I think it's a really important piece that resonates even to the present day.
Alan Moore: My feelings upon censorship are that it is wrong, full stop. It is a thing which I utterly oppose. I believe that there is nothing in this world that is unsayable. It is not information which is dangerous; it is the lack of information which is dangerous.
The example that I always cite is still the one which means the most to me. When she was five, my daughter came home from school, asking for some money for a collection. I assumed it was for collie dogs for the blind or something like that, and I gave her some money and asked what it was for. She said it was for a school friend of hers who was in the hospital. I asked what was wrong with him, and apparently, his older brother had gone berserk with a bread knife and killed his mother and then turned upon him. And I stood there with my jaw hanging open down to my chest. This was a five year-old telling me this, and there is no way short of following my daughter around in an armored car or putting her in a bank vault for the remainder of her life that I can protect her from knowing about the sort of stuff that goes down in this world.
Now, the only thing that I can give my children that's going to be of any help to them in life at all is information, to tell them what exists in the world and to give them a concrete text by which they can approach and understand it.
Amber is only just starting to comfortably read, and Leah, the older child, can read almost anything. She has read Watchmen four or five times. she has read Art Spiegelman's Maus. If she comes in and happens to see an underground comic with a bright cover and asks to read it. if there is any, say, ugly or distressing sexual content in it, I'll tell her that there is, that the sex stuff in it isn't meant to be taken literally, and that she might not want to read it.
I'll tell her that if she wants to read it, she can, and that if there's anything in it that bothers or puzzles her, she should come to me and talk about it. I would like to think that l have a relationship with my children within the framework of which l can talk about anything. If that means that my children might eventually come across had pornography or bad material of another nature, then I would prefer to have built up at relationship with them so that they'll have a context in which and by which to lodge that sort of material.
I prefer doing that to getting into the dangerous territory of saying that I wish to suppress this material so that my children can't see it or so somebody else can't see it. Because when you get into that area, you're really starting to head into troubled waters.
I've heard an awful lot of feminists, for example, calling for a ban on pornography because they perceive it as being insulting and degrading in its approach to women. No doubt with a lot of child pornography, that's absolutely true. But you're taking a dangerous step if you go on from there and ban the material because then you are in effect saying that all censorship is right, and you cannot turn around if someone starts to censor you and say, “Hey, look, this isn't fair!"
You must be consistent about it. Feminists who wish to censor pornography should think what it would be like in a fundamentalist society that believed a woman's place was as according to the Bible: under man and in the kitchen.
If the feminist literature was seen to he socially corrosive, then I could imagine that there are several right-wing groups which could make just as persuasive an argument for the banning of all feminist literature as feminists can make for the banning of all pornography.
Now, unless we’re going to have total silence, the only other option is total noise. One of my responsibilities as an artist is to keep the noise level up. If I dislike the Rambo films, then I've got the option of making as much noise as I can in an effort to redress the balance. If the Rambo films are putting over one view of the world, I can use whatever means are upon to me to put forward a countering view of the world. And that is all that I have a moral right to do. I don't have the right to picket Sylvester Stallone films. I don't have the right to try and stop films like Rambo from being made, much as I despise them.
If I were to insist upon that right for my own reasons, then I couldn't expect my own right to free speech to continue being extended to me.
That, to me, is the essential thing. If there is something you do not like, presumably you can articulate your reasons. If you really believe in what you're saying, presumably you can put as good a case against the values shown in any particular work as that work itself puts for its own values. That is the proper way to do things, not t.o try to get a government body to do your moral policing for you, not to hand responsibility for what you or other people can or cannot read to some outside party and let them make all the decisions. That is very, very dangerous. We already have certain strict information controls within our society. I don't think we realty need to add to them.
We're living in a world where we have a capacity to annihilate the entire population, something we pay our tax dollars and pounds to support. Our own government and those of other countries carry out this lethal, hideous, grotesque ballet, often in secret, to support their interests, involving the deaths of thousands of people and the erasing of square mile upon square mile of property. These things can happen, and somehow, we don't seem to get too excited about the fact that they happen and continue to happen. We don't put a strong effort into actually eradicating some of the looming social evils that are actually destroying people's lives. But censorship... Let somebody show a nipple in the wrong place, let somebody use language that offends good Christian, Presbyterian values, let somebody refer to a sexual act which, though millions of people worldwide might carry it out regularly in the privacy of their own homes, is still not fit to be mentioned, and people will suddenly find the energy to rise up in arms and take up moral cudgels against this atrocity. I find it very suspect that people can get so excited about things so relatively unimportant when they can only respond with apathy to the genuine evils of the world.
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