Why censorship should not be damned and banned

The recent controversy following a decision by the board of censors (officially known as the Stage Classification Board) to ban Anthony Nielson's play Stitching has given rise to a two-pronged argument against censorship.

One says that the play is a work of art and should not be banned. Banning it treats the public like little tots who do not know how to cross the street on their own. I have not seen the play or read the script and therefore am not in a position to judge whether the censors' decision is justified.

Whether this particular play should be banned is a subjective argument and I respect the fact that those on both sides of the fence have a right to their opinion. Of course, the opinion of those who have passed judgment without actually knowing anything about the banned play is not an opinion at all.

It is the other argument that bugs me. Briefly it posits the belief that as Malta aspires to be a modern European country, there is no place for censorship. The argument here is not whether the banned play oversteps the line of decency - wherever it is - but that there should be no such line, unlike what really happens abroad.

The notion that there is no censorship in other 'enlightened' European countries is completely flawed. There are several examples that show that the right for 'freedom of expression' is not absolute.

Can anyone stage a play that extols Nazism, or that insists that the Holocaust never existed? Can any media portray child pornography implying that paedophilia is just another sexual fetish? Is anyone 'free' to insist that one human race is superior to another?

The obvious negative response to these rhetorical questions undoubtedly shows that censorship is alive and well. To say nothing of European countries where one is free to ridicule Christianity and Jesus Christ but cannot mete the same treatment to Islam and the Prophet: a case of political censorship under the guise of respect towards people's religious beliefs.

The banning of Stitching is an unfortunate incident that is now being politically spun to portray Malta as a country where oppression is the name of the game and where our freedom is threatened. The pundits arriving at this conclusion are, however, starting from the wrong premise: the assertion that the existence of any kind of censorship is necessarily wrong. In fact, censorship is a necessary evil, as in the case of the examples I quoted above.

I do not think that the likes of Evarist Bartolo and Charles Flores, both of whom wrote about the subject last Sunday, are beyond seeing this point if they make a genuine effort at being objective. But objectivity is the first causality in political spin.

For Flores, the censor's decision is "an instant throw-back to the dark old days of total censorship when films were horrendously scissored, newspapers inked over, books refused local distribution, plays banned by the dozen."

From this unjustified exaggeration, Flores went on to another, insisting that "we have not moved any nearer to social and cultural maturity". He then followed these exaggerations - that are far removed from the truth - by an obvious clanger: "People are no longer ready to accept censorship in whichever form it takes."

Generalising in this way to the extent of refusing the very notion of censorship, irrespective of what is being censored, is a dangerous tack.

It is true that we have moved from the days when the published transcripts of the Nixon tapes in the Watergate scandal were peppered with missing bits labelled 'expletive deleted'; and today most of those expletives are acceptable fare in American television sitcoms. But this does not signify the end of censorship in an absolute way.

Bartolo's political motivations led him to sarcastically draw parallels between Malta and countries such as Burma and Yemen where particular films have been banned as if we are being governed by some oppressive regime - like the one that banned the showing of the film Raid on Entebbe in Malta in the 1970s.

He then went on to say that the banned play "is definitely about sick and disturbing human behaviour". Humans are "often cruel beasts" and the author of the banned play "has not invented any sexual perversion or cruelty" but "simply written about this dark side of human beings". I find this reasoning very perturbing.

Try, for example, applying it to theatrical productions that portray paedophilia or cannibalism in some way or other; or even to television broadcasts or films showing actual beheadings with someone's throat being slashed by some misguided terrorist using religion as a pretext for his sadism. Clearly, there must be a line beyond which the portrayal of extremely repulsive behaviour is unacceptable in a modern society living in the first decade of the third millennium.

The argument against the censors' decision should be that the play does not go beyond that line - and not that there should be no such line.

micfal@maltanet.net