Human Rights Commission supports burning books and pre-censorship for art no one has seen because ‘progress’
Ummmmmm, WTF?
Human Rights Commission supports call to shut down Christchurch mosque attacks film They Are Us
The Human Rights Commission has backed members of New Zealand’s Muslim community calling for a film in development about the aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque attacks not to go ahead.
“As a country, we have a responsibility to do all we can to ensure that Muslim New Zealanders are represented accurately in stories,” said chief human rights commissioner Paul Hunt.
“We have an obligation to do all we can to ensure those stories come from a place of respect. It matters who is telling the stories and for whom those stories are being told, particularly when it is your story being told.“
Does it terrify anyone else that a state department is now demanding the censorship of art?
Watching so many citizens gleefully forming a mob to burn books they haven’t read has been terrifyingly insightful.
It’s not just that so many NZers want to cancel a movie they haven’t even seen as part of a lynch mob, it’s that they also wanted to be congratulated for being so ‘progressive’ that is gasp inducing – they have all the misplaced certainty of book burners.
This is the age of pre-censorship, cancelling a movie before it even exists to punish expression outside identity politics dogma.
Killing a thought before it can be art is a grim utopia.
Welcome to Big Sister.
We’ve spent all week watching an identity politics woke Twitter lynch mob cancel a film they didn’t like because ‘white supremacy’ and ‘patriarchy’, and now a State agency has demanded a film be cancelled that they haven’t even seen.
What madness is this? It’s like a collective mental illness that is gripping us as a culture!
If only we could care about global warming the way we do about PoC identity representation in a Hollywood movie.
If They Are Us actually gets cancelled we will be in an age of pre-censorship.
1984 was about constantly erasing the past to control the present. Cancel Culture erases the present to control the future.
You can see why the Right see so much fertile voting possibility in cancel culture.
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When The Human Rights Commission supports censorship of an unknown entity, then society is almost certainly in deep trouble. When pondering complaining to them about the public antics of the co-leader of a political party, I was astonished to learn that she was or had served as an advisor to them for many years.
How and why persons get appointed to such commissions is a bit of a mystery, but this particular commission has the reputation for being composed of people who can’t even get along with each other, are paid very well for not doing so, and make the Wellington City Council look like a vicarage tea party. A better way of selecting commissioners may need to be found, and working brain cells would be a reasonable place to start.
Personally I am uneasy about using the Muslim massacre to showcase the PM, it is too macabre, and too raw for many whose wellbeing has been terribly damaged. However, this does not mean that the circumstances of the tragedy should be in any way suppressed or repressed, which is a different issue altogether.
Pre-censorship by a state agency is tyranny and is very dangerous, and quite frightening.
I agree with you completely, Martyn.
The cancel/censorship/shut them down mentality is taking over.
Eureka!
We make the film ourselves but we cast Jacinda with a black, Muslim, vegan, transgender person.
What about the shooter? Peter Jackson surely has some scary Orc costumes we can use. Demonic horns – good. Main thing is to make him look as different from the rest of us as possible( we do not want anyone saying this evil man is a product of our postcolonial cultures of racism and violence)
For the cast of muslim victims I do not think we should have any men that are too heavily bearded coz’ that is going to be Taliban like. They should be as cool and westernised as possible.
Nor any heavily veiled women- that will seem to retro and any block buster film needs some good looking babes( Julia Roberts!)
Whadda ya think?
Beyond belief…its one thing to criticise something when its out in the public arena..but to try and stop a movie based on assumptions as to what it will be like…f.f.s…