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After two surly posts I really hesitated in writing, doubting whether my mind really held any conceivable answer to the problem, I'll now just shut up on guns, money and pornography and indulge in what I do best; a heinous rant of my own outrage over current dealing with freedom of speech and its perpetual war against the right that negates all other rights.
Which, putting it briefly, has seen a remarkably poor year in Swedish society, reaching a climax this autumn. First, to my great joy, manga artist and translator Simon Lundström was aquitted from all charges by the Supreme Court of Sweden in June for the possession of supposedly child-endangering images of half-humanoid infantile characters with saucery eyes and scant protection against the readers' eyes. I'm nearly there again, so I tactfully ask, with Cicero's famous question in mind; Cui Malo? To who's injury? Do not give the pretense to speak of my security, or that of my friends and family. A writer or artist has no credible responsibility for the feelings induced and, yes, misused by those indulging in their work. Remember Mark Chapman reading Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as he silently waited on the sidewalk for New York City police to pick him up? Or Anders Breivik, only a year ago, claiming (at least when it came out the other side through the headlines) that Lars von Trier's Dogville "may have" influenced the conception of his wicked scheme? Now, Salinger and von Trier may both be taken for loonies, but they have no greater moral complicity in these crimes than the parents of these men, and many others like them, for providing seed and womb to the very dawn of their existence. That is also causality - one act irreplacably preceding another - and it is by no means equated to culpability. If so, every person who ever met with a (future) mass murderer or assassin without breaking his (or her) skull and strangling him on the spot might be considered complicit. But then, again, it's easier to blame Salinger or von Trier. Or Simon Lundström, especially for crimes which, with exceptionally few restrictions, are the works of parents, of aunts and uncles, brothers and the friends or partners of the same. Weird Japanese comics and the queer people over here who indulge in such filth are quite more dispensable as a whole, are they not?
Now, a comic book series more familiar to the Swedish audience and thence perhaps more justly judged would be Tintin. My personal reflections of this is dubious. I do find the humoristic depictions of the USSR, Belgian Congo and, yes, the United States and their respective peoples of the first three albums to be quite ludicrous, though it is inescapable to much of the humor of the time and, frankly, the points that Hergé wanted to draw. Elections were, as we know, pointless and concocted ahead, and there was indeed a very effective network of secret police in the land of the Soviets with its mind set to hamper free speech, and even the murder of millions. For this randomly unsublime but justified critique Hergé deserved no apology that was ever ask from him, which he humbly provided nonetheless.
My favorite example, however, would be one from Tintin in America, where a disraught bank clerk notes to two horse-mounted police officers in a small rural city how he arrived at work to find his manager dead, the safe plundered. As the word escaped, the clerk noted, "seven negroes were swiftly hung, but the culprit got away". Since my editions were outsold a few years ago, the quality of paper has lowered substantially, prices have gone up and, lesser to the account of financial hardships since it has one more letter, the noun "negroes" has been substantiated by the Swedish equivalent of "hobos" or "tramps" as the last word in this sentence. Can you honestly conceive a more ignorant, foolhardy way (though I doubt Hergé's point was completely unknown to the censor-translator - just insignificant) to trample on this, for an early 1930s serial, brave and still remarkably amusing passage exposing and condemning the ludicrous violence of mob lynching - at that time a problem much of the present and in need for a good critique. Of course, that purpose is mostly gone, but does that clear all reasons to have Hergés message cleared of the paper? I think not. I deem it an insult, to his mind as much as the integrity of the free word.
"Insulting?" "Dangerous?" Who is to decide? We could just... scrap the whole scene you know. That way nobody "has" to see it ever again. Or think for himself, in this or any other matter.
If you don't like Tintin, write an angry editorial and try to gain my attention on the same terms. If I don't like it, or parts of it, I think I'll know soon enough without someone needing to remove the evidence from existence. Few men piss me off as much as Bienvenitu Mobutu, the Belgian who now seems to have devoted a significant share of his mature existence to have Tintin in Congo banned under Belgian law (and, to take a brave guess, with a mind to using a potential success as stepping stone to an all-EU ban which would force me to clear part of my library for the stoves or, as some have suggested, a retroactively condemning hate speech museum). This man has actually stated, proudly it seems, that while the European community of Hergé's youth did not see the need to ban and burn popular culture not in line with the views of its rulers (a premise that takes an increadible amount of ignorance and lost knowledge in 20th century history to even consider valid), so must we.
As must we, yells the mirroring call from Hungary, where deputies from a certain opposition party with an ofttimes illegal, jackbooted paramilitary wing notes that the depictions of mistreated Roma children in The Castafiore Emerald are way too sympathetic and hence misrepresenting their true nature. As anyone who despises Mr Mobutu (the live one) and Jobbik as two faces of a similar phenomenon might have shown, though few grasped the opportunity, the very touching part where Tintin shares a moment with his to-be best interracial friend Chang, enlightening and entertaining each other of Belgians' and Chinese's prejudicial anecdotes against each other's rather distantly related cultures. The mutual nature of hatred and fear is almost always insufficiently exposed, I think. Swedish Liberal columnist Johan Norberg did broadcast his impression of the scene, which hardly goes against the decisively so dangerous trend of these days of tolerance. Under the very wings of this trend, the library of Stockholm's House of Culture in September reassigned the immensely popular books - not merely the now-censored and widely discussed Congo album - to a different compartment, with a mind to the universal purpose of censorship - decrease and limit the readership. Confine them, contain them, broadcast a message that this savvy, asexual, rather improductive journalist is... tolerable, but less so than yesterday. Just a precaution. In a few years, good, ordinary people may "have" to "need" him "no more", and take on where the Marshals Mobutu (the Belgian) and Miri took the first step.
