Hurrah for Harry

As one who has twice taken exception to Harry Reid’s column in The Herald newspaper on this blog, I feel honour bound to draw attention to the fact that Harry has, in my eyes at least, aspired to a somewhat higher standard of journalistic endeavour in today’s issue of that newspaper. I suspect his topic will appeal to Bondbloke as it deals with the thorny question of art and censorship. In his column, Harry argues that a movie called Hostel, which apparently is part of the ‘gorefest’ genre, contains so much in the way of gruesome horror and graphic violence that it should not have been certified for general release. Censorship and art…heady stuff indeed. But it isn’t the question of censorship per se that I want to focus on. Instead, it is Harry’s admission that he has reached this judgement despite not having seen the film for himself. In defence, Harry writes

“…I am not certain that you need to experience something before you can condemn it. I do not need to have been at Belsen to know that it was a terrible place to be”.

Now, I find myself agreeing one hundred percent with Harry on that one. It reminds me of the dark days of apartheid when apologists for that particularly vile regime would almost always end up attacking their opponents as being unqualified to comment as they had never visited South Africa. Yes, surely Harry is right – you didn’t have to be there to know it was wrong. And we all have a moral right if not obligation to speak out when an event or a law or an activity violates the fragile and largely implicit and inherited codes of behaviour which we understand to constitute the fabric of our civil society. And when that activity is formally constituted by an action on the part of the State, then that moral obligation becomes a fundamental duty. I'm not saying that I agree with Harry in this specific instance, but I think the general point he makes is a rather sensible one.

Which leads me – rather neatly I think – to something I read yesterday on Normblog which greatly puzzled me. It was this (albeit in edited form), which refers to a longer piece (see end remark) that Nick Cohen wrote in Sunday’s Observer on the Kember rescue by members of the UK’s special forces. This passage, by Cohen, struck me particularly forcefully:

“Yet at least Kember and his colleagues made a commitment to Iraq. They may have done no good, they may have put better and braver men in danger, yet they strike me as preferable to the majority of European liberals who have sat out the conflict…”

It isn’t entirely clear where Nick Cohen is going with this, but it begins to smack very much of the age-old view which says that if you ain’t part of the problem then you can’t be part of the solution. Well, many of us have not been part of many problems whose legacy is all around us, including in our written laws (national and international) and (largely unwritten) social mores (pace Harry Reid). In that way we are all playing the hand of cards which history (in the shape of our predecessors) has dealt us, and we in turn are all the dealers of the cards which those who come after will have to play. So, to Nick, I might say; (a) as Harry Reid puts it, not to be engaged in a conflict is not to disenfranchise oneself from judgement over the rights and wrongs of that event – immediate impact and historical legacy is a matter for us all, (b) someone who opposes the policies of the British and American governments is no more, and no less, sitting out a conflict as is someone who is supporting them – in your terms almost everyone (and certainly the majority of journalists and bloggers) is ‘sitting this one out’ except, of course, those who have no choice, and (c) from where I sit a great many “European liberals” have taken a fairly unambiguous side in the conflict, albeit it is a side that you might oppose. As custodians of the present, we all have an legitimate and equal responsibility for the future.