Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
Nat Hentoff was, of course, absolutely right when he said that censorship has become one of mankinds prime instincts. Tampering with the minds of other people has become as essential to the survival of the human species as self-preservation and all the rest of them. Censorship is a branch of the reproduction imperative, deeply stitched into our genetic codes.
Mankind long ago realised that in order to survive, its menfolk had to behave like all the other mammal studs, go out and prod something soft and yielding. No prodding, no babies. No babies, no need to get a regular job killing mammoths, jack up the caves central heating and so on. Result: everyone either starves or freezes to death. End of mankind.
The equation was indeed once that simple. But mankind has never been satisfied with something as unstudied and cordial as ramming his great throbbing dong up the nearest grateful spinster. Around the same time he decided he may as well ram his great throbbing prejudices up her as well.
So, censorship was born. Soon afterwards it underwent its first sinister mutation when it received the enthusiastic patronage of organised religion. Since then it has flourished and nowadays pervades our lives, be it in the guise of religious dogma or mixed marriage Acts or hit squads or detention without trial or clandestine truth commission hearings or book burnings or chainsaw feminism or you name it censorship is everywhere.
I dont have to explain further. What is interesting is to recognise how mankind has developed a new and decidedly furtive way in which to trespass into the minds of others. A truly insidious form of censorship and which is called Political Correctness.
This is not an original idea on my part. Late last year the eminent stage and film director, Sir Peter Hall, was raising money for a joint Channel 4/US production of a television series about the 18th century American slave trade called Sacred Hunger and based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Barry Unsworth. US financiers were approached but refused to back the project unless the script was drastically altered so that all slave traders were seen to have been white men. Black Americans, they said, would be offended if the truth about there having been black slave-barons was presented to them. Far more prudent to distort historical fact and respray all the ruthless plunderers white.
Hall told the Americans to go and piss up a rope. Channel 4 agreed with him. As far as I know, Peter Hall has been the first to stand up and say that he recognised this particularly odious example of PC for what it really was: an act of a new and obscene censorship. He described it aptly as as Puritanical Stalinism. There is no point to art unless it is allowed to open peoples minds to the way they live, particularly in a pagan society.
In South Africa the PC infection is especially rank, what with the dingy hosts of yesterdays fascists trying desperately to blend in with the new background. It goes much further than that. Political Correctness seeks to reduce everyone to an agglomerate of conformity. It is a whole new way to exterminate human individuality.
PCs intellectual terrain is cheerless, a bland desert where everyone is a person, where no one ever dares to offend anyone else, where we all think in exactly the same waxen codes and where, among the most culpable sins is the one where we laugh at each others silliness. If the South African PC brigade isnt stopped, we will become even more a nation of glutton idiots. Already casualties of an imposed cultural strategy which abolishes symphony orchestras in favour of sponsoring fuckwit- friendly radio stations like SAfm, where all the arts are under siege, where The Lost City is regarded as a national aesthetic triumph.
We need to stop the PC rot now.