freedom of expression | freedom of expression
May.20.2013
I have been away attending the PEN Conference together with three other colleges from Pen Belgium Dutch speaking. The conference was extra-ordinary: we were catered for in a health good way, also vegetarians have been taken into account. The day's were long and the discussions and presentations...
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Jan.23.2013
Why do we protect the freedom of literature and the arts and deny the same to others, even if they might use a similar creative medium or idiom?
Salman Rushdie said in an interview:
“I really worry about how it’s become so easy to attack books, movies, paintings, works of scholarship there...
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Oct.12.2012
The spell is broken…the thrill is gone…
In 2008 I voted for Hope and Change. I have always been an independent thinker. Never voting party but examining and learning the issues before my ballot has been cast. But what I witnessed last night when watching the Vice Presidential debate defies the...
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Jan.04.2012
If a nation were a person, then how would she deal with freedom? The question of freedom has become exceedingly complex politically – although it always was philosophically – because even issues outside the realm of social and armed conflict have become politicised. Is political independence the...
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Nov.22.2011
What is the fuss about? A porn star enters a reality show as a contestant and even the so-called feminists start grunting. Who are we to judge someone in such a narrow manner when being in adult films is only one part of her? Sunny Leone is of Indian origin and works in the adult film...
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May.30.2011
It is clearly naïve to believe that the revolution in both North Africa and the Middle East will result to democratic reforms. The term spring of nation was upheld in Europe in the late 1840s, and in France, the revolution against the monarchy led to free elections. All of this that happening in...
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Mar.31.2011
A new book talks about Mahatma Gandhi’s sexuality – this time bisexuality. The counter-argument assumes that because he was so frank about his own life, including his views on sex and wrote about these in My Experiments With Truth, it should be enough. The problem is that we don’t have to take...
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Mar.07.2011
I do not agree with the recent Arundhati Roy persona. Does it follow that I would support an artist who paints her in the nude? And if so, what would be my reasons?
Last year he painted M.F.Husain in the nude. His reason for doing so was to protest against his use of women as objects. Thus far...
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Dec.07.2010
Thilo Sarrazin was a leading member of the German Contralbank. He has been under fire for his anti-Semitic remarks on Jews. Personally, I understand that Jews were offended by his remarks because he should have had used his common sense, when he made a decision to write a book about Germany being...
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Dec.06.2010
The phrase "culture wars" has been popcorning to the surface of the cultural landscape lately, the renewal of a trope from the late eighties and early nineties. Many people are perceiving a re-emergence of the eighties/nineties culture wars, in which art—especially art depicting...
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