She's probably afraid of plants. (The Lost Daughter)

One might, with a little effort, recall a literary scandal of late 2016. James Wood, a few years earlier, had written a rave review of My Brilliant Friend, the first Neapolitan novel to be published in English. “Elena Ferrante, or ‘Elena Ferrante,’ is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers”, he wrote. She had kept her identity unknown from the 1992 publication of her first novel, the uneven Troubling Love, through to the 2002 triumph of Days of Abandonment. In that slim novel, narrated by a woman whose husband leaves her for his lover, emerged the shatteringly harsh emotional reality that would become Ferrante’s signature: a limpid and authoritative style where cruelty is eternal and infinite, where women live at the razor’s edge of collapse.
Those themes achieved astonishing proportions with the four Neapolitan novels, released in English from 2012 to 2015. The series was a rare work-in-translation to sell millions of copies in the Anglo world, in what was embarrassingly called “Ferrante fever”. Indeed, it achieved a kind of popularity rarely seen in books at all, where even writers at major publishers typically make zero royalties whatsoever.
But in 2016, Ferrante was revealed. Absolute disaster was avoided — she wasn’t, as rumour had suggested and feminists had dismissed, novelist Domenico Starnone, but, according to financial sleuthing, Starnone’s wife: Anita Raja.
In English, most outlets besides the New York Review of Books declined to sully their pages with the revelation. Ferrante’s anonymity was seen as feminist defiance, and her reveal a sexist attack. In The Guardian, Suzanne Moore proclaimed: “Who cares who Elena Ferrante really is? She owes us nothing”. Aaron Bady, in The New Inquiry, called it “a violation, and a desecration”. The New Republic dubbed the whole affair “The Sexist Big Reveal“.
That autumn, her lengthy book of letters and interviews Frantumaglia appeared in English; in 2018, an HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend; in 2019, her disappointing novel The Lying Lives of Adults; in 2021, the star-studded adaptation of The Lost Daughter; and now, in 2022, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, a collection of Ferrante lectures. Indeed, she’s even had a weekend column in The Guardian — producing the iconic headline “Elena Ferrante: ‘I devote myself to plants. Is it because I am afraid of them?’ So much, then, for staying “in the margins”. So much for the threat made in a 2014 interview, that: “I remain Ferrante or I no longer publish”.
Curiously, In the Margins doesn’t make a single reference to the author’s anonymity. This wouldn’t be remarkable under ordinary circumstances, but in a volume centred around a young woman’s journey to the writer’s life, it’s quite the dodge to duck her most shocking decision. It’s more remarkable still in a book which, though quietly disappointing like so many craft essays, raises fascinating questions about the relationship of the author to the work of art.
Ferrante doesn’t have to acknowledge the reveal, since the rest of the educated world has chosen not to. Though the Raja theory has not been discredited, it’s been rejected as a violative and violent thrusting of a woman into the public against her will. In a 2018 retrospective, The Cut podcast remarked on how inspiring it was for a woman to stay anonymous, refusing the usual pressure on women to perform the emotional work of social harmony. Sensitive as I am to the pressures on women writers, this explanation, inflected by the Clinton-Trump election, doesn’t quite convince me, given that these critics never proffer a single example of another woman unveiled, or a man given privacy. Ferrante’s obvious comparator would be Karl Øve Knausgård, whose My Struggle six-part autobiography was published almost contemporaneously; but he didn’t even change the names of others, let alone his own. More importantly, these defences of Ferrante are a little over-tinged with projection, as if Ferrante putting her name on her novels were nothing different from the “emotional labor” of a woman with her social set.
I wonder if Ferrante could get away with it today, when even an Oprah’s Book Club pick like American Dirt could be trashed for “opportunistically” “appropriating” experiences foreign to the writer. Quaint as it seems now, “cultural appropriation” was a new and controversial concept back in 2016, and as a New York Times op-ed weakly pointed out, perhaps the bigger Ferrante scoop was an opportunity to discredit it. After all, Anita Raja wasn’t a working-class girl raised on the violent streets of Naples; she was born in Naples, sure, but moved to Rome at age three, and her father was a magistrate. As Gatti pointed out with disgust, ‘Ferrante’ had said her mother was a seamstress who spoke in the Neapolitan dialect, who had grown up in Naples until she “ran away”. “These crumbs of information,” he said, “seemed designed to satisfy her readers’ appetite for a personal story that might relate to the Neapolitan setting of the novels themselves”.
The Neapolitan novels even end with the narrator writing a novel about the girls’ friendship, before her best friend, to everyone’s torment, disappears. Few of us seem upset by what, almost undeniably, was a case of an upper-class woman passing herself off as lower-class in the marketing (yes, marketing) of best-selling novels almost universally received as autobiographical.
