On censorship of ‘Confederate,’ it’s ‘Satanic Verses’ deja vu – Washington Examiner

There's a grassroots movement brewing to kill the new HBO docudrama "Confederate" before it even begins filming, let alone airs. The Guardian has a useful summary of the controversy so far:

Confederate, the new HBO show from the Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, was announced in a press release a few weeks ago and is slated to begin filming sometime after the final season of Thrones, which will probably air in 2018. But already there seems to be little appetite for the series, which plans to take a revisionist approach to American history, imagining a world in which the South successfully seceded from the union and slavery persists "as a modern-day institution" ... Since the project was revealed in early July, it has become a kind of cultural albatross for HBO, and especially Benioff and Weiss, each of whom have fielded criticisms over the years for both the overwhelming whiteness of Game of Thrones ...

Roxanne Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University, chimed in on the opinion pages of the New York Times:

Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways. ... My exhaustion with the idea of "Confederate" is multiplied by the realization that this show is the brainchild of two white men who oversee a show that has few people of color to speak of and where sexual violence is often gratuitous and treated as no big deal. I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands. And when I think about the number of people who gave this project the green light, the number of people who thought this was a great idea, my weariness grows exponentially. ...

Let's put aside complaints about the "whiteness" of "Game of Thrones." It makes sense for a fantasy set in a Medieval European-like fantasyland to use predominantly (but not exclusively) European-looking actors, just as it made sense that the 1980 miniseries "Shogun" used many Japanese actors or, for that matter, for the 1977 miniseries "Roots" to use black actors. If actors should be cast without reference to skin color or identity, than that should go both ways.

Let's also put aside the fact that alternative histories are not uncommon. "The Man in the High Castle" imagines the world if Germany and Japan won World War II. "Confederate States of America" is a deeply satirical look at what would happen if the South had won the Civil War. Philip Roth's The Plot against America imagines what would have happened if nativist Charles Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and signed non-interference treaties with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

What is truly discomforting about the current campaign to shut down "Confederate" is that neither those who are leading it nor those who are piling on in an international Twitter campaign have read a single line of its script. They have no idea how the writers will address issues of race and race relations, nor whether the alternative history will open the door to productive discussion and debate.

If the writers do a bad job, critics pan the show, and people stop watching, that's one thing. But to pre-emptively try to shut down a show sight unseen, that's different.

In a sense, what we are seeing increasingly appears to be the Western version of the Satanic Verses affair.

In that 1989 case, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for blasphemy, even though neither he nor those around him had ever read the work.

At the time, dozens of writers stood up for Rushdie's right to write and publish. Today, most are silent, and the leading outlets of progressive thought side with the proverbial lynch mob. True, Khomeini's fatwa is an extreme example. No one is suggesting Benioff and Weiss be murdered, but the idea that it is proper to censor works without first reading their content in order to protect popular mores is similar.

Progressives might cry foul at a comparison between what they seek to do and what Khomeini did. After all, haven't conservatives also sought to censor? In the 1980s, many conservatives criticized the funding choices of the National Endowment for the Arts, especially in the wake of a racy Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit and the production of the "Piss Christ" photograph of the late 1980s. Recently, the Washington Post recalled those controversies:

Conservative Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) took to the Senate floor in May 1989 "to question the NEA's funding procedures." Helms called Serrano "not an artist, he is a jerk," and D'Amato theatrically tore a reproduction of the work to shreds, calling it a "deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity." Meanwhile, more than 50 senators and 150 representatives contacted the NEA to complain about the exhibits. [Piss Christ artist Andres] Serrano still remembers being "shocked" by the angry reaction and, he told The Post on Sunday, how suddenly the work became a "political football." ... But the exhibit that pushed Helms over the edge was a retrospective of work by late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who Andrew Hartman, author of "A War for the Soul Of America: A History of the Culture Wars," wrote "became the Christian Right's bte noire." ... Like the exhibit containing "Piss Christ," it was partially, indirectly funded by the NEA. The exhibit featured 175 photographs. One hundred sixty-eight were inoffensive, such as images of carefully arranged flowers. The seven from his "X-Portfolio," though, were intensely provocative. One presented a finger inserted into a penis. Another was a self-portrait showing Mapplethorpe graphically inserting a bullwhip into his anus. Two displayed nude children.

What the Washington Post misses, however, is that the controversy was over public funding for such exhibits; it did not demand pre-emptive censorship over writers or artists. Likewise, when 25 years ago Vice President Dan Quayle famously criticized the television character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, his goal was not to censor the hit CBS sitcom, but rather simply to criticize its judgment. Likewise, criticisms of the Broadway play "Oslo" or the anti-Israel propaganda play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" focus on how they twist the truth or cherry-pick history rather than demand they be shuttered.

Criticism and censorship are not synonymous. The former advances productive debate; the latter seeks to avoid it. With "Confederate," it seems progressives are siding firmly with censorship as they argue against the right to tackle subjects which run afoul of their own narrow orthodoxy.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.

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On censorship of 'Confederate,' it's 'Satanic Verses' deja vu - Washington Examiner