http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CulturePolice



Is trying to burn the playhouse down

They want to stop the ones who want

A rock to wind a string around

But everybody wants a rock

To wind a piece of string around." They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock" , "We Want a Rock" "Someone in this townIs trying to burn the playhouse downThey want to stop the ones who wantA rock to wind a string aroundBut everybody wants a rockTo wind a piece of string around."

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Art has always been an outlet of dissension. These days, this reputation is most strongly associated with The Power of Rock. And where you get dissension, you get people trying to stamp it out. That's where the Culture Police come in.

The Culture Police are bad guys who try to stamp out art (most commonly rock and pop music and/or dancing) for whatever reason. Mundane versions may simply be exaggerated versions of real-life Moral Guardians operating on a local level, or trying to drum up support to expand their pro-censorship campaign. Fantastic versions may be a SPECTRE-esque organization or Scary Dogmatic Aliens whose scheme to Take Over the World involves stamping out freedom of expression. The fantastic variety will usually come with armies of Faceless Goons who go around confiscating or destroying books/records/paintings/what have you, and arresting (or killing) people who so much as whistle. The canonical alignment for these bad guys is Lawful Evil, as they are very much control freaks.

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Can easily be perceived as a Take That! against any art deliberately allowed by the Culture Police.

Unfortunately, this trope is Truth in Television. Several authoritarian, totalitarian and/or theocratic regimes have had (and have still) cultural or religious polices whose function is to curb the dissidents and guard the morals. Let's say they do exist, and any specific examples are therefore redundant.

Overlaps with Thoughtcrime. Compare Moral Guardians and Fan Haters. See also Political Correctness Gone Mad for a similar concept.

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Examples

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Anime

Comic Books

Fanworks

In Legionnaire , the Khanate has the Basiji, who are essentially religious fanatic thugs who take to the streets and beat people up on a whim.

, the Khanate has the Basiji, who are essentially religious fanatic thugs who take to the streets and beat people up on a whim. In My Immortal, it's apparently okay to send people to Azkaban for being Goth. Professor Sinister is sent there, and in the past Albus Dumbledore was so virulently anti-gothic that he'd send any goth he saw to Azkaban.

Rocketship Voyager. Captain Janeway has decorated the officer's wardroom with surviving relics of Earth culture, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stated to be "one of the few copies to survive the pyres of the House Committee for the Protection of Youth" and still illegal in certain American city-domes, and a jade dragon "smuggled out of Red China before the End of History".

Films — Animated

The most famous example of the fantastic variety would be the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine.

In The LEGO Movie, creativity in Bricksburg is harshly discouraged, with anything not built to pre-specified instructions getting destroyed, and repeat offenders threatened with being "put to sleep". In reality, the movie takes place in a Lego collector's basement; the father wants to recreate the models perfectly, while his son secretly builds mix-and-match settings but can't save them because he doesn't use glue.

Films — Live-Action

Utilized in Pleasantville as the presence of two kids from the real world starts making a small town from a sitcom set in an idealized version of The '50s more and more real. One particularly non-subtle scene visually feature an angry mob breaking into a store and tearing paintings apart — then moving on to burn books. The town establishes a Code of Conduct prohibiting all recorded music except "Pat Boone, Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Jack Jones, the marches of John Philip Sousa or 'The Star Spangled Banner'."

The Grammaton Clerics of the film Equilibrium were an elite police force tasked with destroying all art and killing anyone who possesses art. This was because the dystopian government was attempting to stabilize society by completely eliminating human emotion (why the government needs an elite, Gun Kata trained task force to carry this out is never really explained).

The surreal Swedish comedy Picassos äventyr (The Adventures of Picasso in the States) have Prohibition being not about alcohol, but art. Secret galleries work as speakeasies for people who want to see art, and are raided by the police; smugglers bring in paintings and sculpture from Canada, and Picasso gets a job producing, essentially, the art equivalent of moonshine for art-starved Americans...

