seanessay.com
If a man ever needed dying, he did
No man had the right to say, what he said
About you
Sung by a man surrounded by police
In Indiana Wants Me
by singer-songwriter R Dean Taylor
(If you can type the title then you don’t need me to link for you)
They say that one or more Muslims find it hard to believe that we think it is a criminal offence for a private citizen to kill someone merely because of their words or insults. This I found out years before 9/11 after Salmon Rushdie’s book came out and a Muslim on the radio said that since we would (take action) for an insult to Queen Elizabeth we should understand planning to (take action against) Rushdie for his insult… I thought sarcastically “Sure, for the days of the first Queen Elizabeth.”
If an insult, perhaps to the Dear Leader, is indeed “bad enough” then the proper thing is to use the court system. I remember as a child on Saturday morning, when the Lone Ranger, in an animated show, after he has captured a bad guy, said in a close up the final line: “No man may be both judge and jury.”
Now, I’m not saying that all Muslims believe “violence is OK if you have a good enough excuse,” but I did read that about half of Pakistan thought a man should be let off, or even be a folk hero, when he was a bodyguard… who betrayed the trust of his patron… by shooting the poor man dead. A governor. Actually, the killer was indeed dealt with under the law, executed, but I am skeptical: Maybe the Pakistan authorities were afraid that, if free, he would become an elected politician.
A law against saying, “The King is a Fink!” is a very good law—for the king to keep his power.
I worry about daughters of True Believers. Next time anyone, of any religion or creed, such as communism, says it’s OK to use violence against words, I am going to think of a passage in a short story written several years before the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. It’s from the back of the book Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein about defeating a theocracy in the U.S. The story takes place years after the Prophet/dear leader has been overthrown.
A grown man, immature, wants approval from a young teenage daughter of the town doctor.
QUOTE
It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You broke his nose, yet he had done you no harm of any sort. You expect me to approve that?”
“But Persephone,” he protested, “you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”
“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth—a verbal label. If the label does not fit you, the noise is meaningless. If the label is true in your case—if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more, nor less, that thing by reason of some one uttering the verbal label. In sort, he did not damage you.
“But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In self-protection the rest of society must seek you out, and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage some one else in the future. If you are, you must be quarantined for treatment, or leave society—whichever you prefer.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” He accused.
“Crazy? Not the way you meant it. You haven’t paresia, or a brain tumour, or any other lesion that the Doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are just as socially unsane as any fanatic witch-burner.”
UNQUOTE
Obviously I’m not saying any respected Muslim community leaders over here would witch-burn, anymore than they would stone or honor-kill or wear a Burka. (Burka is bulky, hijab is headscarf) But what about the ones who are overseas, surrounded by an unfree-to-question culture? One of the reasons, perhaps the smallest reason, there are laws against illegal migration is to control the intake numbers enough, to allow assimilation enough, for new folks to believe in law and order. The nice thing about schools is that teenagers can learn to be bi-cultural, and have a healthy skepticism if their parents preach hatred of their multi-cultural classmates, or claim the holocaust never happened.
As a girl in school, if your parents believe that infidels in the schools should teach creationism alongside evolution simply begin your school papers, “According to science comma…” and then you are safe: you won’t contradict parents and holy scriptures.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Drafted 2022-2023
Winter,
at my house.
Afterthoughts:
~Here’s a news story about a family in Scotland, not assimilated, at last putting hatred and religion below love. (Link)
~Speaking of insults, as I write this, the Kremlin has recently created a crime of “insulting the armed forces” if you voice any doubts about the “special military operation.” Also it is crime to call it a “war” or an “invasion,” punishable by years in prison.
In Iran, I feel the Dear Ayatollah is murdering peaceful protectors to save his regime, not to save the wearing of headscarfs. In fact, I feel the authorities know they have for years been turning many young people of Iran into atheists, and feeling OK about doing so, if only they can keep their power.
From Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You do not seize power to make the revolution, you make the revolution to seize power.”
