censorship is shit.
How did I come to that conclusion? My passion for movies showed me, how destructive censorship is. Again and again the German censorship ruins work. Films and film footage are cut at most, which itself is bad enough already, because if literature and art is cut, too, we would have the second coming of the Third Reich.
Why are movies cut, even if they had been produced for adults? I‘m talking about horror films. There are not many films, which haven´t been cut prior to publishing on the German market. Why? Those films were made for adults only, so why the hell are they being censored? German law clearly states that those movies have to be censored due to their youth-endangering content. But adults are not teenagers or kids. They are adults, which means they can process the content of those films. If they don’t want to see brutal films, they don´t have to. But as I saw SEED or SAW, I sadly had to realize that it had been censored terribly. The FSK (voluntary self-control) is not oblivious to the fact, that they dismember and sometimes even destroy a work. The director wants to convey a message to the audience! Censorship destroys these messages in films like NATURAL BORN KILLERS, or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST! It´s like scribbling around in somebody´s paintings just because you dislike his work. Unfortunately, not only violence is censored, but sometimes whole dialogues are cut out of a movie. This is primarily done to cut the length of that film shorter and secondly, to protect political themes. ONG BAK for example has been deprived of all political dialogues, because they are considered “internal affairs”. Censorship should be banned!
It´s bad enough that I am deprived my rights of enjoying a film but does television have to be censored, too? Television has a strong manipulative power. Documentaries about “killer-games” are the most present example for that. They sometimes not only state wrong facts, but they re-cut film footage in ways so that they can be interpreted as evidence that all gamers are potential mass-murderers and killers. I call those fake or pseudo-documentaries, because they don´t handle the issue with objectivity. Also some political statements or interviews are being censored, for example an interview done with Vladimir Putin, concerning the Caucasus Frontier. In this Interview, Putin doesn´t express much of an affection for the United States. He doesn´t talk very nice about America but he only wanted to show his point of view. He also criticized the Nations, who sided with the USA. Germany played along with that game of showing Russia up. Well, wouldn´t it be awkward, if people at home sitting in front of their TV suddenly start to think about what is right or wrong or even develop an intelligence of their own? Only after heavy debates we were allowed to see the whole uncut interview.
Censorship destroys and manipulates. What have we become?