In C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, the Confederacy's morality laws severely stunt the country's cultural growth. According to the movie, Confederate culture never evolved beyond state-inspired propaganda. Many take their talents to Canada, which benifits greatly.

In Duck Soup, Groucho Marx, as the newly installed ruler of Freedonia, lays down the law in a jaunty tune: No one's allowed to smoke — Or tell a dirty joke — And whistling is forbidden!

If chewing gum is chewed — The chewer is pursued — And in the hoosegow with him!

If any form of pleasure is exhibited,

Report to me and it will be prohibited!

I'll put my foot down

So shall it be-e-e...

This is the land of the free!

Stargate: Written language has been banned on Abydos for millennia (though there is a wall of hieroglyphics that's somehow survived for all this time), and when Daniel Jackson tries to write something to communicate with the locals, the person he's writing to immediately erases it in fear. In-universe, this is explained as Ra not wanting them to learn about and follow the examples of those who rebelled against the Go'auld on Earth.

Fahrenheit 451 (2018): The Firemen, who destroy nearly all books as the ideas they contain simply make people unhappy, in their view.

V for Vendetta: The Norsefire regime tightly controls all entertainment in Britain, censoring everything which ever appears on the British Television Network (BTN) which is government-run. Presumably the Interlink and any other media is also under their thumb. A specific example is Sutler ordering a painting which had once mockingly portrayed him dressed in drag, called "God Save The Queen", destroyed (but V rescued it).

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Professional Wrestling

Professional Wrestling example: The WWF heel stable Right to Censor was a group based on the Parents' Television Council, and were dedicated to stamping out sex and filth in the WWF. Their presence was used to lampshade a lot of changes to the product to make it less racy, such as the removal of Val Venis and The Godfather's smutty gimmicks (both of them renounced their "evil" ways and joined the RTC), and the loss of Billy Gunn's nickname, "Mr. Ass" (he lost the nickname as a stipulation in a match against one of the members).

Tabletop Games

The Inquisition and Adeptus Arbites of the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40,000 are pretty laid-back about culture, so long as planets revere the Emperor in some way, shape or form, pay tribute to the Imperium and don't consort with aliens or Chaos. However, if they see anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of Chaos, the purge will be swift and without mercy. And culture can easily be one of the inroads for Chaos, through the cults of Slaanesh. So they can actually have cause for extreme reactions.

The Serious Police in the Toonpunk 2020 1/2 setting for Toon. In a game based on wacky Looney Tunes type stuff, they're The Comically Serious with assault weaponry.

The Coalition States in Rifts makes literacy itself a crime. This is the primary reason why the number one person on their Most Wanted List is an outspoken 65-year-old woman who mostly writes books about her travels and freely teaches and encourages others to read.

Normality can be argued to represent the final total victory of the Culture Police.

Starchildren: The Velvet Generation (which could best be described as Ziggy Stardust: the RPG) takes place in a future where an organization colloquially known as "Mad Mother" has ridden the wave of public distrust and stamped out rock music.

Some of the less liberal of the Successor States in BattleTech have this. (So do the Clans, although their "police" is more likely to be either active or mustered-out warriors with all that implies.)

Theater

Killer Queen and Globalsoft in We Will Rock You, the rock musical based on the music of Queen, are bent on eliminating all music and, thus, free thought, on Planet Mall, aka Earth. Ironically, Killer Queen sings a song about half way through the play. This is excusable, though, because it's a musical. And who else but a villain could do "Another One Bites The Dust"? After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, all western TV, film, and music was banned in Iran. When liberalizing political attitudes in the mid-2000s led to some western music being authorized for sale in the country, ironically enough, a Queen's greatest hits album was the first disc approved for sale. This was due to Bohemian Rhapsody containing the phrase "Bismillah."



Video Games

Dr. Robotnik's goal in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is to stamp out music and fun via his roboticizer and the converted Beanville citizens.