The reaction from mainstream media and political establishment was immediate and ruthless, and the action was repelled within hours, the figure responsible once stubbornly treading into sunlight now making a Nixonesque retreat by renouncing and resigning his positions. Days after, the chairman of the Afro-Swedish Legue - an organization quite sadly described by artist Makode Linde as "one I learned about through some kind of anti-free speech lawsuit" - defended the censorship under the Newspeakian pretext of "discussion" and denounced arguments against this suppression as naturally derived from inborn, racial qualities. If that is what you seriously think, sir, then you are a fool and a racist. Quite reassuring once you say it, refreshing even, but again I mostly draw horror from the passages in fiction when the plot did actually solve itself, when a worse resolution was conceivable. (Which is why I now like George R. R. Martin, when it usually doesn't.) The efforts to stem the seemingly relentless tide of Tintin will not end in even the freer societies, though they will be naturally unsuccessful for as long as the books remain read and admired by the hundreds of millions who constitute the naturally silent, now unusually loud and usually decisive majority.
Now, only a week ago, newspaper stands virtually exploded with the grim message that Kalle Ankas Jul ("Christmas with Donald Duck") is for the first time since... well, my blogging lifetime, to see a major change, and I don't mean the late, rather insigificant previews for upcoming 3D high-definition titles (Hansel and Gretel now in motion capture animation - none of the actors were harmed by climbing into the plastic makeshift stove for the epic final battle), but of the first and prime of the many, under ordinary circumstances, irreproachable subjects. From six days and into an unforseeable (but not unchangable, I would remind you) future, three characters will be omitted from Santa's unforgettable workshop, and hence the sight of about half the Swedish people. If not pre-announced, it would still have been duly noted, with the most discussed one being long since as lodged in the public memory as the chessboard paint - which is, by the way, entirely unscientific. Blasphemy! Magic! It is the black doll, so merrily rushing down the helter skelter to self-reliantly stomp her behind on the "approved" stamp, expose it to the audience and then roll along who, apparently, may now be noted only in "hindsight". Fortunately we have, as the Chinese discovered long ago, YouTube to deliver even after a purge dangerously insulting and propagandistic characters and moments such as these.
This sudden, unprovoked and deeply partial and cowardly act has been defended by Swedish branch of the Disney Corporation as they "do not alter the plot in a significant way". And, being their property, I cannot condemn the act as illegal. But I can, knowing this will only hurt the bulk of every party involved, display my disgust and loud-mouthed intemperance. This is wrong.
We didn't have time to say Goodbyes - but thanks to the technology by which I write this editorial, I may now look back at the figure you were and always will be to me = )
Asides from the black doll, the preceding "blonde Aryan curls" meets "American housewife in the making" doll will also be omitted. Paradoxically, the three ranks of Nazi dichotomia for the future Greater German Reich seems equally represented (superior slaves, inferior slaves and corpses) as the third one too controversial for today's audiences was, not entirely unsurprising, the old wooden male, bearded and pointy-nosed with hence (is there such a thing?) stereotypically Jewish features gently muddling along in a wooden wheelchair-looking apparatus, shoving his hands forth as if to take something (or give it away), large puzzled eyes looming as if at some danger ahead.
Of course, the great sack, purposedly an inconvenient metaphor for the Holocaust. Let's cut it out altogether, and Santa's midget-demeaning helpers (or, as has already been suggested, are they not child labourers? Are we not "progressed" enough to "leave" that "behind" us?). And the sexual inequality amongst the workshop's employees, and the animal cruelty against the reindeer, and Santa's uninspiring bodily shapes, his hooting, so uncomfortable (well, try it in a social environement and within shortly, people will start react different from you in this moment), or just stick to the way things have been before lesser writers dared to interfere with works of their superior equals. It's bad enough that fewer and fewer Tolkiens and Disneys seem to be born, and I for one sould not waste a moment of distaste on his wonderful productions if a disgraceful membership card from the American Nazi Party could be unearthed. The artistic work is the only merit of an artist, and if he was the most bloated bigot and racist to ever have an Oscar (he left a world which had placed 22 on his shelf) and whatever his beliefs on politics, the value of his fellow man and the price of individual dignity, I can see a lot to sympathy with when I look back on the unscathed works that man left behind after too short an existence in my service.
Censorship - May not alter the plot of mankind in any significant way.
Just make sure somebody knows how his legacy was before the minds of opposition - in this regard a very vile, wicked thing - saw fit to introduce the old, rusty scissors of fear. People of fear tend to do a lot of stupid things - yes, I have been re-indulging myself in Harry Potter and the wisdoms of Remus Lupin - there's an idol for those of you who think Dumbledore's too much a vile schemer with a long, crooked nose. Unfit for the children of today, mayhaps? Unfit for the children of tomorrow? How are we to know?
I will still demand an answer from the Disney Corporation, and from the people who were barely alive when scenes as everlasting and decent as these were still actually made, and waiting to be made. The sound will call, for it is just and widely appreciated; Cui Bono? To whose benefit?
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