MONDAY JANUARY 4TH, 2010

FRONT PAGE OF A TAIWAN NEWSPAPER

Censorship is a fascinating subject. Equally in any part of the world, but especially in non western cultures. China, North Korea, North Africa, the Middle East, what is really happening behind those borders? To us in the outside world, censorship is a twisted and corrupt representation of authority and control. My total lifelong experience with censorship has been the F word bleeped out of films. We westerners are fortunate to have always been awarded the right to freedom of speech, the freedom to learn what we want to learn about, the freedom to practice what religion we want, or none at all, FREEDOM plain and simple. For whatever prejudiced reason, political, religious, moral, etc., censorship in many countries strips its citizens of their right to freedom and millions in this world are still subjected to it in the most extreme and ridiculous ways, some by choice, but most not. This is our warped present, some countries have spent millions developing technologies to monitor and control every piece of binary information sent over every individual network should their citizens be researching their countries history, but the country next door doesn’t even have a phone to report the rapes and killings happening in their villages being carried out by government miltias. Fucked up! Perhaps this introduction isn’t fully relevant to my post, but it’s food for thought.

I was grabbing a coffee at 7-11 before work this morning, and my eyes rolled over todays paper. The image above takes up a full half of the front page. Ottawa Citizen sized papers, not Ottawa Sun. Am I alone thinking that this is totally inappropriate footage for the general public. Like, these newspapers are presented within a child’s line of sight. Perhaps I, as a westerner, have been censored to more that I thought, sensored from the brutality of the real world maybe, but I like to think of it as being spared the gory, totally unnecessary details, mostly out of respect. Is this photo really necessary? And especially in such a scale? Would written words informing the public of a tragic accident not have sufficed?

The footage in the news here, the local Chinese spoken news, is brutally real. They show EVERYTHING. Not only do they show it all, but it’s embellished, without a doubt (a little first hand experience here). With nothing else to do, I lost myself in the news once on the bus en route from the airport, and of the short 30 minute drive, I must have spent 20 of those minutes with my hands over my eyes squirming at the site of a dead infant and his tearful family, and next a mans face being literally dissected on a hunt for an ingrown hair turned tumor like. Images like this are traumatizing, they haunt memories, create scars. There is some sort of emotional bond created within you to the matter at hand.

I consider myself lucky to be in Taiwan, especially with my heart set in China for so long, but as my time on this little island is becoming more and more, I am becoming increasingly aware of the cultural, political, and moral perspectives that the locals have been inflicted upon and how it is manifested in their day to day lives. These perspectives definitely play a key role in learning and understanding a culture so different from your own.

Finally, I took the above photo of the newspaper with my Canon IXUS, so it’s lost its clarity and become quite grainy, so you are spared of some blood, guts, and limbs. There are, however, 3 pixelated squares over the eyes of the two victims on the bottom, and another 3 pixelated squares over a patch of blood middle right. And that’s a fourth body to the left of the female EMT.

My heart goes out.