Obviously, Ferrante would never call this marketing. Explaining the anonymity, Ferrante’s most repeated refrain is that she wanted to avoid the machine of publicity, and to recentre criticism on the work produced by collective intelligence, not on her. In the media, she’s said, “the book functions like a pop star’s sweaty T-shirt, a garment that without the aura of the star is completely meaningless”. Who, though, treats her work as anything other than exceptional? Hasn’t her anonymity precisely forced the focus on the conspicuously, famously absent writer, rather than the books? And moreover, who sees writers like pop stars at all?
As literature limps along to its final extinction, regarded as irrelevant, abrasive, and even suspect by its few remaining consumers, the author is no longer the mysterious and other-worldly celebrity of, say, the Art of Fiction heyday; the author is a somewhat pitiful creature, photographed in front of its bookcase in an unkind sweater in The Guardian. The last writer before Ferrante to have totemic status was perhaps David Foster Wallace, who only doubles as a “red flag” of the pretentious male; and as Jonathan Franzen described beautifully, even he had to die to become a saint.
For a woman, the problem is double. In In the Margins, Ferrante writes that when she was starting out, “It seemed to me that the voice of men came from the pages, and that voice preoccupied me, I tried in every way to imitate it… I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female”. There’s something fascinating there: the idea that the voice of writing, in general, is a male voice, as if the female writer’s body is an albatross, and her transcendental part, her thinking part, male.
What could a woman like Elena Ferrante do? Her books are vociferously angry ones, screeds against the male sex and sex itself, bone-cuttingly dark. At one point, for example, a character says of the narrator’s brilliant, and now beautiful, young woman friend: “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.” It would have been too painful for those words to come from Anita Raja, a real, plump, unremarkable-looking older woman. This level of rage and authority had to come from a disembodied voice, not one with wrinkles and rolls.
That’s what’s missing from so many Ferrante think-pieces: the fact that she is not just a woman and not just a woman in public, but a woman artist. She talks often, in her interviews, of the space of freedom of anonymity. That space, for a woman, is one of not having a body, of being spirit. No one is more connected to their body than an older woman, for whom, with rare exception, there is not even a consolation of beauty. One knows this early on.
As she writes in In the Margins, as a young writer, “I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express.” She ends up finding hope in Dante’s depiction of Beatrice as one of the “women with intelligence of love” who rise above the “vulgar daughters of Eve” to enter the realm of poetry. These pages, though, are often stunted and stiff, as if the author is avoiding the personal: that is, how did Ferrante cope with that feeling familiar to the young woman writer, that her femaleness is a chastising humiliation? Whatever feminist pride has been ascribed to her is far from the girl-power, choice-driven positivity familiar to the American scene; instead, her sense of femininity is cut with terror, anger, and a painful self-loathing. The paradox, here, is that her feminism is largely borne of hating being a woman.
But her writing persona is emphatically female, so female that any rumours she might be male have provoked violent repudiation. It’s impossible, the line goes, for a man to write books like these. So what did she get, then, by being anonymous? Without betraying her sex–and straining credulity–by writing as a man, by being anonymous she was able to write as a disembodied mind, as a pure attention. I find it revealing that so much of In the Margins concentrates on the writing self as an abandonment of self, a rejection of any single identity. She reprints paragraphs of Woolf: “One must get out of life…One must become externalised…When I write, I’m merely a sensibility”; and Beckett: “I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place”.
Similar to how Beckett wrote in French to have no style, by writing as ‘Ferrante’, she could escape the worn-out and stifling limits of her given identity. For her, this depersonalisation is the beginning of art: she writes that “Dante’s capacity to situate himself in the other, pivoting on the autobiographical I, with its inherent limits, left me astonished”. Writing means to leave the self, to be pure voice, pure mind. And as a woman, still, one may not be that. Ferrante gets what so many women dream of: to be a woman without a body.
Though Ferrante fans alike treat the Neapolitan novels as autobiography — as “real” and “brave” — it’s telling that In the Margins celebrates Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Ultimately, I suppose that’s what the Neapolitan novels are: the autobiography of an imagined person dignified in her aloofness, grand in her disappearance, and so absent that the books read as if discovered in the desert. It’s not that her unveiling was all that awful an act: it’s that her fans, with all the magic gone out of art and replaced with exercises in mutual suspicion and mediocrity, have decided, albeit with a slightly inconsistent political justification, to remain studiously unaware of the truth. And who’s to blame them? And who’s to blame her?
