spinoff

The idea of ending up on the wrong side of the law because of something you say is one associated with – amongst others – Stalin. The worst societies are incapable of allowing free speech. They cannot stand it. Surprisingly however, nowadays you don’t have to be living in a loonatic totalitarian state to get in trouble for your ideas any more – not in the slightest.

Take the Rolling Stones – that vanguard of ‘daaaadd! – shut uuuupp ‘n’ roll’ – for example. They provide an unlikely example of how the subject ‘what is being said’ is attracting rather more attention than one might at first think. And from surprising quarters, too.

Not surprising is that the Stones have been asked to drop four of their most popular tracks from the set list when they go to China next month. Several songs were dubbed too fruity for Chinese ears by the fabulously Orwellian-sounding 'Chinese Ministry of Culture', a body no doubt contained in some horrific concrete bunker surrounded by razor wire, machine guns and mine fields, guarded by – I don’t know – sharks, or something.

Yes, the spirit of Mao lives on – he’s alive and what’s more he certainly won’t stand by as his great work is torn asunder by unholy, blubbery-lipped renditions of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, ‘Brown Sugar’, and ‘Beast of Burden’. No sir.

But this vision of backward Chinese censor-monkeys having their fun while the rest of us snigger is not quite the whole picture. The reason? The west is just as bad.

For an example one can take, again, Mick and the boys. When the Stones played the Superbowl this year, the National Football League - the embodiment of good, old-fashioned, American, knock-about fun - decided that the Stones' lyrics needed censoring. Just like the Chinese government.

The songs they doctored? ‘Rough Justice’ and ‘Start me Up’. As Lord Mick came up to the offending words, the faders were muted and the words silenced. If there has been a less rock and roll moment in all history, then please suggest it below.

The point here is that western tendencies are heading towards a certain goal, a goal that for a long time in these parts – secular western Europe that is – we have referred to as ‘fucking idiocy’.

Long have we poked our noses into the history books and recoiled in horror at stories of suppression of free speech in totalitarian states, both past and present. Often have we poked our noses into the newspapers to be stunned to drooling silence by news from China of yet more Falang Gong-bashing. Horrid. Horrid. Even more horrid, though, is the possibility that we too may be creeping towards a similar state of affairs.

David Irving – deluded Nazi enthusiast – was recently sent to jail in Austria. He was sent to jail due to a series of words that he said. In London, Ken Livingston was removed from his position as elected Mayor (and has today had this suspension frozen) by an unelected, government-appointed committee of three suits, again, for some words that he said. Yes, they were very stupid, insensitive words, but they were still only that – words.

As well as this, our beloved, wonderful government, whom we love very much indeed, is trying to introduce laws in the UK that will make it a criminal offence to say certain things, specifically those things that “glorify terrorism”.

So what does that mean? Are we saying that every time an American flies the stars and stripes we can bang him up for celebrating the existence of a nation founded on a guerrilla war aimed at unseating a legitimate governing power? And what of Sinn Fein? Or the ANC? Is the SAS committing acts of terrorism when it sneaks around blowing up bridges?

This would be an unworkable law. 'Terrorism', like all words, is objective - there will never be agreement on what it is, so how can you jail people for talking about it, let alone ‘glorifying’ it, which presents again, another semantic nightmare (“Ere – you were glorifying terrorism.” “No I wasn’t. I was simply ‘politely complimenting’ it…etc…”)

The police, the government – despite all the bluster, talk of ‘security’ and all the rest of it – must not be allowed into our heads. The Chinese government is allowed into its own citizen's minds, and the the US and UK governments are figthting to get into theirs. But no - people must be allowed to hear, see and think everything and anything they want, (unless it’s child porn, which is different). The Stones have been censored by the laughable, Chinese nutjobs in the ministry. They've also been done in the - erm - the US.

The Americans have headed off over the hill and far into deepest la-la land with their bizarre combination of 16thC morality and 21stC artillery which results in all sorts of moral and ethical contortions.

Among these is the willingness to censor innocuous music by a bunch of grandpas. The Chinese will do the same thing next month. This is the control of speech, just as the jailing of the shit Irving and the hounding of the gobshite Livingston were exercises in controlling speech (the protests over the Danish cartoons are, again, an attempt to halt free speech, though this subject is dealt with elsewhere on this site.) And this is before we even get to anti-terror laws. If you want to know what these anti terror laws entail, go to google and type - 'Walter Wolfgang, Labour Conference'.

To open the gates and allow anti-free speech barbarism fully into our society would be a hideous disaster. We must not be under any illusion as to how real a prospect this disaster is.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

The Standards Board for England can push elected politicians out of office for being rude and thoughtless? Fantastic! Spinoff have a little list we could let them have at a moment's notice.

The Prime Minister alone's been guilty of quite enough to earn him a one year ban; most members of the Tory front bench are surely well overdue a period in the sin bin (and if it's retrospective, maybe we could finally get to grips with Margaret Thatcher: the fact that she's no longer in office shouldn't bother the unelected Standards Board).

