Censorship 101

WARNING: The following post is very long. Hence, if you're not the "read things" type, you may want to skip it.

NOTE: The fact that I'm typing this post and not spending the time on better things (e.g. reading 2 chapters of the BGS textbook or read 4 chapters of the Psychology textbook for my mid-term test next week or complete the AS homework) goes to show how much I hope to learn from this. I hope everyone will learn too!

Today, I attended the Ministerial Forum 2006: Is Censorship Relevant in a First World Singaporean Society? The speaker invited by Econs Soc and Soc Sci Soc was Dr Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs & Information, Communications and The Arts.

In this posting, I will attempt to paraphrase, to the best of my lousy English abilities, what Dr Balaji Sadasivan said in his speech during the forum and the questions and responses in the Q&A thereafter. Hence, I would like to apologize first to Dr Balaji if you do read this and find that I have misinterpreted anything of what you said and there are any inaccuracies in what I write here. Here and there I will also add in a few of my own comments and observations and I will say so explicitly if I do.

Background: Dr Balaji Sadasivan is a pediatric neurosurgeon by profession. He also has a law degree. During the 2001 election, he contested alongside PM Lee Hsien Loong in Ang Mo Kio GRC and was labelled by the media as one of the "Super 7s". For more information, you may view his CV here.

Talk: He starts of by introducing what he is going to talk about today - mainly introducing to us to the principles that the ministry applies in censorship and how they go about doing it, while trying to make relevant references to local examples as much as possible.

A bit of personal history. When he was a student in NUS studying medicine, he organised an arts event - a triple bill of sorts as we would call it today - a comedy, musical and theatre rolled into one. On the first day of the screening, the Dean's wife walked out of the theatre because she had found some of the contents of the play offensive. As the same play was to be shown on the next day, the organizing members (including him) went down to the Dean's office and debated with him about the contents. They eventually won over the Dean and no changes were made. So, he finds it somewhat amusing that he's handling censorship now, as 30 years ago, he was on the other side of the fence.

Why exactly is freedom of speech / freedom of expression so contentious? We value it, that's why. If we did not value it, then we would not be griping about it. It is perhaps what makes the human species different and more dignified than other animals.

However, freedom of speech is not absolute. It is always constrianed. In every society, there exists a tension between liberty and authority. It can move both ways. How this tensions exists and comes about is due to many factors and one of the main factors is the history of the country.

In European history, during the 18th, 19th and 20th century, the region was ravaged by 2 World Wars and the religious wars before that, hence, there is a culture for people to talk freely and lightly of race and religion. The result is the Danish cartoons on Prophet Mohammed which most Europeans had no problems with but greatly infuriated people from the Middle East.

In Singapore, there were the racial riots and the Maria Hertogh riots (Muslims rioted against the court decision to return Maria, then 13, back to her biological Dutch Catholic parents after she had been raised a Muslim under foster parents), indicating the fragile relationships that exists between different races and religions in Singapore.

With reference back to the tension that exists between liberty and authority, it is a tough job in censorship to move between the 2 ends, towards either of the ends. It is not easy because there is inertia. Whenever you try to shift between the 2, people are afraid of going down the slippery slope either ways - towards too much liberty, or towards too much authority.

Firstly, in applying censorship, there is the "harm" principle. And there are a few examples of this.

One. Recently, a person was arrested for writing letters and providing certain formation to foreigners in protest of something. Now this is unacceptable because there are things that are secret and obviously they had to act quickly before more things are leaked.

Two. Hate speech. This is in reference to the bloggers who deliberately targetted a a specific group within the society in Singapore to cause them harm. This is harmful to society and hence, they were arrested, charged, and although their punishements were light, the correct message had been sent out.

Three. Sex and pornography. It gets a bit more tricky here because there is an area where the arts is involved. How and by what standards do you disinguish between art and pornography? Where does a picture of a bare breasted woman stand? Some time ago, MICA shut down a website titled "Fluffyboy" which posted obscene pictures of under-aged boys.

Secondly, there is the "offence" principle. How people will take offense to what is presented. For example, Playboy & Comopolitans and the relevant magazines. If you want to stop this ban, soceity has to change and not take offence. Society needs to understand that with freedom there needs to be tolerance and unless society understands this, we cannot stop the constraint.

This is where the idea of a committee comes in. Dr Balaji says that there is actually a committee, made up of everyday, ordinary Singaporeans who come in and make the decisions on censorship. Don't have the mistaken impression that there is some high-powered civil servant doing all censorship. The idea of the committee will come in later.

But people are selfish and what is offensive to one may not be to another. Whenever you fight to expand your own space, you are constricting the outside space for things that we don't like and this will infiltrate other people's space which would lead to confusing standards.

In another area, there is the issue of "political sensitivity". The Singapore Biennale has some examples. In one exhibit, there was a video of Bin Laden and also a video of a Japanese drinking Sake. Then there's a person saying, repeating "Koizumi is an idiot". We had to take it out because it may cause offense to the Japanese! Then there was a terrorism exhibition at the National Library and there was a picture of Arafat. Is he or is he not a terrorist? We had to tell them to take the picture out. Then there was another exhibition in which Gandhi's face printed was on a slipper and the Indian Ambassy wrote to us to complain. Fortunately, the Indian artist (from India) had a good explanation. Many countries are so sensitive that we are forced to use censorship on our own and it is unnecessary for us to go around offending countries for no good reason.