The final stage of Elite Beat Agents features a race of music-hating aliens that take over the world and outlaw music. Anyone caught singing, dancing, or enjoying music in general gets either Taken for Granite or sent to what is essentially a concentration camp. However, they didn't do that just because they hate music, but because music actually hurts them, which leads to their inevitable downfall as a result of a worldwide rock concert.

Revolution X has the New Order Nation, an anti-youth culture organization consisting essentially of Kerri Hoskins as Mistress Helga, a hot authoritarian woman in a dominatrix-esque leather outfit, and her throngs of machine gun-wielding mooks in yellow jumpsuits, which takes over the American government, bans television, rock music, and video games, and kidnaps Aerosmith.

The Jet Set Radio games have regular police and later trained assassins playing this role, trying to suppress a skater counterculture. Pompadoured police chief Onishima employs an oversized revolver loaded with rubber bullets, hordes of riot-shield wielding goons, and even tanks and helicopters armed with anti-riot gear to take your character down. All this turns out to be the plan of an evil corporate mogul so he can smother Tokyo in nothing but homogeneous, mediocre mainstream entertainment, as the first part of his plot to conquer the world with dark powers. No, really.

Normality plays this pretty straight; music is banned, joy is banned, most color is banned, and people have to turn their TV on (with only crap on air, of course) at all times. Later, you smash walls apart using a guitar.

The INKT corporation in de Blob bans music and color. They take a more proactive approach on color, sucking it away with robots... which they then leave around for the protagonist to slam into and gain color to go spread around Chroma City once more.

Fallen London: The Ministry of Public Decency, and their Special Constables, play this role, complete with book-burning insignia. They mostly crack down on obviously revolutionary literature and simple digs at the government (in particular the Masters of the Bazaar), but they're known to go after plays and books for stranger reasons, which is only partially explained by the fact Mr. Pages loves to steal books from the "for burning" pile and occasionally bans rare books just to have them itself. All romantic literature is also subject to heavy revision and taxation, and getting caught smuggling it is about as bad as getting caught soul-smuggling. That's because the city itself feeds on love stories.

In Final Fantasy XIV, the first emperor of Garlemald was an avid patron of the arts, so much so that he personally commissioned a grand airship for his favorite theatre troupe to take their performance all over the empire. By contrast, his grandson and successor placed strict regulations and censorships on all forms of art and theatre so that only Imperial approved works could be shown to the public.

Web Comics

Several storylines in Fans! played this trope hilariously straight. Apparently, the only thing standing in the way of would-be world conquerors is science fiction fandom. Ban sci-fi, or go back in time and kill someone big like H.G. Wells, and Earth is all yours.

The Mayor in The Word Weary has a Grand Jury indict Yorick for his performance art.

Web Original

In the Chaos Timeline in Technocratic Germany. Censors the book "Das Paradies der Goldis" by Katherine Geller (apparently a bit like Valley of the Dolls) for the depiction of mental diseases, drug addiction and lesbian love.

Shows up in A World of Laughter, a World of Tears, in the form of the Mickey Mouse Club, which manages to suppress, among other things, Elvis and Beatniks, causing them to leave for Europe.

In RWBY, an enormous Culture War figures prominently in the history of Remnant. Taking place eighty years before the start of the series, the war saw all four kingdoms fighting over issues of trade and borders, but also over, as Professor Ozpin puts it, "the destruction of all forms of art and self-expression." (The rationale behind it was that, as negative emotions attract the Creatures of Grimm, keeping "the emotions of the masses" in check would serve as a measure of protection. In practice, this was enforced on the populace of the outer territories, leaving the wealthy and elite free to enjoy themselves as normal.) As a form of rebellion against this, Remnant's tradition of Colourful Theme Naming was started after the war. Ozpin: "It was their way to demonstrate that not only would they refuse to tolerate this oppression, but neither would the generations to come."

The online supplementary material for the Bernice Summerfield novel Down (still available via the Internet Archive ) features the Culture Cancellation Authority (note the acronym) which in the 2530s "was publicly burning morally suspect pulpzines".

Western Animation