Clearly, democracy in Britain's just hit a very major challenge. An appointed body (read, un-elected) can get rid of a prominent and important politician (read, elected) for being rude (read, something that's not very important). There's only one thing to do now: the elected politicians who created the Standards Board have, very promptly indeed, to either (a) abolish it or (b) reign in its powers. Substantially.

The suspension of an elected official by an unelected body is antidemocratic, and should be illegal. Until it is, we'll send that list to the Standards Board on your, the voters, behalf. We reckon there'll be about three MPs left in Parliament by Monday.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Western politicians like to make the case that the war in Iraq, the recently rebranded ‘war on terror’, operations in Afghanistan, the Danish cartoon row, support of the state of Israel, opposition to the democratically-elected Hamas administration in Palestine, and so on and so on, are emphatically not examples of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and the Islamic world.

In this, they are probably right: the ‘civilisation’ that is the West offers things like meritocratic advancement, personal freedoms and equality that attracts many non-westerners to western countries, provides an example that encourages democratic elections in the developing world, and was, after all, the big incentive that brought down the Warsaw Pact. But to deny that the West and Islam are in an entrenched struggle is disingenuous.

This writer spent some years in the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, and came back convinced of one thing: that Islam is the only serious opponent that the West has left, and a conflict between the two is inevitable. Events of the past twenty years have only reinforced that opinion. The core reason is less that western political thought and Islam are incompatible (though, in their current incarnations, they probably are). It is that Islam provides the only truly internally consistent, satisfying and rewarding ideology left in the world.

Communism is moribund, reeling from the loss of the Soviet Union and unable to reframe itself in a way that makes it exciting and attractive enough for people to see its (many and real) values. Christianity, though dominant in America and parts of Europe and Africa, spans a range from the shrill fundamentalists wilfully misinterpreting the message of Christ to the weak quasi-liberalism of the Church of England. Schisms in the Anglican communion over gay priests, the role of women clergy and so on are tinkering round the edges of a belief system that has lost its role and provides no clear leadership, whilst the Catholic and Baptist wings drive once-a-year Christians from becoming more engaged. Other world religions – Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, sects like the Quakers, cults like the Moonies, all fail to have the ability to attract truly world-spanning importance.

So we are left with two belief systems: that built upon a protestant Christian framework with its belief in success through hard work, an individual relationship with God, and a communitarian focus on a welfare society; and Islam. Islam’s enormous strength comes through many things. The Qur’an is the directly revealed word of God, and therefore provides real certainty as well as being a manual for how to live one’s life. Importantly, it is the revealed word of God in the language of God (the Qur’an is only ‘real’ in Arabic) providing a commonality of language and understanding lost in the west since the King James Bible and Vatican II.

The Islam of the Qur’an provides all those things the West provides, and many it does not. Protection of widows and orphans is expressly mandated. The role of women is clearly defined (the prophet was married, remember, and his wife Hadija’s legacy provides an important role for women). The ‘Umma, the unitary nature of Muslims around the world, is explicit. Islam works: as a belief system, as a social and political polity, as a consistent and powerful model not only of how one should live one’s own life but how the world should live its.

And this is where the clash is inevitable, quite simply because western liberalism promises the same. The ideology of the west is a peculiar blend of Christianity, small-c communism, welfare statism, synthesising a broad range of political thought and belief but ultimately promising a way of living that is supportive in difficulty and rewarding in success. It also happens to provide a consumerist society where goodies are abundant – the most superficial, but attractive factor that attracts the majority of people to the western lifestyle.

Interestingly, both systems are proselytising: the west moves to spread democracy, Islam moves to further Islamic belief (though, since the Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, in-the-field warfare between the two has been limited). It has become all too obvious that, as the West has moved from intellectual dominance to intellectual parity, the speeches and actions of its leaders have become increasingly strident in their stress not only on Western values but on the Christian underpinning of those values.

This was probably inevitable: when the Soviet Union was at its strongest, the West was at its most McCarthyite; but it has led to the deeply unfortunate situation where the leaders of the Western world are now expressly and publicly Christian, provoking a situation where the West is led by people about whom the majority of the electorate feel deeply uneasy, sharing neither their open Christianity nor their desire to be dragged into conflicts whose causes and outcomes are unclear. The west is fundamentalising in response to the pressure from Islam, driving the two sides even further apart.

So the messy agglomeration of ideas that is the west (and it is clear from the terminological knots in this piece that there is no commonly agreed term for ‘western liberalism’) uneasily faces the clear, internally consistent and satisfying belief system that is Islam. There is no natural common ground where they can meet: the west despairs of Islam’s lack of reasonableness, Islam fails to understand the West’s capitulation to irreligious consumerism. A clash, under these circumstances, is inevitable, and politicians do us no favours in pretending to admit it is not.

