Subject: Re: Movies banned in BC, Canada

From: [email-masked] (Brad Templeton)
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1993 08:21:58 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (scott weaver 9209 U) writes:
>In case you haven't noticed the increase of real-life violence and
>sexual-abuses happening, I wouldn't doubt for a second that this is in
>part due to the increase of voilence and pornography in movies and on
>television.  

I think you miss the point.  Even if this connection were certain, even
if movies about rape were known beyond a shadow of a doubt to increase
rape, are you suggesting that they should be banned?

Karl Marx wrote a book once that inspired several societies who declared
it to be their highest ideal.  They followed its directions about setting
up a dictatorship of the proletariat and in each case that dictatorship
became corrupt.  In several of the cases it lead to economic ruin, oppression,
destruction, poverty and starvation for HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE,
perhaps BILLIONS of people, and the painful cruel murder of millions of
people.

This connection is far more certain than any connection ever suggested
between movie violence and real violence, between movie degredation of
women and real life repression of women.  The people doing the murdering
and ruination actually held up the book as their guide as they were
doing it, declaring that it inspired them, even though they had
corrupted much of its message.

Yet in spite of this very compelling link between this book and the
ruin and death for millions upon millions of people, which to be frank
makes all the rape and violence in Canada look like a walk in the daisies,
I have not seen the suggestion that this book be banned.

And it should not be, nor the other things.  There is no justification
to respond to portraits of violence with the real violence of book-banning,
the jailing of publishers.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366