These novels are an almost unparalleled feat in contemporary literature, more ambitious and more accomplished than is allowed in an age of diminished expectations, where the summit of contemporary literature is a naturalism stripped of coherence and navel-gazing justified as humility. With Ferrante revealed, one would have had to grapple with a question both tedious and unanswerable: can a rich woman write a poor woman’s experience? Well, yes, it would seem so. But only in secret.
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SubscribeProtecting the feelings of an imaginary friend has taken precedence over protecting the human right for free speech! The world needs to stand together against the OIC. More pressure should be put on the OIC to reform Islam. Islam’s intolerance must not be tolerated at the expense of human rights.
Some one once said: We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.
Protecting the feelings of an imaginary friend has taken precedence over protecting the human right for free speech! The world needs to stand together against the OIC. More pressure should be put on the OIC to reform Islam. Islam’s intolerance must not be tolerated at the expense of human rights.
Some one once said: We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.
There are always bullies and there are always cowards eager to appease them. These Scandinavian countries will experience, again, the usual result. Bowing to violent tyranny only brings on more violent tyranny.
There are always bullies and there are always cowards eager to appease them. These Scandinavian countries will experience, again, the usual result. Bowing to violent tyranny only brings on more violent tyranny.
Is it illegal in Iran to burn the Bible? Just asking …
Is it illegal in Iran to burn the Bible? Just asking …
Ugh. Very disappointing.
Ugh. Very disappointing.
So will places like Iran ban the burning of other countries’ flags?
So will places like Iran ban the burning of other countries’ flags?
Prima donnas with beards.
Prima donnas with beards.
There seem to be many ‘liberal’ minded people in Europe who live and breathe, the hippy, one world nirvana. Let’s just all get on together. What does it matter if some people believe in gods, and some don’t. We all interpret the World in equally valid ways. Just take people on Unherd like Paul Kingsnorth! Intelligent, well read, articulate; all searching for meaning in their lives.
But utterly misguided. The project which started with the European Enlightenment led to a standard of living that previous generations simply couldn’t imagine. Reason over superstition is a superior (choose your own term) way of engaging with the world and our existence. If you prefer superstition that’s your choice, but as the saying goes, you can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
I hope that the Danish and Swedish submission in the face of Islamic threats doesn’t begin a retreat from the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment.
‘I hope that the Danish and Swedish submission in the face of Islamic threats doesn’t begin a retreat from the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment.’
Sadly, the retreat started years ago and the craven attitude of our western politicians / academics appears unlikely to change.
‘I hope that the Danish and Swedish submission in the face of Islamic threats doesn’t begin a retreat from the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment.’
Sadly, the retreat started years ago and the craven attitude of our western politicians / academics appears unlikely to change.
There seem to be many ‘liberal’ minded people in Europe who live and breathe, the hippy, one world nirvana. Let’s just all get on together. What does it matter if some people believe in gods, and some don’t. We all interpret the World in equally valid ways. Just take people on Unherd like Paul Kingsnorth! Intelligent, well read, articulate; all searching for meaning in their lives.
But utterly misguided. The project which started with the European Enlightenment led to a standard of living that previous generations simply couldn’t imagine. Reason over superstition is a superior (choose your own term) way of engaging with the world and our existence. If you prefer superstition that’s your choice, but as the saying goes, you can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
I hope that the Danish and Swedish submission in the face of Islamic threats doesn’t begin a retreat from the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment.
“But when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message — the essence of free expression”
But the message might not be ‘Hate’ as you seem to suggest, it might just be that the defense of FofS *requires* making ‘deliberately provocative’ performances. Here’s an example: I’d not think of burning a Koran myself … *unless it was made illegal* in which case I’d burn one simply to convey my objection to that law. Use it or lose it. A Koran burning is a way of very explicitly exercising one’s FofS in the face of those who would slowly but surely erode that right.
“But when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message — the essence of free expression”
But the message might not be ‘Hate’ as you seem to suggest, it might just be that the defense of FofS *requires* making ‘deliberately provocative’ performances. Here’s an example: I’d not think of burning a Koran myself … *unless it was made illegal* in which case I’d burn one simply to convey my objection to that law. Use it or lose it. A Koran burning is a way of very explicitly exercising one’s FofS in the face of those who would slowly but surely erode that right.
Nothing reveals better than cases like this how the development and maintenance of an open and tolerant society is not something which expresses the potentialities of a universal human nature when this is uncorrupted by social prejudices and the tyranny of custom, as liberals too often suppose, but is rather a precarious achievement which presupposes a certain self-confidence and maturity among the citizenry: a maturity, developed over centuries, which can distinguish genuine harm from mere offence, and which can shrug off the latter while prosecuting the former.
