Of Marcello Veneziani
Source: Marcello Veneziani
There is a dark desire for censorship that crosses the West, its media, schools and universities. It is liberal or radical censorship, in the name of progress and freedom.
He is furious not with extremists and evildoers but with plenty of writers, poets and writers of the past, come Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid, Euripides. Or with artists who had violent lives or depicted violent scenes. At Cambridge University, for example, some great classics, even Shakespeare, they were given a red sticker.
The goal? Admonish students to prevent them from being shocked by reading "depictions of sexual violence". But from Cambridge to Columbia University, from Paris to our local centers of culture and literature, it infects theaters and museums, schools and cinemas.
The sin punished by the new Inquisition is having violated the current catechism, political correctness and having written, said, did unacceptable things to women today, neri, Jews, disabled, homosexuals and minorities now protected. Red dot or danger warning, trigger warning for irreverent authors accused of sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia or violence.
The Red Sticker censors judge the classics with the lenses of the present and with infinite presumption they think that all past generations have had wrong beliefs; only we know how things really are, what is right to say and what is not.
The greatness of an author or a work it is thus subordinated to his ideological conformity to the present or his behavior in life; What matters is not the value but the correctness. And if it doesn't meet the standards, the red stamp is issued.
Forbidden to prohibit was the slogan that today's censors shouted in the universities and schools of the past against repression, obscurantism and censorship.
Now the canon is overturned with paradoxical results: you can use foul language but not politically incorrect poetry, you can smoke cannabis but not read certain Shakespeare sonnets, you can have sex in the classroom and perhaps film it with your smartphone but not read "sexist" passages from Ovid in the classroom.
The removal does not only concern high culture but also pop.
At the cinema a film to have the imprimatur of Hollywood, nomination for an award or receive public funding for high cultural value must have at least one of the following requirements: tell an anti-racism story in which the victim, the positive character, it's always coloured; or stories of migrants, where the bad guys are always the "locals", “our people are coming” from western films is reversed into “they are coming”, foreigners; or a story of persecuted and liberated homosexuality, of outraged or violated feminism, where the family, the priest or the father is evil.
If it is a historical film the privileged theme it will be the Nazis and the Jews or the fascists and the partisans; silence on every other horror or page of history. I tg, the school, the university, Every day the newspapers decree the catechism of acceptance and rejection, of the prohibitions and permitted transgressions, the traffic light of the prescribed and the proscribed.
Here they are the new bigots with their fogeys of hypocrisy.