RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14505/self-censorship-artists

The Index on Censorship has identified what appears to be an overly cautious approach to commissioning new artwork. “Artists will create the work that gatekeepers and commissioners will adopt….”

“I love my freedom. I’m aware of the very real threat to that freedom from Islamic fascism and I’m not going to pander to them or justify it like many people on the left are doing.” — The artist Mimsy, whose artwork was removed from an exhibit entitled Passion for Freedom at the Mall Gallery, London, on the grounds that it might be “potentially inflammatory”.

This kind of censorship among artists, however, unfortunately, only contributes to the ever-shrinking space of free expression. Some artists, evidently, only approve of certain kinds of free expression. They never appear to consider that a similar boycott might happen to themselves, if they happen to fall afoul of current political orthodoxy.

“Ai Weiwei should be the first to know that this kind of thinking is totalitarian…. Political art represents both the struggle and the vaccine against the culture of silence found in any society. The political artist breaks down taboos so that the roads are opened for the exchange of thoughts and ideas between individuals and between citizens and rulers. Therefore, political art is necessary. And so this exhibition is necessary.” — Jon Eirik Lundberg, curator of the Læsø Art Hall, Denmark.

Index on Censorship, a London-based organization that campaigns for free expression worldwide, recently launched a new support service for artists, Arts Censorship Support Service.

The service is apparently intended to “push back against censorship and keep the space for artistic freedom of expression as wide open as possible”, according to an interview by ArtsProfessional with Associate Arts Producer Julia Farrington of the Index on Censorship.

The Index on Censorship has identified what in general appears to be an overly cautious approach to commissioning new artwork. “Artists will create the work that gatekeepers and commissioners will adopt, and so [the new service] is a lot to do with making the decision makers, the commissioners, confident in taking on and challenging their own self-censorship and organisational censorship,” Farrington said. According to her, the pressure that can be exerted on arts organizations when producing controversial or challenging work has been greater than ever, in part due to a climate of online hostility.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-uyghur-emergency/

The Chinese government has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities, throwing them into concentration camps.

When people talk about what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghur people in northwest China, they tend to refer to the Nazis. They can be excused.

In April 2018, Jerome A. Cohen raised the specter of the Nazis. He is considered the dean of China scholars in the United States, born in 1930. He is a very careful, judicious man. He would not use the N-word — “Nazi” — lightly. But he said that what was happening to the Uyghurs reminded him of his relatives in Austria and Germany. Some 40 of them were killed.

At the beginning of this month, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post had an article headed “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.” He noted that you are not supposed to bring up the Nazis, because the Holocaust was a unique event. Yet, in a discussion of northwest China, the Nazis are hard to avoid.

The government has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities, throwing them into concentration camps, or “reeducation” camps. These camps constitute a Chinese gulag archipelago.

Among the Uyghurs, there are a relative handful of militants, as there are among the Rohingyas (the minority people whom the Burmese government has brutalized). This gives the government an excuse to go after everyone — think of Lidice, multiplied untold times.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-motives-behind-the-false

Any honest and objective appraisal of Islam’s historic jihad on the Christian world must be eye-opening, to say the very least. In the first century of its existence (between 632-732) Islam permanently conquered, Arabized, and Islamized nearly three-quarters of the post-Roman Christian world, thereby permanently severing it. Europe came to be known as “the West” because it was literally the remaining and westernmost appendage of Christendom not to be swallowed up by Islam.

For roughly a millennium thereafter, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and Tatars—all of whom called and saw themselves as Muslims—launched raid after raid, all justified and lauded as jihads, into virtually every corner of Europe. They reached as far as Iceland and provoked the U.S. into its first war as a nation. The devastation was indescribable; some regions in Europe, particularly in Spain and the Balkans, remain inhabitable due to the incessant raiding. Some 15 million Europeans were enslaved during this perennial jihad and, according to contemporary records, treated horrifically.

In short, “if we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born,” writes historian Franco Cardini, “we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe between the seventh to eighth centuries, then between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries … was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.”

Here the inevitable question arises: How could such a long, well-documented history of unmitigated Islamic aggression that had immense repercussions on the development of Western civilization now be presented as the antithesis of reality?

The answer revolves around a number of modern philosophies—from the Enlightenment to moral/cultural relativism—that have each contributed to an all-pervasive “Narrative” concerning the historic relationship between Islam and the West. In presenting the West as aggressor and Islam as victim—hence the latter’s ongoing “grievance”-based animosity—this history is as entrenched as it is the reverse of reality.

Erased: How the Middle East Was Expunged of Its Judeo-Christian Heritage