If a society should become so oblivious of the historical contingency of its fortunate situation as to unthinkingly import into its citizenry sufficient numbers of cultural aliens who have not been socialised from childhood into such self-confidence and maturity, it will be faced with an unappealing trilemma: either (1) it must abandon its hard-won toleration of dissent, however crudely expressed, or (2) it must become accustomed to increasing levels of antagonism and social unrest between faith groups who do not respect and cannot or will not tolerate one another (including the faith group of anti-religious secularists), or (3) it must make life so hard for one or more of those faith groups that they will have no choice but to emigrate. Probably it will opt for an ineffective blend of all of these, or else will shift uneasily from one to the other in an opportunistic fashion. In any case there is certain to be a severe escalation in faith-based violence along the way.
Nothing reveals better than cases like this how the development and maintenance of an open and tolerant society is not something which expresses the potentialities of a universal human nature when this is uncorrupted by social prejudices and the tyranny of custom, as liberals too often suppose, but is rather a precarious achievement which presupposes a certain self-confidence and maturity among the citizenry: a maturity, developed over centuries, which can distinguish genuine harm from mere offence, and which can shrug off the latter while prosecuting the former.
If a society should become so oblivious of the historical contingency of its fortunate situation as to unthinkingly import into its citizenry sufficient numbers of cultural aliens who have not been socialised from childhood into such self-confidence and maturity, it will be faced with an unappealing trilemma: either (1) it must abandon its hard-won toleration of dissent, however crudely expressed, or (2) it must become accustomed to increasing levels of antagonism and social unrest between faith groups who do not respect and cannot or will not tolerate one another (including the faith group of anti-religious secularists), or (3) it must make life so hard for one or more of those faith groups that they will have no choice but to emigrate. Probably it will opt for an ineffective blend of all of these, or else will shift uneasily from one to the other in an opportunistic fashion. In any case there is certain to be a severe escalation in faith-based violence along the way.
As at 14:31 BST. Where are the other FIVE comments?
ps. I don’t understand why UnHerd bothers to discuss Islam!
This happens on every occasion, and by the time the comments reappear, IF they reappear at all, the day will be over and the discussion thwarted.
True, discussions would be far more lively, if our comments weren’t vetted.
Given the power in both influence and finances of orgs, bikie billionaires, etc. willing to stifle independent journalism/freedom of expression, I admire Unherd’s courage to display e.g. my comments about Australia’s lawlessness at all.
Thankfully people need to be paid subscribers to even vote up/down our comments, let alone abuse us in counter comments.
We are paying the price for ignoring insanity assuming that it won’t prevail. It will be a hard job, if not impossible to reinstate the values and principles that made humans thrive in peace.
Peace being the existence of justice, not just the absence of war.
PS: several of my public LinkedIn posts expressing angst about Australia never having had functional law-enforcement, bikies making billions $ in the drug-trade yearly, and our dismal prospects, given Clare O’Neil’s* incompetent hubris/vanity have disappeared without a warning.
Tech, including cyber-tech far beyond what’s known to civilian experts at the time have been used against me since 2009 in an ongoing crime-spree in physical and cyber-space by an ex-coworker stalker organised-crime info source. I never even dated the stalker. Using tech not known to civilian experts in bizarre, seemingly pointless crimes is a long-established crime witness/victim discreditation strategy of Victoria Police officers and their accomplices. See Raymond T. Hoser’s brave publications about Victoria Police corruption.
The disappearance of my public LinkedIn posts that were possibly damaging to the ongoing risk-free operation of Australia’s bikie gangs has nothing to do with bikies doing victory-laps around my home since I discovered the disappearance. Of course not.
As a public servant witness to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse, whom Victoria Police have been trying to silence since 2009, I will continue making public interest disclosures about Australia’s absurd crime reality via every possible platform, until I see positive, material changes to Australia’s crime fighting ability/willingness. Since Australia faked its way into Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc., and the Internet is everywhere, Australia’s lawlessness poses a significant global threat.
#ididnotstaysilent
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katalin-kish-38750b154/
—
* Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security AND Home Affairs no less since mid-2022.
PS: several of my public LinkedIn posts expressing angst about Australia never having had functional law-enforcement, bikies making billions $ in the drug-trade yearly, and our dismal prospects, given Clare O’Neil’s* incompetent hubris/vanity have disappeared without a warning.
Tech, including cyber-tech far beyond what’s known to civilian experts at the time have been used against me since 2009 in an ongoing crime-spree in physical and cyber-space by an ex-coworker stalker organised-crime info source. I never even dated the stalker. Using tech not known to civilian experts in bizarre, seemingly pointless crimes is a long-established crime witness/victim discreditation strategy of Victoria Police officers and their accomplices. See Raymond T. Hoser’s brave publications about Victoria Police corruption.
