05 November 2015
Ban It
Go on, Great Leader, you know you want to
By Neil Tidmarsh
China is overtaking us in the race for the future; it’s already so far ahead that the West is finished and little Britain is no longer significant. So we are told. I’ve never really believed it myself – but an item in the news this last week made me wonder if I was wrong. Perhaps China really is light years ahead after all; perhaps they have found a better way forwards and we would do well to follow them.
That news item? China’s powers-that-be have banned golf. Yes, the ruling communist party has banned its 88 million members from joining golf clubs. The game was denounced as long ago as 1949 by Chairman Mao, and the building of new courses was banned in 2004. But the game has boomed nevertheless; there are now about 600 golf clubs in China, three times as many as there were ten years ago.
The official reason for the ban is that it is part of the party’s anti-corruption drive. Golf is a game for rich men wanting to get richer, a forum for forging dodgy deals and cementing crooked business arrangements. But we all know what the real reason is (at least, those of us of sound mind and healthy instinct know). Golf is a ridiculous pastime. It isn’t even a sport. It’s a waste of time and effort, and every golf course is a waste of space. The charisma of James Bond was shattered for me when Sean Connery got out of his Aston Martin at Royal Sandwich or Stoke Park or wherever. Andrew Graham Dixon is the one TV presenter whose every programme I’m prepared to watch without question; but that faith and confidence was severely shaken when I recently learnt that he was fond of golf.
Now I know that I’m being subjective in the extreme, that the majority of my regular readers (that’s two of the three of you) may well be passionate golfers, that my interests and activities (if you knew about them) would strike you as even more ridiculous and bizarre than playing golf. But that’s the great thing about authoritarian power. You don’t have to be objective. You don’t have to be tolerant of other people’s differences and opinions. You can just ban them. What’s the point of having dictatorial powers if you can’t use them to eliminate the things in life which really wind you up personally? Must be wonderful.
The Chinese authorities have also banned ‘improper sexual relations with others which result in adverse effects’. Quite right too. Of course, all the other types of improper sexual relations are still OK – it’s just those ‘adverse effects’ (don’t you hate it when they happen?) which have to be knocked on the head. Oh, and ‘extravagant eating and drinking’ have been outlawed as well.
There are other lessons from all around the world, not just from China, and all in the news recently. Last August, Isayev Amirbek, a resident of Dushanbe in the former Soviet state of Tajikistan, was fined £400 for posting a picture of his birthday cake on Facebook. Article 8 of the law “On regulations of traditions and customs in Tajikistan” more or less bans birthday celebrations. They are forbidden outside the home, and there are strict limits on the number of guests and dishes etc allowed inside. Mr Amirbek and his girlfriend had popped out to the bakers to pick up his 25th birthday cake, and on the spur of the moment they had dropped into a café on the way back home. There they made the fatal mistake of photographing the cake. A waiter bore witness in court that no one had as much as whispered ‘happy birthday’ to him in the café but that cut no ice with the judge.
The stated reason for all this is that the people of Tajikistan are shouldering a massive burden of debt caused by borrowing too much to pay for lavish celebrations; but we can guess what the real reason is. Think about it – a country where you don’t have to worry about forgetting birthdays, where you don’t have go through the fuss of writing cards, where you don’t have to slog in and out of shops looking for that perfect present, where you don’t have to stress yourself into a nervous breakdown over the guest list, the venue, the speech, the menu…
Similarly, the Health Ministry of Saudi Arabia banned the celebration of birthdays inside their compounds earlier this year. The stated reason is a religious one – the celebration of the birthday of the prophet Muhammad is not allowed, so neither should it be allowed for us lesser mortals. But no one who works in a hospital in Saudi Arabia has to worry about forgetting the boss’s or secretary’s birthday, about whether they should bring a cake into the office, what sort of cake (a chocolate cake is always best, but then again will your diet-conscious colleagues hate you for it?), what sort of card (risqué or boring?), whether the after-office celebrations will plunge you into an unwise display of affection or protest. Etc, etc.
Why stop at birthday celebrations? Certain wedding celebrations – cake-cutting, heavy drinking, wild dancing, firing guns, extravagant expenditure – have recently been banned in Grozny, the capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya. Wedding raids and monitoring teams are sent out to make sure the bans are observed. The Department of Culture states that these measures are enforced to ‘safeguard the spiritual and moral development’ of the republic’s youngsters. But I’ll bet the Department is full of men, i.e. fathers and potential fathers-in-law and grooms, trying to protect themselves from the dreaded march of the bridezillas.
And let’s not forget that Christmas was once banned here. Yes, in Merry England. The Godly authorities of Oliver Cromwell’s republic tried to stamp it out with all its wild revelries and extravagances. And now, at the beginning of November, with the prospect of getting to grips with the Christmas card list, shopping for presents, ordering the victuals and all the other mind-boggling logistical demands and expenses of the season already looming large on the horizon, it’s possible to think that they had a point.
Jeremy Corbyn is emerging as the heir to those puritanical republicans; I suspect that if he adds the banning of Christmas to his manifesto, it may well secure him a sledge-load of votes, a really huge Santa’s sack full of them.
Bah humbug, as China, Tajikistan, Chechnya and all the other puritanical republics in this article seem to be saying.
