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Censorship the eXile Way

Thread ID: 12333 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-02-14

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madrussian [OP]

2004-02-14 22:02 | User Profile

If you can ignore the self-promotion, there are some interesting insights in the article

[url]http://exile.ru/183/183010100.html[/url]

As the eXile noted in our last issue, there’s been a lot of whining lately about the “return of censorship to Russia.” Frankly, most of this bellyaching is by people who don’t have a clue about how to do censorship right. We feel that the real reason censorship gets such a bad press is that most of the time it’s left to amateurs. And that’s where we come in. Just hand over control of all organs of repression (police, army, security services) and watch our dust as we show you censorship as it should be done—censorship the eXile way.

Now before any of you so-called liberals start complaining, you need to know that us intellectuals decided a long time ago that there’s always censorship, even in your so-called “free societies.” Read your Marcuse, read your Foucault, read your latest newsletter from the Homeland Security Service. The authorities are agreed, ladies and gentlemen: there’s always censorship, and anybody who doesn’t know that is just a dumb old hick from the sticks.

Us intellectuals realized a long time ago that no human society could function without heavy-duty jamming all signals that might allow people to see reality. Because reality is so downright horrible we have to jam it tighter than Castro. The only question is who’s going to decide what gets jammed and how to jam it. We aim to show you here that your best bet is exchanging the kind of censorship we have now—sloppy, cruel and depressing—for the eXile brand, which we guarantee will put more fun in your life, if only because you’ll get to see a lot of smug, famous media personalities humiliated, gangraped and executed along the way.

the eXile uses trained professionals

There are basically two kinds of censorship, but most people only notice the harmless kind that involves trying to hide naughty words or pictures once they’re already out there in plain sight. This kind of censorship is what brought down the Soviets. It just doesn’t work, and ain’t worth the trouble of trying. It just ends up as a joke. Take today’s New York Times story on the Superbowl “Halftime Controversy” over Janet Jackson’s left tit popping out on cue. The Times, America’s paper of record, couldn’t bring itself to say the word “nipple,” and squirmed around the offending udder with a real classic of verbal censorship: “…Some Janet Jackson fans were, no doubt, disappointed to see that a body part they were eager to see was obscured behind a silver star…” This sentence is so afraid to say “nipple” that it’s confusing. You can’t even be sure which “body part” they’re talking about. Unless, of course, you looked at the gigantic photo accompanying the article, which shows Jackson’s sagging boob with a star clipped over that controversial, multimillion-dollar middleaged nipple.

What we have here is one of the peculiarities of American censorship: in the US, it’s language that gets you in trouble. You can kill as many people as you want, but don’t call them ethnic names while doing it. You can squeeze billions out of the ordinary suckers out there, as long as you don’t talk like an “elitist.” And you can let your highly-insured tit flop around America’s living rooms all you want, as long as you don’t make the NYT use a word like “nipple.”

The other sort of censorship is harder to spot and much more cruel. It’s a matter of which stories get told or noticed in the first place, rather than fussing about the language in which they get told. Put it this way: how many things happened yesterday? and how many of those things made the nightly news? For starters, you probably didn’t. Yup, if you’re reading the eXile, it’s a good bet that nothing you did or ever will do made the news.

Your story is just too depressing. To make the news, your story has to be one of the consoling lies that a culture, any culture, tells itself to make the ordinary suckers’ lives seem bearable to them. If your bike is rearended at a stoplight and you spend the rest of your life tetraplegic, it’s not going to be on the news. It’s a big story to you, and it’s the kind of story total strangers enjoy hearing, if only out of morbid curiosity, but it won’t make the news. It’s too true. It’s not an exception.

But if you suddenly regain the ability to walk after years of lying there paralyzed, that’s news. The TV crews will film your every wobble. Not just because it’s unusual, but because it’s a consoling lie. Don’t think so? Try calling those same news crews a few months later, when you slip back into paralysis. See how many of them show up to film that big story.

