Censorship: the Invisible Epidemic (A soap-box lament)
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F.J.Colman

he fucks me hard in the ass (Rahman Babar, Dislocated Diary of a Hag Fag, 1998)

Censor was the name of an officer of ancient Rome who kept an account of the property of the citizens, who imposed taxes and other such factors necessary in the ordering and control of the citizens of a state. Sounds familiar ? Censorship today is still about accounting for citizens, and making certain that there is nothing in the state's running that is verboten. Availability of things depends on the censor, and these things are of course specific to nations, and their religious and political beliefs and customs. How things are given censure relates to contemporary opinions of values and morals in a society, and political manoeuvring which has nothing to do with Manichean dilemmas or even questions of one's conscience. Judgments which censor rarely stop at just one thing - one thing leads to another, which leads to a whole chain of censored things, agendas, events, ideas, sexualities, lifestyles, attitudes. In psychological terms, a Freudian theory of dreams regards a censor as a psychological force which represses ideas, impulses and feelings and "regulates" them from becoming conscious actions. Who and or what instilled and regulated the regulator was not a concern of Freud's theories, which is part of the reason why they have (within the history of humankind) been so short lived.