greeted by a rather ominous sign on the O-Fence (a large barbed wire barrier) that surrounds this land, “YOU ARE AT THE FRONTIER OF THE RESPECTORATE OF I. MIND YOUR MANNERS.” It is home to very thin-skinned rats who “take Offense very sharply indeed.”

It is here in this children’s novel that adult themes emerge. Perhaps because Rushdie hopes his works, like the Harry Potter series, will appeal to adults as well. In his first children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories — written for his eldest son Zalaf immediately after Rusdhie went into hiding after the fatwa – Haroun struggles against forces within the world of magic determined to silence storytelling, which is very clearly connected to Rushdie’s real-life battle to speak freely.

In Luka and the Fire of Life, and particularly in the passage on the Respectorate of I, takes on what he sees as a grave threat to free speech: political correctness and censorship under the moniker of respect. A bit of pet topic for Rushdie.

In a BBC interview about this chapter, Rushdie said:

I think we live in a very timid age and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And, as a result, there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. You know, I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? Nobody, or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think this whole business of defining yourself by anger is very problematic and the idea that we all sort of bend over backwards not to induce that anger also becomes a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don’t like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, you know, but to say “You know, I don’t like that much,” and get on with the next business.

Rushdie is particularly concerned about a new climate of censorship emerging where people are afraid to name things and call them what they are. Something he feels is happening not just in Muslim countries, but in the secular West as well.

He sees it in a bill put forward by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and in the furor over the Danish cartoons and Random House’s (his own publisher’s) decision to cancel The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha, over fear of Islamic reprisals.

In 2005, Blair put forward a controversial bill that sought to combat racial and religious hatred. He argued the new law was necessary in the post-9/11 world where Muslims, as a group, have been the target of racial attacks.

But Rushdie, and a rather unlikely counterpart – Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, helped defeat it by one vote (as Rushdie points out, Blair went home early that day and missed the vote).

Rushdie recounts how Atkinson asked, quite politely, whether a sketch that aired on his program would be considered a hate crime under the new law. The sketch includes stock footage of Muslims praying at an Iranian mosque with Atkinson saying in a voiceover, “And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contact lens.”

They were defending the right to shock, outrage and offend, which they feel is a fundamental part of the right to free speech and a legitimate form of creative expression.

Also in this spirit, Rushdie signed on to a manifesto in support of the infamous Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. He, and a dozen co-signers, argued that the violent response to the cartoons signaled a new tyranny hiding in the cloak of religion and that it should be called by its true name.

The question Rushdie wants us to consider is: how do we respond to intimidation? We must be careful he says not to confuse not printing or publishing something out of fear of protest and violence with respect. The problem with giving in to intimidation, he says, is that there will be more intimidation in the future.

In a democracy, he says, there is no absolute view of right and wrong. We argue about it all the time. At one time, we believed slavery was acceptable and later, as the argument developed (and included some bloodshed), we decided slavery is wrong. The argument, Rushdie says, is freedom. The argument is the end — not winning.

Are you concerned, like Rushdie, about a growing climate of censorship? If so, what can be done to stop it? Do you agree argument is at the heart of democracy?