Dominic Green, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression, wrote of the German government’s attempt to censor—to bar from public viewing—a movie that was, by most accounts, badly done schlock (Green’s term). The rationale was that the movie depicted unrepentant and graphic violence by German vigilantes against Germany’s “immigrants,” the illegal aliens present in that nation.
German regulators’ problem with Citizen Vigilante wasn’t its depiction of unspeakable acts, but their unmentionable perpetrators. For years, European governments did their best to deny that mass immigration, notably from majority-Muslim societies, correlated to documented rises in the number of sexual crimes, especially gang rape.
Green closed his piece with this:
We like to think of the arts as our conscience, pushing social problems to our attention. If Europeans must rely on cinéastes of Mr Boll’s caliber to depict Europe’s current problems, it’s because no one else wants to admit their nature and extent.
Mr Boll has illuminated the crisis of political legitimacy and social order that is rapidly unraveling Europe’s peace. His film was censored to keep the peace. That shows the severity of the continent’s crisis, and the fragility of Europe’s peace.
It’s broader in scope than that, though. Government censorship, of nearly anything in any milieu, is a clear and dispositive sign of the intellectual bankruptcy, arrogance of Knowing Better, of cowardice of the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict it. Even the (legitimate) censor of slander is after the fact, not preemptive.
If the citizenry cannot speak freely, they cannot be free. It’s on those citizens in their aggregate—We the People as we put it in the opening phrase of our Constitution—not just individual makers of bad movies or one-off rich idealists, to change out those politicians who would limit our speech.