Essay #1 Censorship

Yani Rivas
Essay #1 draft #3
1-22-09

Censorship


Censorship can be defined as the prohibition of expressing our feelings, when they are in disaccord with the government or with an influential group. This happens in many countries, democratic or not. But where it is most notable is in the dictators’ countries. Censorship can be applied to songs, books, news, TV programs or in a simple world. Though these pages we can see examples about cases where censorships were implied.
One case of censorship happened 11 years ago. On June 15 of 1996 the Michael Jackson’s song called “They don’t care about us” was censored. In this song there were a few words that were offensive to some ethnic groups. Those words were “Jew me” and “kike me” and “don’t you black or white me”. Because of these words, the song was classified by the Jewish community as a racist song. The term “kike me” is very, very insulting for Jewish people. Michael Jackson says that he never wanted to be racist; rather, he said, “the song is about the injustices to young people and how the system can wrongfully accuse them”. So he had good intentions in singing this song, but not all people agreed with his language. Michael Jackson later apologized that some people felt uncomfortable with this song because it was not his intention. On June 23 he decided to change the insulting words “Jew me” and “kike me” to “do me” and “strike me.”
The men who would direct the music video for the censored song “They don’t care about us” say that it was a double standard in the music industry. It was because in another songs Michael did use words like nigger and nobody care about it. Finally the song was not censored completely; just the offensive words were censored. In my opinion people have to have the same rights, because our skin color can’t define who is better. Many people agree with this. So we shouldn’t use offensive words about anybody. Accordingly I think that if they going to censored the offensive words in songs, we should take care of all the words not just some. If people feel bad about the word “kike” it should be the same with the word “nigger”. So I don’t agree with this decision because people are being unjust when they only dispute some words. In others words Jewish people aren’t better than black people, and black people aren’t better than Jewish people. So I don’t understand why people who were offended by the derogatory term 'kike' were not equally offended by the derogatory term 'nigger.'
In other case in Bangladesh a country in south Asia there was a writer called Taslima Nasrin. In 1993 one of hers books was censored. Wild Wind was censored, first, because she talked about the personal life of a girl who was raped. She did it without the girl’s permission. Secondly, she critiqued the women’s life in the Islam religion. So the Bangladesh government accused her that she was blaspheming. It was the principal reason why the book was censored. She defended her book telling, the government that there’s no freedom in Bangladesh even it is a democratic country. But her defense didn’t work, because the book was banned anyway. It is hard to write a book about abuse in a country where the government doesn’t practice democratic. Talisma must have had much value and reasons to write the book. I disagree with the censorship in this case. I believe that everybody can say what they believe. It is up to the reader to believe it or not.
In US everybody knows Shakira, a singer from Barranquilla, Colombia. Since her video music “Ojos Asi” she has been recognized for her sensual dance. Her dancing is popular worldwide, but in her world tour called “fijacion oral tour”, she was censored by the Afghanistan government because they claimed that she showed too much of her body and her dance is not appropriate. In some TV transmissions they decide to cover her chest using technical support. But this action was not enough for the government. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, demanded blacking out the transmissions. He called transmissions damned, because the obscene content caused damage to Afghanistan and his culture. I think we can not to pretend that all the governments are going to believe the same. If the government and their people feel bad with this kind of dance, then they have all the strength to avoid it. In my opinion the Afghanistan’s government is being exaggerated, because people have to decide by themselves what they want to hear and to see.
Some of the censorships are fair and others are not. Fair or not when it is a legal decision, we have to accept it. I mean not accept it and be conformist otherwise I mean that sometimes we need to give it time to see our dreams fulfilled. Some of these are big cases of censorship and others are just little cases. Many people feel upset about the censorships; this is why there are littler organizations that do concerts against censorship.