The disappearance of my public LinkedIn posts that were possibly damaging to the ongoing risk-free operation of Australia’s bikie gangs has nothing to do with bikies doing victory-laps around my home since I discovered the disappearance. Of course not.
As a public servant witness to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse, whom Victoria Police have been trying to silence since 2009, I will continue making public interest disclosures about Australia’s absurd crime reality via every possible platform, until I see positive, material changes to Australia’s crime fighting ability/willingness. Since Australia faked its way into Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc., and the Internet is everywhere, Australia’s lawlessness poses a significant global threat.
#ididnotstaysilent
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katalin-kish-38750b154/
—
* Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security AND Home Affairs no less since mid-2022.
You don’t know why UnHerd discusses the world’s second largest and fastest growing religion, and the consequences of its adherents abroad and at home interacting with western societies?!
Why discuss anything then?
True, discussions would be far more lively, if our comments weren’t vetted.
Given the power in both influence and finances of orgs, bikie billionaires, etc. willing to stifle independent journalism/freedom of expression, I admire Unherd’s courage to display e.g. my comments about Australia’s lawlessness at all.
Thankfully people need to be paid subscribers to even vote up/down our comments, let alone abuse us in counter comments.
We are paying the price for ignoring insanity assuming that it won’t prevail. It will be a hard job, if not impossible to reinstate the values and principles that made humans thrive in peace.
Peace being the existence of justice, not just the absence of war.
You don’t know why UnHerd discusses the world’s second largest and fastest growing religion, and the consequences of its adherents abroad and at home interacting with western societies?!
Why discuss anything then?
As at 14:31 BST. Where are the other FIVE comments?
ps. I don’t understand why UnHerd bothers to discuss Islam!
This happens on every occasion, and by the time the comments reappear, IF they reappear at all, the day will be over and the discussion thwarted.
We are pathetically in thrall to this savage and utterly illiberal creed. It will never change because we pander to it in ever-increasing fear, but denial, of its essence.
We are pathetically in thrall to this savage and utterly illiberal creed. It will never change because we pander to it in ever-increasing fear, but denial, of its essence.
Why not ban all book burning? “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also”.
Exactly my response. This legal shift is not about book-burning per se but specifically to make the Islamic Koran a special case. I cannot think of a worse response. Laws designed for ‘special circumstances’ i.e. exemptions by any other word, always end up bad law. I would like to see a law on book-burning adopted throughout Europe.
Rather pointless to ban Koran burning to appease Muslims as the book burners will presumably adopt ritually tearing or soaking and turning the Koran into pulp to achieve the end of expressing their disapproval and to wind up Muslims. To adopt the preferred response to ban any destruction of or act of disrespect to the Koran would have to be balanced by a similar ban on disrespect of any text regarded as holy by any religious group and would constitute a return to blasphemy laws.
It would certainly be impractical to extend a similar protection to all books.
Rather pointless to ban Koran burning to appease Muslims as the book burners will presumably adopt ritually tearing or soaking and turning the Koran into pulp to achieve the end of expressing their disapproval and to wind up Muslims. To adopt the preferred response to ban any destruction of or act of disrespect to the Koran would have to be balanced by a similar ban on disrespect of any text regarded as holy by any religious group and would constitute a return to blasphemy laws.
It would certainly be impractical to extend a similar protection to all books.
The reason might be that it is authoritarian to ban symbolic acts of protest such as book or burning. The Nazis famously burned piles of books, but whether this helped or hindered their rise to untrammelled state power, which is what actually enabled them to murder millions of people, is not at all clear.
Exactly my response. This legal shift is not about book-burning per se but specifically to make the Islamic Koran a special case. I cannot think of a worse response. Laws designed for ‘special circumstances’ i.e. exemptions by any other word, always end up bad law. I would like to see a law on book-burning adopted throughout Europe.
The reason might be that it is authoritarian to ban symbolic acts of protest such as book or burning. The Nazis famously burned piles of books, but whether this helped or hindered their rise to untrammelled state power, which is what actually enabled them to murder millions of people, is not at all clear.
Why not ban all book burning? “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also”.
Something not mentioned: The Swedish government contains a lot of people who under other circumstances would be happy to defend the right to protest over the unhappiness of any number of Muslims. (And a good many who are saying exactly that right now.) The problem is that many of these politicians want to join NATO rather more than they want pretty much anything else, and as long as the burnings go on, Erdoğan won’t give Turkey’s approval. And this means that the people who are most interested in keeping Sweden out of NATO, are planning to keep on burning Qurans for as long as it takes.