We all know these stories about happy exceptions to the rule. Here, we’ll start one and you finish it, TV news style: “A young immigrant arrives without a penny in his pocket, not speaking a word of English….” The correct ending: “…then he earns ten million dollars and starts an ethnically-restricted scholarship fund.” That’s the only way he makes the news. All the other immigrants who started out washing floors and are still washing floors aren’t news, because their stories are statistically valid, i.e. true. The censors don’t want true stories, they want Cinderella, over and over and over: the shining exception, the distracting lie.

Try keeping track of the stories you see featuring “ordinary people” and you’ll discover that they’re all lies: Illiterate nobodies get rich. Terminal cancer case is spontaneously cured. Parakeet and cat become best friends. Behind all these like the breath of the grave whisper the simple, censored facts: the poor stay poor. Millions of terminal cancer patients die on schedule. The cat grabs the parakeet first chance it gets, and kills it slowly, torturing it with great pleasure. The Sum of All Lies: Forrest Gump

Lie #204: cute girls dig retards

When a culture really wants to censor the horrible truth, it takes these stories and puts them together into an “inspirational” movie. And that movie is called Forrest Gump. Next time you want to see censorship in action, just watch Tom Hanks acting out every single lie his screenwriters could fit into two short hours. Moron becomes profound; cripple becomes star athlete; Vietnam builds character; hick turns billionaire; hopeless boyhood crush fulfilled at last…. Forrest Gump is the best example of real censorship you’ll find—because in our era, censorship has gone on the offensive. It doesn’t try to hide ugly facts like those crude Soviets. Instead it actively develops and market a set of lies designed to fill up the heads of the suckers so seductively that no raw truth would even be welcome inside their heads.

And damned if it doesn’t work.

If you’re one of the non-miracles, the tetraplegic who stayed tetraplegic, the penniless immigrant who remained penniless, the effect of years of this kind of censorship is to convince you that it’s your own fault. If you were any good, a miracle would’ve happened to you. So you suffer not just from being unable even to wipe your own ass, but from guilt about it.

That’s the fun of censorship: you show your version of the world over and over, till everybody who doesn’t fit it is so miserable they want to kill themselves. And then they do—and the punchline is, even that isn’t news! Your suicide will not be televised—unless you were famous already. In that case, they’ll show it non-stop, because it tells another convenient lie: that life is just as hard at the top, it’s lonely at the top…when the simple fact is that life at the bottom, or anywhere but the top, is so unbearably lonely that it takes non-stop aggressive censorship to keep the losers from killing themselves en masse.

Imagine how wonderful life could be if the eXile were allowed to handle censorship just for a while. We stand for truth, baby! And not because “the truth will set you free” or any of that idealistic crap, but because the truth is kryptonite. The truth is death itself. The truth doesn’t just hurt, it kills. It kills us, and you too, as well as our enemies—but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.

We’d still allow the showing of the kind of “inspirational” movies that run at Christmastime. We’d just apply a simple rule: only the first half-hour will be shown. It’s just uncanny, folks, how neatly this separates the bleak truth from the sweet lies. Say some of you inspiration addicts get a hankering to see It’s A Wonderful Life. Fine! But you only get the first half-hour, when the fool wanders in the cold looking for a place to die, as the banker sneers at him. Now that’s truth. Suppose you’re fond of the kind of “romantic comedy” where a lonely nerd finds love? Well, we’ll let you watch the true part, the first half-hour where the nerd scuffs around the slovenly apartment, trying to bond with his or her sullen cat, sobbing on the couch. Watch all you want! Knock yourself out! But remember, once the nerd meets the gorgeous yet tender-hearted lover, the eXile’s massive lie-jamming devices kick in, and you’ll find yourself watching nothing but static. It’s for your own good, you know. What you get now is killing you anyway, and not even in a fun way. The Sit-Kommissar

Lie #384: Fag hags have more fun

Take a nice harmless sitcom like Will & Grace, about the cute ditzy redhead who’s in love with her gay roommate. That script is being lived out by a couple million dumb girls who might have felt a little dissatisfied with hanging around gay men and bitchy women—until the sitcom reassured them that there’s nothing more fun than being a fag hag. And of course, that’s a lethal, horrible lie; there’s no existence more wretched than that of the crippled women who hang around gay men, or the ****ed-up men who waste their lives trying to show dykes that men can be sensitive too.

