Burn, Baby, Burn
Oliver Kamm writing in The Times recalls an anecdote about the Labour MP, Bernie Grant, who is recorded in Tony Benn's diaries as being less than 'worked up' about all the book burning in Iran which followed after the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
Now I agree with Olivier Kamm that people being offended by something is not a reason to support censorship or, worse still, the issuing of a religious 'fatwa' calling on Muslims to murder a fellow human being whose only 'crime' was to write a book about Islam.
Likewise with the 'rent a mob' protest which, ironically, forced the cancellation of an anti-racist exhibition in London recently although the people doing the protesting decided, somewhat arrogantly, that they knew best and succeeded sadly in shutting things down.
Not everyone will know this, by the way, but Bernie Grant was a NUPE official for a while before he became a Labour MP, and he was not much good in that role either, as I recall.
Burn, baby, burn
The banning of art is topical again. After disorderly demonstrations by “anti-racist” protesters, the Barbican last week cancelled an exhibition about colonial attitudes towards race. I could have predicted that the Barbican’s patient explanation that the event was itself hostile to racism would have no effect on the demonstrators, who complained that they were “deeply offended”.
Being offended has become a common justification for censorship and it’s time it was accorded the disrespect it deserves. This feeble complaint came to prominence with the protests against Salman Rushdie 25 years ago for his novel The Satanic Verses, which satirises Islam. There’s a passage in Tony Benn’s diaries for that period recounting the position of one Labour MP: “Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.”
Grant is dead but his pernicious reasoning lives on, and last week it claimed an unmeritorious victory.
