My eldest asked me at lunch the other day, ‘Dad, what is blackmail?’<\/p>\n
I gave one answer, my mother-in-law gave a slightly different answer, which led to some investigation and an interesting discovery. From wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n “Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing, socially damaging, and\/or criminally incriminating nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands in exchange for withholding it. English Law creates a much broader definition of blackmail, covering any unwarranted demands with menaces, whether involving revealing information or not.<\/span>“<\/p>\n Essentially the difference between my mother-in-law and I was that I was using the English Law version, whereas as she was using the stricter (earlier?) definition.<\/p>\n So: in common English terms, blackmail is when someone says ‘do this, or you’ll be sorry’, ie it is the use of force <\/span>to compel someone to do something that they otherwise would not have done (NB force doesn’t have to be physical; I’m using it essentially as a contrast to reason, as in ‘reasoning with someone’). It is treating a human being as a thing, an instrument for the will, rather than as a person. In short, it is bullying (in the news at the moment).<\/p>\n I was reminded of this conversation by reading Doug’s post<\/a>. The concept as a whole has been on my mind rather a lot over the last nine months or so. My eldest asked me at lunch the other day, ‘Dad, what is blackmail?’ I gave one answer, my mother-in-law gave a slightly different answer, which led to some investigation and an interesting discovery. From wikipedia: “Blackmail is the crime of … Continue reading
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