With the Path to 9/11 DVD, the Samizdat may come to America
We note the intense efforts of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Administration to censor or cancel the movie, The Path to 9/11. In addition, govenment officials have obliquely threatened ABC with adverse government action under the Communications Act of 1934. The most peculiar thing about this attempt at censorship, coercion, and prior restraint is that the movie already has been distributed to some people as a DVD.
The furor by the Clintonians and the institutional Democratic Party is very interesting. It could have a number of sources, one of them benign, many of them not. Whatever the source of the outrage, none of the outcomes for the censorship proponents seem very good, since the director’s cut DVD has already been released to some people throughout the country. If ABC heavily edits the movie to eliminate elements offensive to the government officials, those scenes will be made available no doubt on the internet for side-by-side comparisons. If ABC cancels the movie entirely, so much the better. Woe betide the American who ever listens again to this group of Democrats as they declaim on the sacred rights of free speech — and furthermore, the DVD will still be out there.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at a worst case scenario, in which the movie is changed in ways that definitively alter its meaning — that would turn the existing DVD’s of the original movie into gold overnight. They would be pirated; they could be sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars perhaps. Then what might happen? What could be the next phase of government repression, we ask? How eager could their corporate lapdogs be to carry out their masters’ wishes? Will ABC attempt to recover and destroy all copies of the director’s cut DVD? Will they sue anyone who posts passages on the internet? Will the brave Senators Reid, Durbin, Stabenow, Schumer, and Dorgan try to pass a law to throw the offenders in jail?
In the bad old days of the Cold War, the Samizdat (самиздат
was a clandestine publishing system within the Soviet Union and Societ bloc countries, by which forbidden or unpublishable literature was reproduced and circulated privately. Authors from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Milan Kundera found their way to millions of readers via Samizdat. Depending on the degree of censorship and political correctness ultimately imposed upon ABC, it is possible that the name Cyrus Nowrasteh could be added to the list of banned authors.Obviously, we don’t expect things to get that bad, but the outrage of the Democratic government censor wannabes is highly instructive. Do they think the public is so stupid that it can be swayed by a few minutes of this or that? Are they that thin-skinned that they think one mini-series among the millions of broadcast hours each year will make some difference? Do they treasure propaganda that highly, and fear its loss so much? Are they right about the public and propaganda? Perhaps many Americans are so weak-minded and impressionable today — but if that is true, how do they have the stamina to sit through a five-hour mini-series, let alone get up to vote in November?
lthumbsdown: 
