8 Jun 2010 | Uncategorized
Dutch writer Frank Westerman will be speaking to Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner at the Free Word Centre tonight (book here).
Readers may have heard Westerman on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning (listen here), describing how he discovered the first known film of Turkmen people — Kara Bogaz — a Soviet propaganda film from the 1930s, showing how communism brought prosperity and civilisation to the nomadic people.
The film was never actually shown. Why? At the time, Stalin would demand that he be the first person to see all films made in the USSR. The film’s creator, Konstantin Paustovsky (who had adopted the film from his 1932 book), made the mistake of allowing the French communist critic Henri Barbusse see the film. Barbusse subsequently praised Kara Bogaz in the pages of Izvestia, saying it portrayed a “great many authentically socialist moments” (incidentally, Barbusse died just three days after the publication of the review in August 1935).
Paustovsky and his filmmaking comrades, clearly terrified of the consequences of crossing Stalin, decided to stifle their film, through the odd tactic of stringing out the editing process indefinitely, thereby rendering the film unavailable for release.
Such a small, petty reason for stifling such a significant historical work. But as is often pointed out, tyrannies rule not through consistency, but through capriciousness. The subjugated must never know whether they’re on the right side or not from one day to the next.
2 Jun 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Facebook admitted on 1 June that it has now blocked Pakistani users from accessing the page Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. A company spokesperson claimed the restrictions were placed “out of respect for local rules”. Pakistan temporarily banned Facebook website on May 19, Bangladesh banned the site on 29 May because of the page, and it is know expected the company will block it for the Bangladeshi government as well.
28 May 2010 | Uncategorized
Steve Jobs wants the iPad, which goes on sale in the UK today, porn free. He’s said so. And unlike most people, he can make this sort of thing happen. Approval for Apple’s App store involves passing the censor — and the threshold is quite high: Germany’s Stern magazine recently failed because it runs topless photographs.
It’s not clear whether this just applies to visual porn — nor how this is defined. Are the works of the Marquis de Sade pornography? Will there be an iPad app for Last Exit to Brooklyn?
Well, no one has to buy the iPad or any other Apple product. So this seems to be fair enough. There are plenty of alternatives at the moment. Google, for example, in contrast to Apple seems committed to openness. But what if Apple grew and completely dominated the market? What if just about every e-book or e-magazine publisher chose to do exclusive deals with them? Suppose Apple decides on a whim that it’s not just porn they want to control but anything that might be deemed “offensive”? We’d end up with Steve Jobs or his successor as a de facto online censor, and self-censorship being the route to e-publication readable on the device everyone is using. Is this the future we want? Are we happy that Jobs is controlling iPad content so carefully already?
26 May 2010 | Index Index, minipost
A new exhibition in Vienna displaying North Korean poster art and architecture has been slammed by the Association of Austrian Koreans. The “Flowers for Kim II Sung” exhibition at the MAK museum, has been described as “idolising” and “embellishing North Korea’s dictatorial system”. Museum chief Peter Noever has denied that the exhibition is in any way an endorsement of the North Korean regime in interviews.