Do try to keep up, Laura. Erdogan dropped his opposition weeks ago.
That was then, now we are hearing it is back again.
That was then, now we are hearing it is back again.
Do try to keep up, Laura. Erdogan dropped his opposition weeks ago.
Something not mentioned: The Swedish government contains a lot of people who under other circumstances would be happy to defend the right to protest over the unhappiness of any number of Muslims. (And a good many who are saying exactly that right now.) The problem is that many of these politicians want to join NATO rather more than they want pretty much anything else, and as long as the burnings go on, Erdoğan won’t give Turkey’s approval. And this means that the people who are most interested in keeping Sweden out of NATO, are planning to keep on burning Qurans for as long as it takes.
Sad news. A retrograde step, Appeasement.
Sad news. A retrograde step, Appeasement.
I assure you, Europe is filled with spineless jellyfish, and is only getting its just deserts.
I assure you, Europe is filled with spineless jellyfish, and is only getting its just deserts.
Plenty of Muslims were happy to burn the Satanic Verses. The thing is, in terms of the quality of the content, the Satanic Verses is a much, much, much, much, much … much x a million, better read. Are there ANY books that are worse reads than the Quran? I’ve not read any.
Anyway, isn’t this (burning the Quran) a case of Equal treatment, in the light of the alacrity in so many Muslims to burn the Satanic Verses?
Quran is actually not a bad read if you read it in the context of 7th century literature!
Yes, there are books that are worst reads than Quran. Any book by Deepak Chora would fall into the worst-reads category!
A matter of taste perhaps, but I read every word of the Koran and I found it to be a crushing bore. Endless repetitions of the same sermon exhorting the faithful to keep killing.
A matter of taste perhaps, but I read every word of the Koran and I found it to be a crushing bore. Endless repetitions of the same sermon exhorting the faithful to keep killing.
Quran is actually not a bad read if you read it in the context of 7th century literature!
Yes, there are books that are worst reads than Quran. Any book by Deepak Chora would fall into the worst-reads category!
Plenty of Muslims were happy to burn the Satanic Verses. The thing is, in terms of the quality of the content, the Satanic Verses is a much, much, much, much, much … much x a million, better read. Are there ANY books that are worse reads than the Quran? I’ve not read any.
Anyway, isn’t this (burning the Quran) a case of Equal treatment, in the light of the alacrity in so many Muslims to burn the Satanic Verses?
Yet again as at 0902 BST, 02.08.23.:
31 Comments recorded but ONLY 11 shown!
Where are the rest and WHY have they been censored?
Yet again as at 0902 BST, 02.08.23.:
31 Comments recorded but ONLY 11 shown!
Where are the rest and WHY have they been censored?
All done on purpose to bring in government censorship rules across the world! So easy to see
All done on purpose to bring in government censorship rules across the world! So easy to see
Let us all calm down a bit. Until a few years ago, Denmark at least had a law against blasphemy, which could have been used to stop this. At most we would be moving back to, say 1997, not 1769. There are already laws against hate speech that restrict argument and expression of honest (if unpopular) opinion. I think some of those go too far, but they have not caused armageddon yet. There are also laws against burning the flags of foreign nations. The freedom to publish the Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, or even Charlie Hebdo (much as I find it disgusting) is a hill worth dying on. The Koran burnings are neither expressions of opinion nor argument, but deliberately attempts to offend for the hell of it – much like those UK muslims a few years back who went to funerals of dead soldiers and loudly rejoiced that those men were now in hell. Good riddance to either. If Rasmus Paludan and company actually have anything to say, they can find another way of saying it. If they just want to provoke strife, let them do it in Syria or Pakistan, without demanding the protection of Danish police.
“The Koran burnings are neither expressions of opinion nor argument”
I disagree. They are expressions of hatred for whatever the burned thing represents. We lose our freedoms from the edges inward, no? Thus, if one is to defend freedom of speech, one must do it at the edges, where it is being attacked. Thus, in a nation where I’m free to burn the Koran, I’d not think of doing so, but in a nation that’s contemplating banning it, then I’ll feel obliged to burn a Koran just to assert my right to do so.
“The Koran burnings are neither expressions of opinion nor argument”
I disagree. They are expressions of hatred for whatever the burned thing represents. We lose our freedoms from the edges inward, no? Thus, if one is to defend freedom of speech, one must do it at the edges, where it is being attacked. Thus, in a nation where I’m free to burn the Koran, I’d not think of doing so, but in a nation that’s contemplating banning it, then I’ll feel obliged to burn a Koran just to assert my right to do so.
