Index on Censorship 2/2000 [antikvár]

EDITORIAL Priváté places espite women's collective achievements over the past century, there have always been profound divisions between them, and none greater than in attitudes to pornography. Index confronts the women in the US and the UK who want to ban pornography, arguing that they misrepresent both its content and its effects, as well as misunderstanding the culture in which we live and the 'peculiar nature of fantasy' (p45). There are other issues where women censor and silence — both themselves and others. It is, for instance, mainly women who insist on clitorodectomies for their daughters (p73). Women in Zimbabwe remain silent, and risk further infection, rather than admit to family members dying of AIDS (pl 72). Asian mothers and mothers-in-law may kill their young women, saying they act 'not out of choice but responsibility1 (p82), while in eastern Europe (p76) there is overwhelming silence from the victims of violence in that sacrosanct priváté place — the home. And this, of course, is the nub of the argument: women are the guardians of that priváté place and if they censor, however monstrously, they say they do it to protect themselves, their daughters, their culture. Yet, ironically, it is often the misogyny embedded in the cultures they are protecting — whether western or eastern — that makes life so precarious for them. At a time when all Europe is watching Jörg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria, our file 011 that other Europe further east reports on disturbing levels of racism 111 countries that will be future partners in an expanded EU. Rafal Pankowski deplores the fact that the far right has entered the heart of Polish mainstream politics (pl43), while Anatolii Pristavkin sees that the promotion of Nazism and racism attracts no opprobrium in his native Russia (pl36). Is collective envy at the root of all this, asks the Hungárián writer George Konrád (pl49)? Certainly on this subject, as Ludvik Vaculik suggests in his sharply satirical piece (pl32), we need look no further than into our own hearts: the implicit racism in the British Home Secretary's recent remark, taken up with alacrity by somé of the média, that he wanted to see all the people 011 the hijacked Afghanjet removed from Britain las soon as reasonably practicable' niade nonsense of his quasi-judicial role in deciding their fate. Meanwhile, as Dávid Irving's libel case against Deborah Lipstadt puts historical truth on trial in the place least appropriate to judge it, a court, we publish Norman Finkelstein's essay (pl 20) on the Holocaust industry and the influence of Holocaust denial in the USA. ?