In a comment to my earlier post about DIY censorship, JuliaM from Ambush Predator refers, via Unenlightened Commentary, to this story about a museum forced to censor an information sign about Darwin following a complaint from a single religious fundamentalist.
Once again, a single complaint provokes apparently automatic, unchallenged submission to the extremist’s demands.
Apparently. It is becoming clear that certain complaints will always be thus acted upon while others, even if expressed by a multitude, will be ignored.
‘Christian’ fundamentalists are definitely members of the privileged group which can expect to order censorship, denial of the freedoms of others and interference in educational processes on the basis of a single, unsupported and unverified complaint.
Who else gets this privilege? What pattern might emerge?
Everyone’s familiar with the common phenomenon of craven submission to every supposed sensitivity of Muslims, including those that are made up.
And everyone is so terrified of being compared to Hitler that nobody dares attempt to deny the extreme Jewish lobby the legal measures they demand to protect themselves from mere contradiction.
So all three of the major authoritarian, patriarchal religions can expect their vociferous and sometimes vicious extremists to be appeased at every turn. Is this, then, a religious thing? Are we so afraid of offending someone’s religious sensibilities that we make ourselves absurd?
No. Hindus, who consider cows to be sacred, did not manage to persuade the agricultural authorities to spare the life of a bullock with TB, despite his divinity.
Nor, in another museum case, did the neopagan group Honouring the Ancient Dead ever succeed in persuading the Avebury Keiller Museum to refrain from displaying as ordinary exhibits certain ancient human remains.
So it’s not a religion thing.
Who else gets their complaints acted on? The Saudis. The fact that they are Muslims is probably transcended in this context by the fact that they own so much of the oil.
And of course certain people with skins rich in melanin (there used to be a perfectly good ethnological term for them, but one isn’t allowed to use it any more), to whom I am apparently expected continuously to ‘apologise’, despite the fact that I don’t remember ever having owned a slave [after Kenobi].
What distinguishes these people? Clout. Nobody wants their oil cut off, and nobody wants race-riots in their capital city.
Does ‘clout’ apply to the three named religions? It does. ‘Christian’ fundamentalists regularly express themselves with rifles; Islamic nutcases of various flavours regularly make themselves offensive in various ways, and Jewish extremists succeeded in obtaining for themselves an entire country, which, with some style, they defend against all comers, and they maintain, by means which are not entirely clear, a decisive influence on US foreign policy.
So how does the principle of ‘clout’ apply to the removal of a sculpture from a roundabout on the basis of a single complaint from an inattentive motorist?
Fear.
The ‘compensation culture’ demands and receives huge payments in respect of the most trivial damages, usually on the basis of psychobabble. The employees of local authorities, mindful of their secure, well-paid jobs and possibly still credible pensions, are always likely to err on the side of caution whenever there is the slightest possibility of anything happening which might attract financial losses or bad publicity to their employer. Much the same applies to corporations, which will infallibly produce a sacrificial victim from among the cubicle folk if anything ever goes badly wrong with management policy.
Can this be checked with reference to the religions? It can. They can all instil fear in timorous, disempowered little apparatchiks, who will take precipitate action on their own authority rather than have anything go to the boss. Nobody wants to take the risk of being identified in the press as the council official (or whatever) whose insensitive, cack-handed incompetence resulted in offence being caused to the noisy and sometimes dangerous devout.
This suggests that if we were to apply one of the principle of jujitsu, said to be ‘turning the enemy’s strength against him’, we would have to make it seem as though the premeditated and malicious complaints which we were making against selected targets (I gather, for example, that a very ugly man called Miliband, who is something to do with the government, runs a blog, which should obviously be behind one of those ‘offensive content’ pages) originate from one of the following sources:
1. Fundamentalists of one of the three named religions
2. Influential foreign powers
3. People of African ethnicities
4. Enthusiastic litigants
5. Fashionable causes with guaranteed media access
I could probably get away with impersonating a ‘Christian’. I don’t know enough about the Q’ran to try it as a Muslim, and I don’t suppose I was ever clever enough to pass myself off as Jewish. As a skin-cancered Celt I’d make a most implausible Saudi and an even less convincing West African. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a celebrity (though I was once mistaken for one in Kew Gardens, and asked for my autograph).
On the other hand, as the son of a lawyer I’m probably quite well placed to give the impression that at the drop of the proverbial hat my vast and terrifying legal team will swing into action, extracting from the villein every last groat of his employer’s budget together with the entire contents of his own pension scheme, personal account and piggy-bank*, settling in respect of costs for several dozen pounds of flesh.
This could be fun but I suspect that it would be more fun for longer if done with one of those telephones which one can buy in the supermarket.
The tactical effect of this measure could be expected to be harrassment of the enemy and that peculiar modern kind of satisfaction which has a strong flavour of schadenfreude and which our younger American cousins call lulz (‘the essence which can be derived from an epic win’). The strategic effect might be a revision of the official tendency to act upon a single complaint, from certain groups, without hesitation.
* I continue to use this word despite having been told quite recently that it is offensive to Muslims, the truth of which, frankly, I doubt.
