Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

There are not many things that I’m allergic to. But there are some. Here’s a good example: bigotry.

Behold, in the article quoted below, the danger of political correctness in all its glory. A 30-year old Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, it is claimed, must be censored or banned. For a reason I’ll explain, such things always make me think of Rembrandt’s painting “Bathsheba at her Bath” (the painting below), which hangs in the Louvre.

No doubt there are those who are offended by her nakedness. But as John Berger put it in the video below, the master painted it with the utmost love and devotion. I first saw the video many years ago in art school, and it’s always stayed with me. Berger was a British art critic (he died last year) who wrote many books and made lots of TV shows on his view of what makes art – and its viewers- tick, together. Berger loved Rembrandt as much as Rembrandt loved Bathsheba. And so do I.

Back to the song, Fairytale of New York: There are people who think/feel/proclaim that the perhaps most popular Christmas song of the modern age contains one word they do not like, and must therefore be changed. It hurts their safe space, or something. It’s not politically correct. You can’t say ‘faggot’, even after it’s thoroughly explained to you that it means something else entirely in older Irish vocabulary. This is a very dark road towards a very dark future; don’t go there.

We can censor and ban a large part of art -and rock- history if we go by 2018 PC standards, but we should never give in to the vapid illusion that we know better now than the artists in the days and places when and where they produced the paintings, the sculptures or the songs. That is profoundly stupid, arrogant and conceited. None of us are any better than the Greek and Roman sculptors who carved their genius marbles of naked splendor. None of us are better people than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or the ancient Greek sculptors just because we live later in time then them. So we have no right to correct them.

And none of us have the right to demand a correction of a 30-year old song. Don’t even try to take our art away from us. It’s the best thing handed to us through the ages. Art is where man excels, much more than technology or anything like that. Art. And Fairytale of New York is Art. So don’t you dare touch it.

Calls To Censor ‘Fairytale Of New York’ Lyrics

A student newspaper editor has called for the word “faggot” to be censored from The Pogues’ popular song “Fairytale of New York” over claims it is offensive. Tom Haynes, the...