Better that we should actively engage, with words rather than bullets, with the strength that is Islamic thought, in an intellectual debate in which we are truly invested. Otherwise, the ‘war on terror’ will truly become the long war, and it won’t be between just the armies of the west and ragtag groups of bandits. It will be between the world’s two major belief systems. And the odds on who will win are, at best, evens.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Two problems are posed by Parliament’s vote on smoking. Well, that’s nonsense, obviously – there are many problems, not least of which that the policy wasn’t in the manifesto (but then again, neither was invading Iraq, of course); potential loss of revenue to pubs and clubs, coupled with additional costs of creating – as has happened in New York and Dublin – smokers’ areas in the form of terraces or fenced off pens outside; a £2,500 fine for lighting up (which is less than one gets for many real criminal offences); the collapse of the cigarette vending machine industry and so on.

Problem 1 (of many) is the fundamental wrongness of the bases of the law. ‘Passive smoking kills, just look at Roy Castle’ is an extremely poor argument when there is no actual evidence of it doing anything of the kind (and don’t quote the US EPA report – it’s rubbish, and been proven to be so).

It smells, yes, and stings the eyes, certainly – like smoke machines, actually. But no-one’s talking about banning them now, are they? ‘Smoking costs the NHS millions a year which we could be treating little kiddies with’.

Yes, smoking related illnesses cost £1.7bn per year (figures from ASH). Smoking related taxation raises £9.9billion a year (or it did in 2004: £8.1bn Excise duty, £1.8bn VAT). £9.9bn minus £1.7bn gives a profit of £8.2 billion to the Exchequer.

Smoking doesn’t cost anything. It makes money – the little kiddies are being funded through tobacco taxation, and don’t you forget it. Smokers pay for hospitals, battleships, social services and all of the wonderfulness that is the state, and because of taxation they do it truly disproportionately to others So. Passive smoking doesn’t kill, and smokers don’t cost the NHS anything.

Bar staff, apparently, will not have to put up with second hand smoke. That’s good. Any chance we could ban, say, drinking in pubs so they didn’t have to put up with being regularly threatened by drunken punters? Or with cleaning up their vomit?

What’s worse is that smoking is still, nominally, legal. No Chancellor wants to lose £8.2 billion, so no-one will take the truly logical step. Rather than limiting where people can smoke to, effectively, doorways and their own homes, if this truly was a public health measure, smoking should be banned. It kills people. Ban it. You can’t own a gun, and there are fewer gun deaths in one year than there are of smoking in one week.

So the bases of the law are wrong. A true public health measure wouldn’t tinker, but would ban smoking entirely. You’d lose billions in revenue, but at least you’d be principled. And this is the other problem. The self righteous squawking of the anti-smoking lobby seems designed to make most smokers go out and buy a packet of 20 in sheer anger.

Deborah Arnott, of anti-smoking group ASH, was quoted by the BBC saying she was "amazed" and "very delighted" by the Commons decision. Cancer Research UK was quoted as saying it was the biggest step forward in public health for half a century (what, bigger than advances in antibiotics? The abolition of polio? Are they quite mad?).

There is nothing more designed to put the back up of the recently defeated than a gloating victor. But truly, there’s nothing worse than a gloating victor who has won an argument on the basis of false information. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, called it a ‘victory for Britain’s insufferable paternalists’.

It’s that, and more. It is an proscriptive measure taken for the shakiest of reasons, an easy hit to placate the increasingly vocal lobby in government that seems to believe that because it has little power over deciding big issues, it must legislate over the little ones. The smoking ban is inconsistent, half-hearted and illiberal. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Yours etc., Spinoff.

Does god have a sense of humour? If there is a god, and he invented everything that we have, that we are, that we see and that surrounds us in the known universe, then it stands to reason that he also must have invented our ability to laugh.

And so if god invented the sense of humour, does it not stand to reason that he himself has one? How odd therefore that god is always portrayed as being a solemn, humourless individual. How odd that we presume the almighty has no conception, or ability to join in with a manner of communication that he himself must have bestowed on us in the first place.

A startling example of this came with the publication in a Danish newspaper of satirical images of the Prophet Mohammed. Muslims were upset, and have started boycotting Danish goods. Today, the EU building in Gaza was surrounded by protesting gunmen.

Images of Mohammed are banned because it is thought they encourage idolatry. Create a portrait of the divine, and you will end up worshipping it in place of your actual god. But a humorous image is absolutely not a suitable image of worship. Therefore it is not an idol. It is satire – humorous, and not an agent of idolatry.

It is a humorous image of the divine. Is this bad? This question brings us back to whether god has a sense of humour. Well - why shouldn’t he? After all, there is nothing degenerate about humour.

Why should humour be associated with baseness and corruption, when it is elevating and enlightening? It is a device for communal pleasure, as well as for pointing out our foibles, and therefore for understanding ourselves better. This is the very essence of humour. Also, critically, it is the essence of religion.

The gunmen in Gaza? Saudi Arabians refusing to buy Danish mayonnaise? I bet he’s up there laughing his bloody head off.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.