Let us all calm down a bit. Until a few years ago, Denmark at least had a law against blasphemy, which could have been used to stop this. At most we would be moving back to, say 1997, not 1769. There are already laws against hate speech that restrict argument and expression of honest (if unpopular) opinion. I think some of those go too far, but they have not caused armageddon yet. There are also laws against burning the flags of foreign nations. The freedom to publish the Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, or even Charlie Hebdo (much as I find it disgusting) is a hill worth dying on. The Koran burnings are neither expressions of opinion nor argument, but deliberately attempts to offend for the hell of it – much like those UK muslims a few years back who went to funerals of dead soldiers and loudly rejoiced that those men were now in hell. Good riddance to either. If Rasmus Paludan and company actually have anything to say, they can find another way of saying it. If they just want to provoke strife, let them do it in Syria or Pakistan, without demanding the protection of Danish police.
They are forever burning books. Soon they will burn men. Heinrich Heine
They are forever burning books. Soon they will burn men. Heinrich Heine
So nothing has actually happened to ban anyone from burning whatever books they feel like?
Still, the thought of burning Qurans sure gets the UnHerd crowd all excited – why not publish some clickbait nonsense?!?!?
No doubt the same folks get themselves in a frenzy when someone burns a US flag.
So nothing has actually happened to ban anyone from burning whatever books they feel like?
Still, the thought of burning Qurans sure gets the UnHerd crowd all excited – why not publish some clickbait nonsense?!?!?
No doubt the same folks get themselves in a frenzy when someone burns a US flag.
Public Koran burning is a non violent symbolic expression of what? Being a t**t? The game’s not worth the candle, Sweden’s accession to NATO is being held up because of someone’s urge to publicly insult someone else’s religion, and for what reason? Its not like its a rational critique of the shortcomings of Islam, that might have some value.
Making the issue about burning specifically the Koran, or not, is the problem. I don’t see book-burning anywhere by anyone as a defendable way to protest anything. We all know where book-burning leads us. They should – we should – simply ban book-burning.
You’re right
You’re right
Making the issue about burning specifically the Koran, or not, is the problem. I don’t see book-burning anywhere by anyone as a defendable way to protest anything. We all know where book-burning leads us. They should – we should – simply ban book-burning.
Public Koran burning is a non violent symbolic expression of what? Being a t**t? The game’s not worth the candle, Sweden’s accession to NATO is being held up because of someone’s urge to publicly insult someone else’s religion, and for what reason? Its not like its a rational critique of the shortcomings of Islam, that might have some value.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, Jacob. There is a proposal in Denmark to make such acts illegal but in Sweden, as of today, that’s just not the case. The government there have been keeping their heads down and are focusing right now on security for Swedish subjects. Changing the law is complicated since there is a conflict with the Grundlag (Basic Law/form of Constitution). Common sense would say that these demonstrations have more to do with intolerance/hate rather than freedom of speech/expression, so it would be reasonable to ban these, especially if the consequences affect issues of national security (embassies/NATO/foreign relations).
“ if the consequences affect issues of national security”.
If that is the case then the best course of action would to repatriate ALL Muslims currently living in Sweden and Denmark back to their place of origin.
Let’s face it, ‘they’ are completely incompatible with the Scandinavian way of life. Always have been, always will be.
Otherwise this will “end in tears”.
Please stop grovelling in the face of authoritarians. The fragility of a religion is in inverse proportion to it’s ability to be criticised, mocked even. Giving in to geopolitical blackmail would only lead to further demands, and those who seek to appease will not be appreciated by either side – and it is a cultural war.
Totally agree – these extremists are inciting religion hatred and damaging Sweden’s international reputation, there’s no need for it and it should be stopped.
Cower in the face of angry authoritarians if you want. The rest of us will stand up for free expression even by those we disagree with. Freedom is more important than good manners.
Freedom of speech/expression does not mean you can say or do absolutely anything. Inciting religious hatred is a crime.
That’s palpably absurd. If “freedom of speech/expression” does not mean one can say or do absolutely anything (save the immediately dangerous “fire” in a theater), it doesn’t mean anything at all. Inciting religious hatred is stupid, wrong, venal, and cruel. It’s also protected free speech. When it escalates to actual physical harm (largely the province lately, as it happens, of one particular religion – you know which one) then we punish the harm as a criminal act. Up until then it’s just an idea, and an making an idea a criminal act is literally right out of Orwell.
That’s palpably absurd. If “freedom of speech/expression” does not mean one can say or do absolutely anything (save the immediately dangerous “fire” in a theater), it doesn’t mean anything at all. Inciting religious hatred is stupid, wrong, venal, and cruel. It’s also protected free speech. When it escalates to actual physical harm (largely the province lately, as it happens, of one particular religion – you know which one) then we punish the harm as a criminal act. Up until then it’s just an idea, and an making an idea a criminal act is literally right out of Orwell.