And then there is race and religion for the "offense" principle. For religion, there was the "Da Vinci Code". Despite the fact that there was considerable representation to protest against the screening of the movie, we went ahead with it anyway because we (the committee) felt that there was sufficient fiction in the story for people to understand that it is a work of fiction.

As for race, there was the recent case of the banning of the play "Smegma". This term is actually a word for some mammalian genetelia secretion. The inefficient manner in which the play was approved, then banned with a statement, then banned with a different statment is a given, but the fact is that the play deserved to be banned.

Dr Balaji then proceeds to read a highly offensive scene. I can't really remember the exact words but it was something to the effects of:

>2 chinese soldiers deciding how to rape a malay muslim woman.
>Soldier 1: I say fuck her now.
>Soldier 2: We will wait for the one to come and fuck her.
>Soldier 1: Why wait? Fuck her now. Who's the one.
>Soldier 2: The HIV-positive fucking one. Wait for im to come around and fuck her.
>Malay woman: Stay away from me, you chinese pigs.

And then Dr Balaji tells us that there is another scene which describes 2 Singaporean chinese males having sex with 2 under-aged Muslim Indonesian women in Batam, but it is too offensive so he would not read it.

Journalists are of course eager to want to know what happened and perhaps support the arts group, but when MICA gave them a copy of the script to read, all of them backed down in writing what was in the script because it was too offensive.

Then there is the area of sexual liberty. Again the committee plays an important role. There was the introduction of Crazy Horse. Dr Balaji describes going to watch the show with his wife with 2 young officials (late 20s). After 20mins, they excused themselves, went to the toilet and were never again seen for the whole show. Even young officials are uncomfortable with the show which goes to show even most young Singaporeans are conservative. There is a way to improve this area and that is by the increase in classification of shows and the zoning idea - CITY vs NEIGHBOURHOODS.

A local community that has felt particularly agrieved is the gay community. With regards to this, there jury is still out on whether it is NATURE vs NURTURE. The committee takes the stand of impressionable minds (nuture-bias) and therefore have the requirement of gay-events to be R21 labelled. Unless there is conclusive evidence that it is genes (nature) that is the cause of homosexuality, the stand is one of non-promotion and of R21-requirements for gay events.

In one particular instance, a concert by a gay couple was banned simply because the organizers did not want to have the R21 classification. The organizers argued that the concert was organized in support of some AIDS foundation and that they had already sold tickets to people under the age of 21 and hence did not want the R21 classification. Therefore, the concert was banned.

As for the NATION party, there havve been conclusive studes to show that there are many people who are HIV positive attend these parties and the social interaction the happens after the party would be disastrous, hence the ban. In fact, many other countries which organise similar parties are considering not organising them.

Recently, there was a gay and lesbian pride month named INDIGNATION, which showcased healthy events like poetry reading and the works, hence it was left untouched.

Finally, there is the issue of political censorship. They understand that in an open society, it is not possible to censor peoples' views because the internet will always be the alternative. The newspapers are there to be as accurate as possible. During the elections, only political websites (PAP, SDP, etc) have the limitations on the podcast and videocast rules, no other websites are limited. Of course this will be reviewed for the coming elections.

Mr Brown. Dr Balaji states up front that MICA did not censor Mr Brown. He agrees it was a badly written response by the MICA official and that it was written in bad taste.

However, 1 point needed to be clarified and rebutted in Mr Brown's column and that was with regards to the suppression of information. Mr Brown's column implied that there was suppresion of information about Singapore's poor till after the elections which was not true, as the information was already out before the elections, which was the reason for the progress package.

MICA did not ask TODAY to suspend Mr Brown as a columnist. The editor of TODAY did the suspension. The editor was at fault for not checking the accuracy of the column even though he was fully aware of the inaccuracy of the information in Mr Brown's column.

Q&A:

QN: You say Singaporeans are constrained and intolerant. From my knowledge as a psychologist, no one is inherently conservative or liberal. I feel that the conservativeness is imposed by the government. The government is a major socializing agent.
ANS: Opening up can only occur if people themselves are tolerant and to convince society to be tolerant then we will reflect the views of society and the space will be open. The government is ultimately answerable to the society that it is governing and it has to reflect those views. Right now, the majority view is still fairly conservative. What you all can do is to support people like Mr Brown and to push society along to believe in you!

QN: Why does the government have to slam down and bankrupt all the JBJ and CSJ?
ANS: The government is responsible for correcting facutal errors. And it is the individuals that sue. Not the government. It is not what so much one says, but whether one says in the correct medium and context. For example, talkingcock.com VS The Straits Times. Also, people like CSJ do not stop at criticising. They always go one step further and allege things as fact, such as corruption of money etc, and that cannot be tolerated.


Dang. I forgot the rest of the questions. OK, I definitely missed out a lot of the questions but I think I've tried to cover as much as possible what Dr Balaji has said. I hope it gives everyone an insight on how MICA works. I did. Hahahaa...

Without wax,
Soulgroove