toberman

February 26, 2012

White as Snowy

Jack Graham china mieville, colonialism, racism, steven moffat, toberman, tomb of the cybermen 0

I’m sure I’m giving you all the impression that I’m a kind of obsessed stalker when it comes to China Miéville, but everyone should read his latest blog post. It’s about the recent decision by the Belgian Supreme Court to reject the application by Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo…

to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law. However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this – and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.

When human rights lawyer David Enright asks for the book to be sold as an adult work, while explicitly, repeatedly, stressing that he does not advocate banning it, nonetheless, cometh the resentment-spewing dissemblers in the comments insisting that he is supporting ‘censorship’. This is a degree of point-missing so great it is hard to believe it is not performative.

(Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.)

In case you don’t know the book, here‘s a link (provided by Miéville in his blog post) that will fill you in.

Had a look?

Delightful, isn’t it?

I’m not quoting it or putting any of the pictures on here. It makes me feel ill.

Herge (real name Georges Remi) was, by the way, a Nazi collaborator who featured anti-semitic stereotype villains (hook-nosed, cigar-chomping financier called Blumenstein, for instance) in his cartoons. Nice company for Spielberg and Moffat.

Aside from picking over the Tintin issue forensically, Miéville’s blog post is of relevance to this blog because he goes over the various weasely excuses always wheeled out by people who want to sleaze their way out of confronting the racism often blatant in cherished old stories.…

January 6, 2012

The Black & White Era

Jack Graham complacent fanboy scum, diane abbott, michael rosen, race, racism, richard seymour, toberman 2

Readers of this blog (all 12 of them… on a good day) might be forgiven for thinking I do nothing but obsess over the politics of Doctor Who. Undoubtedly, I do do that, and far too much of it. However, in my defence, I will say that most of what I post here is the product of long-term, off-and-on, occasional, when-I-get-the-chance pondering and tinkering. My last post, for instance, had been loitering in the ‘Draft’ category for months, getting steadily longer and more tendentious, before I posted it. I spend a lot of the rest of my time thinking about and doing other stuff. However, my practice of letting my ‘essays’ (I hate calling them that, but what else can I call them?) percolate means that I’m very bad at reacting quickly. However, there are some things to which I desperately want to react quickly because I care about them so much… usually because they make me so ANGRY.

Luckily, there are people out there who

a) broadly share my political perspective,

b) are much cleverer and better informed than me, and

c) can react quickly.

So, on the subject of the recent synth-controversy and twitterstorm about Diane Abbott, here are three reactions which, between them, pretty much say everything I want said.

Here‘s Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb:

First of all, what Abbott said was, in a very loose sense, correct: ‘white people’ do indeed love to play divide and rule. Not all of them, good lord no. Not you or I. Not the good whites (there are some good whites). But I think we all know that there’s a troublesome minority in our midst, the ones who give us all a bad name, whom we must root out and expose, and hand over to the authorities. That’s all I’m saying. Second, I would rather have a politician who expresses things bluntly and occasionally blunders but is usually on the right side of the argument (Abbott, for all her flaws, is better than most Labour politicians in this respect), than a calculating mountebank who plays for position in the spectacle.

Here‘s Michael Rosen at his new blog (which I fervently recommend, by the way):

As a broad statement about history, Diane Abbott is to my mind more or less right in that the elite that has ruled over the British Empire and continues to rule is of course 99.9 per cent white and one of the ways it has ruled was, say, to use black troops from one part of the empire to fight another, or to use ‘mulatto’ elites (as they were called) to rule over ‘pure’ black populations and so on. In terms of how Diane Abbott acts as a local MP – now an apologetic one – is for me less clear. I don’t feel as if I tried to rule over her, trying to set black people against each other in the matter of education. To tell the truth, I felt that she did that herself.

…