see no evil hear no evil

Censorship; the act of controlling what people read, write, see or hear. There is much contention on this issue here in Malaysia. It is quite common to hear the rakyat complaining that excessive censorship constitutes as infringement of human rights. However, to the higher authorities, censorship is sometimes necessary to preserve a peaceful society and to promote a healthier mind and soul. There are two different thoughts on this matter and the next question on one’s mind will be, who is correct? Let’s do an analysis on this matter based on the condition in Malaysia.

No doubt, our television and radio programs, movies and reading materials are subjected to certain degree of censorship to weed out offensive languages and scenes deemed improper and corruptible. Topics on religion sometimes come under the knife too. To the naked eye there is certainly nothing wrong here for we would not want our future generation to learn offensive languages and improper conducts. But is the initiative working? Young kids cursing and acting like hooligans are a norm when we are out there at the streets. Teenagers committing offences such as snatch thefts, rapes and fights are also common. The perfect example will be the Mat Rempit menace. There is even a news report published lately stating that teenagers are indulging in pre-marital sex and they are not ashamed to admit it even. It is all just for fun (guess most of us wish we should have born at a later time). On a serious note, the core objective of censorship clearly flounders based on all these events. So what went wrong?

We can perform censorship for all we want of the media but the one we forgotten to take into account is our own behavior and attitude. Parents and even politicians acting like cavemen and hooligans; ring a bell? How in the world do we expect the younger generation to act decent when our own esteemed elders curse and to some extent degrade women in public for instance, Parliament. This so called holier-than-thou attitude certainly does not make sense to many. At least in the movies, people are merely acting but in a Parliament? The only term that makes sense here is “lead by example”. Furthermore, the younger generation is a curious lot. You can restrict them but you can never stop them from finding out anything about anything especially in this cyber age era. The higher authorities misplaced their judgments and clearly failed in this aspect. To make further mockery of this failure, nowadays movies are being rated for general viewing and extreme violence or explicit sex. After the censorship board has gone through the movies, all movies are basically rated as “U” (for general viewing) no matter what their origins are. This contributes to another problem; the mushrooming of pirated VCDs and DVDs. The rationale is, would you pay more for something that is not complete or pay less for something that is complete? It is certainly a no-brainer here.

The worse kind of censorship is to silence oppositions and views that do not conform to establishments. It cannot be denied that some views are too extreme and seditious to be allowed for public consumption but shouldn’t the rakyat themselves make that call? Are we that pampered and immature to think rationally to the extent our leaders should decide for us? By suppressing an extremist will only prevent the rakyat from seeing the true nature of that person. Those that follow his extreme thinking only reveal the true self in them. Isn’t that a good thing? By that time we will know who our real friends or enemies are and who are true Malaysians that respect one another and cherish peace.

Hopefully to those that control and sit on the censorship board, the next time you censor something, do so with an open mind and determine what can be seen and heard by a mature, peace-loving and respectable Malaysian. God bless our intellect.