Thought Crime

India Knight takes a pot shot at the Internet today in the Thunderer – and Chris Langham is the route she takes to make her point.

Langham used the pathetic defence that he was “researching a role” for an episode of the BBC2 show Help. Isn’t the point of actors that they are able to, well, act? Did Langham, who most recently starred in The Thick of It, a political sitcom, hang around taking politicians out to dinner for three years to “research” his role (and satirise politicians all you like, but not one of them has ever been accused of sinking as low as Langham, a nice arty liberal)?

Well, yes, it worked for Pete Townsend, so pathetic as it is, why not try it? However, this is not the point India is trying to make. She uses Langham as a tool to win over the reader; after all, this pervert used the Internet and the Internet is full of stuff that is eeeeviiil. That is the target of the article.

I love the internet and spend hours a day on it. But there is a serious problem with much of its sexual content and it’s of such magnitude that even swoops like Operation Ore, the international police investigation, can only ever touch the tip of the iceberg.

Doubtless. However, we then move onto the underlying thrust of India’s argument.

The fact that your 10 minutes of madness – where you contemplated the merits of child rape or mass murder – doesn’t feel real does not mean it doesn’t exist, or that you are absolved the second you switch off the computer. The whole subject is incredibly murky – Orwellian, actually, because it’s to do with thought crime. Is it right to punish people because they have had a violent or revolting thought? Don’t we all have thoughts that would strike other people as revolting?

Probably we do, but keep going and you will see that this leads to a fairly predictable conclusion.

What used to remain a nebulous sexual fantasy, locked away in the head of the person having it, can now be made flesh in about three minutes. There is a huge difference between vaguely thinking something and having it acted out for your delectation.

The people who felt sufficiently inclined to act out their fantasies would have found a way to do so – the Internet is simply a vehicle that is currently available. And, yes, it is a means of sharing such images easily over a widespread audience.

Again, the same applies to embryonic terrorists: if, 10 years ago, you fancied blowing up strangers on the underground and were not a member of a terrorist organisation, the thought would probably remain just that, a thought. There weren’t any manuals in your local bookshop, you could hardly ask around at work and so you were left a wannabe detonator until, hopefully, you got a life. Today you Google, order supplies online and wham – literally.

Ah, yes, the old terrorist bogeyman button pressed right on cue. Funny, the IRA managed without the Internet. So did ETA, Black September and the Bader-Meinhof gang. If one is inclined, one will find the means. Looking on the Internet isn’t going to turn a fantasist into the real thing any more than looking at a book, watching the television or playing a computer game.

I understand the discomfort that many people feel about thought crime, with its McCarthyesque overtones and its alarming whiff of smug moral superiority; nobody likes censorship. But there are some things that nobody thinks are right and killing innocent people and raping children are at the top of the list.

Really? No one likes censorship, indeed? But… Oh, yes, there’s a “but” a bloody great big “but” with flapping ears, long trunk and pointy tusks. But, because there are nasty things that no one thinks are right (although the fact that some people indulge suggests that “no one” is perhaps not entirely true), we need to “do something”.

Take that a little bit further and you have Abu Ghraib, where many of the indignities perpetrated on Iraqi prisoners, combining humiliation and genitalia, were entirely familiar to a regular viewer of internet porn.

Fuck me! Abu Ghraib was the fault of the Internet. No, India, those people were entirely responsible for their own actions. It had nothing to do with either the Internet or pornography. Viewing porn does not make people go out and rape the first woman they come across, nor does it make them commit human rights abuses with prisoners of war. They do this because they are morally corrupt, not because they viewed images on the Internet. They, and they alone are responsible for their actions.

Yet people – and governments – shrug their shoulders and say that yes, there’s a lot of horrible stuff out there but there you go. Mightn’t it be time to actually do something about it?

No. Censorship does not stop people having access to things you don’t like. People commit crimes, people do bad things and they will continue to do them with or without the Internet, so it is not time to do something about it.