If the eXile’s kinder, gentler censorship took over, not only would the cast and writers of the show hold their next session at the bottom of a lime-dusted mass grave, but a new and better version of the show would play: Fruit Fly, a genuinely funny reality show on the hilarious predicament of an actual Manhattan fag hag, sobbing in the toilet of a new ethnic restaurant after a particularly “witty” comment on her clothes, sobbing in her apartment at those old pictures of Halloween parties, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing…. It would crack you up—and be educational too!

Our Sit-Kommissars would have to work overtime, just trying to keep track of all the evil shows requiring blood purges followed by remakes. Not just other intentionally life-destroying comedies like Dharma & Greg, or in fact any sitcom with two first names in the title, but whole classes of show:

*Copspittle Shows: the censor-purpose of shows like ER, NYPD Blue and LA Law has always been to persuade miserable office slaves that the office is sexually hot, interesting place full of quirky personalities just interacting to beat the band. This, of course, is a socially-useful lie so transparent that it’s hard to feel any pity for the suckers who buy it. It might be better to use what we call “proactive censorship, ad hominem”: that is, find out which households watch this filth and then have special eXile Aestheto-Gruppen teams kill everyone in said households.

*All News Programs: It should be obvious that all news programs will be cancelled “with extreme prejudice” when we take over. These shows are elaborate jamming devices, designed to keep you from registering what you actually see: the obvious, miserable world of failure, aging, and death by dangling miracles and spectacles before you. After committing all news staff to the flames, the eXile censors will install video cams at randomly chosen locations to show the unseen, actual, flat existence. We might have a 24-hr channel showing the corner of a storeroom, or a particular shrub outside the San Leandro DMV office. And we’ll provide 24-hr coverage of the hospital room of a tetraplegic accident victim who remains tetraplegic.

eXile Shining Exceptions Award: Amazingly, there is one sitcom which will not be censored, because it reflects horrific reality. Of course, it’s a British show—they’re just braver than us, let’s face it. It’s called The Office, and if you want to know how you actually spend your life, where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing all that time you zone out between sleeps, this will tell you. But we warn you, you may not survive the revelation.

Honorable Mention in the same category goes to Hoop Dreams, a documentary which dares to tell the story of a non-miracle: two talented, hardworking ghetto kids who dream of making it in the NBA…and don’t. The Happy Side: Drugs’n’Vengeance!

Lie #41: Rush deserves treatment

But don’t think we’d just emphasize the negative, folks. Nope, our eXile censorship plan will do its honest best to show the bright side of life. This is actually a pretty simple task, because there are only a few real consolations in Schopenhauer’s world. Still, we’ll do our best to show them early and often. One of the great joys of life is vengeance, and we plan to have free 24-hr tape loops of the execution of enemies of the people, their every shriek and splat filmed with love.

And we plan a special feature combining vengeance and that other great consolation, drugs. At the moment, drugs are so intensely censored in mainstream media that Stalin is probably looking down with a smile, nodding as he puffs his pipe to see just how much cruelty and lies can be packed into one small topic. People whose most cherished, happy moments involve floating on morphine or nuzzling on E solemnly nod their heads when watching another melodrama in which every user dies a terrible death.

We’ll fix this one fast, folks. First we’ll offer nonstop video of happy druggies doing what they do best, variously tweaking, nodding, blissing or even—for the peasants among you—just being drunk.

Next we’ll go back and exact vengeance on all the lying scriptwriters, actors and directors who conspired to help deny the comfort of drugs to their fellow sufferers. What makes the prospect of revenge so sweet here is that every single writer, actor, director and producer uses drugs. And the bastards don’t even have the decency to feel ashamed of their hypocrisy.

