From: TURK@TUKY.COM   
      
   Sorry for tardy reply - new year's festivities (during which it crossed my   
   mind that an apercu of yours from your Liberty book - '... morally literate   
   people would not wish to stupefy themselves' - is not quite as watertight as   
   it sounds). I'm using ~~ this time round.   
      
      
   >   
      
   ££When do you think the watershed ( already a joke) should be for racial   
   epithets?   
      
   ~~All about context - not a concept that will have much appeal to a zealot,   
   but there you are - for example, it would be hard to make a piece of drama   
   about the civil rights struggle in the southern states of the USA without   
   using the N word. It would be integral to the drama and without it the drama   
   would be risible and prissy. Now you may say that this argument would extend   
   and be abused by sex scenes, however I am perfectly happy not to see sex   
   scenes on the TV because they are used 99 per cent of the time as   
   pornography and furthermore are boring. But the N word is a   
   complex historical fact that is not the same as swear words or genitalia.   
   If parents did their parenting properly and adults were not infantilized   
   politically and philosophically, it would be possible to have a watershed   
   and deal with adult themes in an adult way, rather than thinking that the   
   tide of peurility can be stopped by pretending its 1948. The Dambusters is   
   that well known item 'a product of its time' and I'm quite keen on such   
   products remaining unbowdlerized for a lot of reasons mainly to do with PC   
   drones working sedulously to abolish the past. Look at the emasculation of   
   Biggles, for example.   
      
      
   >>I'd be PERFECTLY happy if the film began with an explanatory note,   
   scrolled   
   up the screen or even as voiceover, explaining that the dog's name would   
   not be transmitted, what the name was, and why. Do you regard it as   
   censorship when authors , ranging from Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to   
   Nevil Shute, leave the f-word or other crudities out of conversations   
      
      
   ~~Funnily enough I thought straight away of the opening page of 'Our Man in   
   Havana': '"You see that nigger walking down the street, Mr Wormold? He   
   reminds me of you."'   
   The I thought of a favourite book of mine, Decline and Fall by Waugh: 'what   
   price the coon?' says the exuberant Captain Grimes at one point. Do you want   
   to see these censored? Then there is 'Prancing Nigger' by Ronald Firbank, a   
   very elegant and amusing book - and a huge influence on Waugh (I don't   
   suppose the PCistas would like a page of Scoop or Black Mischief ) and   
   Anthony Powell (not my idea of a coarse oaf) for example. Would you wish to   
   see that censored? The N word appears on almost every page and yet the book   
   is the furthest thing from oafish you could possibly imagine. I'm sure there   
   are many other examples if I bothered to go and look. Of course you will not   
   find the f-word in the same pages,  which goes to show that the n-word is   
   not the same as the f-word in our cultural history, no matter how much you   
   want it to be so for your campaign. The n word is littered around British   
   cultural history and while I DON'T like it, I like even less the idea of   
   censoring it out and becoming so schoolmarmish that I convince myself it is   
   no different to our notorious sexual swear words.   
      
    in   
   which it would certainly have been used. Shute made a great deal of use of   
   'mugger'in his versions of serviceman's conversations,  and his Australians   
   say 'My Word' quite a bit.Is that, was that 'censorship'?   
      
   ~~I would call that the constraints of the period and furthermore if   
   'mugger' became the next word on the list to be censored I would be against   
   censoring it.   
      
   Should the books   
   now be republished with the f-word , the b-word etc inserted?   
      
      
   ~~You should not allow your taste for counter-intuitive argument lead you to   
   take refuge in the ridiculous.   
      
      
    When I   
   object to censorship, it is to attempts to suppress facts or arguments. The   
   definition upon which you rely( very similar to that used by John Mortimer   
   etc in their noble battles to make the world safe for smut)  is so broad   
   that, under it, all my objections to pornography and bad language would   
   have to be laid aside   
      
   ~~I don't agree. Mortimer's argument was proposed at a time that could not   
   conceive of the puerility and organised stupidity that was to come. Just the   
   same as the fools with their hate speech legislation fail to see that they   
   are hammering nails into free speech.   
      
      
   . I do not think this has ANYTHING in common with the   
   suppression and distortion of the truth about the past which you rightly   
   fear.   
      
   ~~I do. Why on earth do you think the Left colonise the mass media. Because   
   that's where the battle for control of the past present and future lies.   
   Because people are all hopelessly addicted to television. So the   
   bowdlerization of aspects of our cultural history on television should come   
   as no surprise. The N-word, as I have explained, is part of that and should   
   not be censored. If you wish to keep facts unsuppressed, don't censor them   
   from the TV.   
      
    On the contrary, the fact that a much-admired war hero was crass   
   enough to give his dog this stupid name   
      
   ~~I bet he wasn't the only one in England at that time...   
      
      
    rather reinforces the (false)   
      
   ~~I agree it is a false view.   
      
   view   
   that pre-cultural revolution Britain was a swamp of bigotry. The n-word has   
   always been an insult.   
      
   ~~I agree but I think its use was more complex. It certainly wasn't on the   
   par with the f-word and c-word. It is NOW. But wasn't THEN.   
      
      
   Gibson may not have known how insulting it was in   
   1944, but then a lot of the people who wear FCUK clothes probably don't   
   know how much I want to punch them in the mouth.   
      
   ~~I think you overreact. FCUK was a tiresome joke that wore out.   
      
   Have you thought about this   
   at all, or have you just dug in on what at first looked like a good   
   defensive position and turned out not to be?   
      
   ~~I've thought about it a great deal. I was thinking about it before I ever   
   heard of you. And I think I'm in a very good position with it. You are   
   prepared to sacrifice an unpleasant fact of our cultural history (and it IS   
   censorship as I've explained above) because you think that the sacrifice can   
   be used as a lever to get pornography off the TV. I don't agree because I   
   know that you won't be able to because the people in charge are so in love   
   with puerility and pornography as double think (ratings and their own   
   socio-politics) that they won't ever back down unless their licenses were   
   renewed every six months. It's all too easy and there's too much money in it   
   for all of them. And perceiving the truth about England is hard work whereas   
   thinking it a nasty old cesspit of racism is much the easier option - and   
   people always go for the easier option.   
    I think the more practical and less idealistic argument is: if you want to   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)