'Endless Stream Of Filth'

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30471, 19 June 1964, Page 11

'Endless Stream Of Filth'

/Special Crspdt. NZP.AJ LONDON, June 18.

An attack on American magazines, films, books and television was made by Mr Thomas Armstrong, the Yorkshire author whose latest book is “The Face of the Madonna,” when he was opening a library in the West Riding.

It was an “endless stream of filth,” he said, and it must be stopped. “In Yorkshire we have a saying: ‘Where there’s muck there's money,’ but never has it been more true than today—in the wrong sense,”

Mr Armstrong said. “Viciousness and salaciousness are rammed down our throats endlessly. “The bombardment never ends. If things go on, the day must come when future advisers of careers will say to parents: Tut your sons and daughters into pornography. It is the thing.’ “Think what life was a decade ago. Think of what it is now and project yourself forward another 10 years and think what it is going to be like then. “Why has our society come into the state it is—a society affluent with money and bankrupt in everything else? The short answer is that it is our own weakness and we

have just not stopped it.”

No nation in the world had poured out money more lavishly than the United States. But it was her tragedy that she had also poured out “endless streams of filth through the medium of magazines, films, books and television.

• “From whom did English youths learn to use knives instead of their fists, if not from the polyglot great New York?” Mr Armstrong asked.. “I think all ■ these things have made a tremendous difference.

“Every day that passes that dark pool of sadism and eroticism is ever-increasing and more and more people are being caught in it