A classic case is the Don Johnson/Mickey Rourke megabomb Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The climax of the film comes when the two stars are deciding whether or not to shoot a man in cold blood. They finally shoot him down, after Rourke says to Johnson, “Man, this guy sells drugs! He’s a murderer!” The story goes that that scene had to be reshot at least a dozen times because the director and Johnson, who shared a coke dealer, were waiting for a delivery and couldn’t focus for days. You almost have to admire hypocrisy as raw as that.

Almost—but not quite. The eXile Soviet of Censors has a simple three-step plan to help media people addicted to anti-drug lies.

Step One: review every film and tv show concerning drugs from the past 40 years and interrogate the entire cast and crew of each concerning their own drug use. These interrogations will be facilitated, of course, by drugs—drugs which release inhibitions and encourage full disclosure.

Step Two: every actor, writer or director who is found to have used drugs while making any “anti-drug” show or movie will be forced to make a public confession detailing his or her most pleasant experiences with his or her drug of choice.

Step Three: After their confessions, these convicted perjurers will be taken to large prison cells occupied by a few of the millions of harmless drug-users imprisoned over the past decades for using the very same drugs. Punishment of the guilty will be left to the prisoners’ imagination, but we’ll offer suggestions, as for example that the prisoners show their Hollywood colleagues what it feels like to be gang-raped by four or five HIV-positive felons.

And, of course, the funniest moments from our three-step program will be rebroadcast as Christmas and back-to-school specials. We anticipate Super-Bowl level ratings for certain scenes, such as Rush Limbaugh’s spreadeagled debut on the floor of Folsom Prison. So let’s not hear any more naysayers whining that our censorship will take the fun out of TV.For one thing, naysayers are subject to special punishment. You don’t even want to know what it is. We’re censoring ourselves here, because it’s so gruesome we can’t even write it down. Just trust us, you don’t want to be one of the naysayers when our program kicks in. Private Conversation

Lie #178: Drugs don't make you feel good

Private conversations offer perhaps the biggest untapped field for the eager eXile censor. Under the present elitist regime, these conversations are largely ignored because they simply don’t matter. We plan to show more respect for ordinary people by monitoring their every word at work, in the car, and above all at home. After all, censorship begins at home, and the eXile regime will do its best to see that it’s strictly enforced. Not the sloppy, amateurish censorship of easily distracted Moms and Dads, but a stern and consistent censorship aimed at accentuating the negative and eliminating the positive. How can we hope to maintain strict control over millions of households, you ask? That’s where our key piece of hardware, the eXile’s patented Censor in A Box, enters the picture. This handy product is basically a lie-detector wired up to sensitive pain-inflicting devices which are attached to every chair and sofa in every home across the formerly Free World. The device works on a simple principle: when it detects a lie, it applies a certain level of punishment; a small electric shock for a minor untruth, up to a heaping helping of scorpionfish venom, which inflicts the most agonizing pain known to man, for a major deceit.

You might be wondering, “Who decides what’s a lie?”

Good question! Simple answer: we do!

But the lay person who’s nervous about getting a little “wake-up call” in his or her posterior from mean ol’ Mister Scorpionfish will generally do fine if he or she simply remembers the eXile’s rule: the truth is as flat and simple as that shrub outside the DMV. When you find yourself adding drama and hope, you’re probably lying. But thanks to Censor in A Box, you don’t have to figure it all out for yourself. The machine will tell you if you’re departing from the truth, and in a way you’re sure to remember!

Typical remarks which will be punished by the machine range from false hopes (“Hard work always pays off!”), which rate the full scorpionfish-venom dose, all the way down to false reassurance (“You look OK to me!”) which require only a few hundred volts to the spine of the offender, since no one believes them anyway.

Of course it’s hard to quantify these things. There are no hard’n’fast rules, there’s only the whim of the hand holding the gun. And we’re hoping you’ll let us be that hand. We may not always be able to lay out every little syllable of the complicated web of prejudices by which we plan to run our censorship, but we know wrongness when we see it. We just have a deep, deep feel for it. And you will too, after a while. It may not be until you’re jolting over the Rockies in a cattle car, wishing you hadn’t made that casual remark praising the wrong sitcom in the hearing of an eXile operative…but sooner or later, you’ll feel it too.