One thing I like about being in Germany is that authorities here know what
to censor. In the U.S., as one will see in tomorrow's "The People vs.
Larry Flynt," government restricts pictures of sex because folks won't
do it if they don't see it - a fact surely proved by the 1/3 of out-of-wedlock
births in colonial America. The second idea is that violence won't be done
to women if folks don't see violence against women, a fact surely proved
by the global absence of rape prior to tv. By contrast, the German government
restricts nasty political ideas, as one saw in the charges against PDS member
Angela Marquardt for sneaking the banned "Radikal" onto the Internet.
The magazine included information on sabotaging trains, and I agree with
the government here. Folks do not get rebellious ideas on their own, as
the biographies of Jesus, Luther, Danton and Darwin attest. I wonder only
why "Radikal" chose to target trains and not the apparatus government
uses to survey the Internet. Sabotaging trains in 1997 is like trying to
be a pornographer by showing ladies' ankles.
The charges against Larry Flynt also pertained to political speech, and
I agree with the censors here, as well. Flynt published a scatalogical satirical
cartoon of fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell, and I know that no one in
America had nasty thoughts about him without reading them in "Hustler"
first. I certainly never did. Other complaints against Flynt re-emerged
with release of the film. Some protested that the movie "valorized"
a sleazebag thug by highlighting his one noble moment defending free speech.
The protesters are right: all people who do good things should be intelligent,
have good taste and be cute, too. America never valorizes bad guys. The
men who made millions sending immigrants in chain gangs to build the railroads
or who worked children in mines and sweatshops, these men who might have--perhaps-
-harmed more people than Flynt's photos, the Carnegies, Fricks and Rockefellers
are not valorized in America. In the U.S., only the good get rich and famous,
and "Larry Flynt" is evil for saying otherwise.
Still others protested that the mine-and- sweatshop owners did not harm
more people than Flynt whose photos, they say, cause men to rape women.
In a piece in The New York Times, feminist leader Gloria Steinem wrote about
the pool hall rape that occurred shortly after Flynt ran a picture of a
pool hall rape, and she likened Flynt to Hitler. I am with her, too. The
Nazis took pictures of the crimes they caused, and it is these pictures
we should focus on, not the strains in German society that produced the
Third Reich. For if we examine the underlying causes of crimes against Jews
that might suggest we examine the underlying causes of crimes against women.
And that would be a lot of work, and we'd have to change a lot of things.
Better to focus on the pictures. Though as a Jew, I must say one thing:
I'm glad Steinem didn't make a career of Holocaust studies.
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