Freedom of speech/expression does not mean you can say or do absolutely anything. Inciting religious hatred is a crime.
Cower in the face of angry authoritarians if you want. The rest of us will stand up for free expression even by those we disagree with. Freedom is more important than good manners.
Speech/expression is either free or it is not. It is never “reasonable” to ban them, no matter how “intolerant” or “hateful” they are. Doing so gives a heckler’s veto over your society to whatever group happens to get its feelings hurt. That’s not how freedom works. Sticks and stones.
Who gets to apply their common sense to deciding what is permitted and what is banned? An official censor? An Imam?
‘Common sense would say that these demonstrations have more to do with intolerance/hate rather than freedom of speech/expression’. That’s really opening up a can of worms. Just whose ‘common sense’ gets to define intolerance/hate?
Where I live right now, saying publicly – in person, or online – that you believe biological sex is immutable is regarded by the police as a hate crime and will always be followed up by them. Physically punching a woman for expressing that belief isn’t a crime though, as the unfortunate Julie Marshall discovered last week (Times, 27 July).
Shovelling koran-burning into the already overfilled doggy-bag of ‘hate crimes’ really isn’t going to help. Just ban all book-burning: a ‘fahrenheit 451 law’. That really would help. Destroying the written word really can’t claim to be helping expression of free speech. Whereas we all know where book-burning ends up.
Sinead o’Connor died last week. One of her most famous actions was tearing up a photo of the Pope on live TV. This will have caused pain to Catholics; ‘ban’ or ‘free speech’?
In the late sixties there were Vietnam War demonstrations outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Sq.
A regular feature was the burning of the US flag. This will have caused pain to patriotic Americans.
‘Ban’ or ‘free speech’?
Where does book burning by private individuals end up? Are you saying it ends with government burning books? I’m just not sure what you are getting at.
Sinead o’Connor died last week. One of her most famous actions was tearing up a photo of the Pope on live TV. This will have caused pain to Catholics; ‘ban’ or ‘free speech’?
In the late sixties there were Vietnam War demonstrations outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Sq.
A regular feature was the burning of the US flag. This will have caused pain to patriotic Americans.
‘Ban’ or ‘free speech’?
Where does book burning by private individuals end up? Are you saying it ends with government burning books? I’m just not sure what you are getting at.
“ if the consequences affect issues of national security”.
If that is the case then the best course of action would to repatriate ALL Muslims currently living in Sweden and Denmark back to their place of origin.
Let’s face it, ‘they’ are completely incompatible with the Scandinavian way of life. Always have been, always will be.
Otherwise this will “end in tears”.
Please stop grovelling in the face of authoritarians. The fragility of a religion is in inverse proportion to it’s ability to be criticised, mocked even. Giving in to geopolitical blackmail would only lead to further demands, and those who seek to appease will not be appreciated by either side – and it is a cultural war.
Totally agree – these extremists are inciting religion hatred and damaging Sweden’s international reputation, there’s no need for it and it should be stopped.
Speech/expression is either free or it is not. It is never “reasonable” to ban them, no matter how “intolerant” or “hateful” they are. Doing so gives a heckler’s veto over your society to whatever group happens to get its feelings hurt. That’s not how freedom works. Sticks and stones.
Who gets to apply their common sense to deciding what is permitted and what is banned? An official censor? An Imam?
‘Common sense would say that these demonstrations have more to do with intolerance/hate rather than freedom of speech/expression’. That’s really opening up a can of worms. Just whose ‘common sense’ gets to define intolerance/hate?
Where I live right now, saying publicly – in person, or online – that you believe biological sex is immutable is regarded by the police as a hate crime and will always be followed up by them. Physically punching a woman for expressing that belief isn’t a crime though, as the unfortunate Julie Marshall discovered last week (Times, 27 July).
Shovelling koran-burning into the already overfilled doggy-bag of ‘hate crimes’ really isn’t going to help. Just ban all book-burning: a ‘fahrenheit 451 law’. That really would help. Destroying the written word really can’t claim to be helping expression of free speech. Whereas we all know where book-burning ends up.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, Jacob. There is a proposal in Denmark to make such acts illegal but in Sweden, as of today, that’s just not the case. The government there have been keeping their heads down and are focusing right now on security for Swedish subjects. Changing the law is complicated since there is a conflict with the Grundlag (Basic Law/form of Constitution). Common sense would say that these demonstrations have more to do with intolerance/hate rather than freedom of speech/expression, so it would be reasonable to ban these, especially if the consequences affect issues of national security (embassies/NATO/foreign relations).