As I watch this huge, and considered extremely polemic, journalistic piece on CNN about the repercussions of religion based jokes online, I wonder if something like that will ever happen in Brazil. It all started when some guy, claiming to be defending freedom of speech, created that page on Facebook encouraging people to draw caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. What happened next was that millions of muslins started a huge protest against Facebook for allowing this offence to their religion, and the man who started it is receiving more and more death-threat e-mails. Maybe is not a new thing for the middle-east that joking is becoming a crime. But for a country like Brazil, in which people fought, about 40 years ago, for their freedom of speech during a military dictatorship, that extreme opposite situation sounds very strange.
There was a time in Brazil, that you wouldn`t be allowed to speak up your mind, providing, of course, that you have something to say against the government or the Brazilian society, the military system, the censorship or anything too political. The International music festival in Rio de Janeiro, 1968, where the musician Caetano Veloso tried to sing his protest song, which translated to English means “It is forbidden to forbid”, illustrates what I`m saying. Less than one year after that, Caetano, who had already been arrested, ran for exile in Europe, along with many other artists of the time. The severe punishment of the government, including kidnaps and torture, caused university students to go on the streets protesting. It took many of those protests and political actions until Brazil`s freedom of speech was finally brought back. There were many deaths and traumas in the process and dozens of people are still missing.
Now that we can talk and joke about pretty much anything, I turn on the TV to see people protesting against freedom of speech! I guess people are never satisfied, are they?
