A few days ago I was reading another Blog that was taking about censorship in the UK. This was written off the back of recent stories about Sikhs closing down a play, the Prince Harry uniform thing and last week's broadcast of 'Jerry Springer - The Opera' on BBC2.
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Very understandably and laudably, the Blog makes the point that these are examples of censorship by minority groups and that the right to free speech must be defended. On a larger scale, the news media took a similar line with these stories and held them up as examples of attacks on our otherwise noble tradition of freedom of thought.
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B*llocks.
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There's no such thing as free speech in this or any other country. There never was and what little expressive freedoms we did have are being eroded by the minute.
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Sure, it's not right for minority groups to attack free speech but there is also widespread censorship through exclusion and bias as well. The people producing plays / documentaries / news stories are absolutely not representative of the general population and their concerns or beliefs at all. These people are also mindful of the requirements of their paymasters - be they politicians or conglomerate owners.
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Stories like the recent ones about Jerry Springer et al. are ramped up in the media to give Joe Public the impression that censorship is the exception rather than the rule and also to misguide us all as to where the true censors of our thoughts lie. Freedom of speech is 100% useless if it is only directed towards useless things and, by and large, that's pretty much what is happening.
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I have several personal favourite areas of exclusion. First off there's the whole Iraq thing, symptomatic of the way our political thoughts are controlled. Here's a site filled with hundreds of pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis that never made it into the Western media
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You might think that these have been kept from us for reasons of decency and respect. You'd be wrong. That didn't seem to get in the way when that Russian school was blown up last year.
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Another personal pet peeve is the entire 9/11 thing. 9/11 has been used to justify wars and monstrous erosions of civil liberties. A globla police state is one stop nearer. The problem is that the 9/11 story, as told, just isn’t right. No-one in the media has taken up the glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of what happened and this task has been left to the tinfoil underpants brigade on the Internet, with all the flaws that go with that
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.A final example. A recurring theme of mine is the growth of science as a new religion and the moral despair in the West that has gone with it. Science is always portrayed as being all-knowing and religion as all-loony. A recent example was the widely reported discovery of a new human ancestor a few months ago, dubbed 'Hobbit Man' so that us stupid people would take an interest. What wasn't so widely reported was a follow-up story a couple of months later about recent research that shows that ALL supposed human fossil ancestors lay within the range of accepted physical human variation; Neanderthals, 'Lucy', Java Man and Hobbit Man, all just as human as Eskimos and pygmies. When the Hobbit Man story broke, the Sunday supplements were full of flatulent articles criticising religious belief. When the follow-up story appeared there was nothing, nada.
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Of course, media figures would argue that they have a responsibility to filter-out stories that are inaccurate, hateful, irrelevant or insane. But who decides? Who put them in charge? I certainly didn’t vote for them. Occasionally, we will be treated to a news item or documentary that apparently challenges some of the lies we are told. The usual deal is to present the 'anti' case in a skewed way; either by vicious editing of footage if the advocate is too strong or selecting an incompetent loony to make the case in the first place. Sometimes the production teams are really blatant and light up their interviewees with harsh, Vincent Price style lighting, placed somewhere just beneath their victim's chin. This kind of behaviour occurs with depressing regularity.
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Arts and drama are no freer from bias than 'hard news'. How far would I get televising a drama that say featured:
- The life and times of a super-rich media tycoon, manipulating people on a national scale with a daily diet of fear and porn.
. - A risqué play about the hypocrisy of supposedly compassionate media executives and celebrities lecturing the World about how it should behave, whilst themselves living a cocooned lifestyle of privilege and obscene conspicuous consumption.
. - A senior politician calmly sacrificing the lives of a few thousand citizens in order to pursue an agenda of self-glorification.
. - A central character driven to despair and anti-depressants by a pointless working life, living in an empty, consumerist world and a daily diet of soul-destroying mindshit in the media. The last lonely act of his life played out in an old people's home modelled on Belsen; his kids waiting impatiently for him to die so they can get on with tossing his cremated remains onto a flower bed and selling his house to pay for a new car and family holiday to Disneyland.
(As an aside there has been some talk of enacting pro-euthanasia legislation in the UK recently. Funnily enough the last time right to die laws crept to the top of the headlines was at the end of the last property boom. Trying to grow old in a time of rapidly rising house prices really can be a pisser)
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And finally, on top of all the manipulation and censorship that is performed on us we, as individuals, administer the final coup de grace to any possibility of free thinking by suppressing those trickles of free speech that somehow manage to reach us.
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We censor ourselves.
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That's the beauty of thought control. After a few years of indoctrination we do all the hard work for our politicians and multinationals anyway. Like McDonalds subsidising Happy Meals and kiddies playgrounds, if you catch people early enough they're yours for life.
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Human beings really hate bad news and will go to great lengths to filter it out from their lives. We choose newspapers that match our political views, we select non challenging books and television and dismiss those we disagree with as being insane or misguided.
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When was the last time you, or any other human being, voluntarily bought a newspaper or book or consumed any other kind of media that they knew would fundamentally contradict their beliefs about how the World works?
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Don’t be silly.
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And then there's the issue of attention spans. Life is far too exciting and packed with reality TV and visits to IKEA to spend any longer than 30 seconds contemplating any single issue. There's just so much great stuff to do and see.
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Yup, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and people get the style of government they deserve. We're not particularly vigilant and we don’t deserve very much. So, it looks like those two old adages have stood up pretty well to the test of time.
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2 comments:
I wasn't aware that IKEA had infected Europe (outside Sweden) with its uber-trendy crap like it has down in the States
Oh yes
In fact, IKEA's most popular store is here in Brent Cross, London.
I have never bought any furniture from IKEA, partly because I don't own a car but mostly because I hate crowds and don't like being treated like a herd animal.
What impresses me about IKEA is the fact that it somehow has avoided being considered as an evil, globalised multinational. This is strange because it is. It also operates with a weird, cult-like management style.
If IKEA were an American company I've no doubt that everyone would hate it and that's pure hypocrisy. Companies like IKEA are bad news wherever their major stock holders come from.
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