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Volume
II
Issue 14 Summer 2000 |
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Sugar Pill or Tonic? by Anne M Carley [This is a companion piece to Forbidden Theater by Paul Foster, appearing in this issue of the Arts4All Newsletter. Ed.] When the playwright and US citizen Paul Foster stepped off the plane onto Romanian soil in 1971, did the sweetness of freedom of expression flavor his every meal? No. In February 1977, at the hotel in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was the First Amendment right there, in every glass of iced tea? Not that you could have noticed. But when he returned to the United States, did it come back into his life? Yes. On the face of it, it is that simple. By carrying a US passport, an American citizen does carry certain protections - supported by internationally ratified treaties, by declarations of rights and other weighty measures, and by American economic clout. But the inalienable, enforceable right of free expression anywhere in the world? Not exactly, not yet. In Romania, had the actors in Foster's play, Elizabeth I, been free to express themselves on stage, the showstoppingly clever translation from text to sugar-bowl pantomime would not have been so essential to the evening. In Brazil, had his listeners been free to opine on free speech at the American Literature conference, the US diplomatic officials would have left him to his own devices - his life would not have been in peril. Time has passed since the 1970's but freedom of speech is still scarce in some quarters. Freedom of speech distinguished the thirteen original states from their colonial overlords, and it continues to distinguish the fifty United States from other nations. Now, as broadened by the courts into freedom of expression, First Amendment jurisprudence often baffles other citizens of the world, and even some within the US: Think of the die-hard free-speech left-leaning lawyers who went to court in April of 1977, a few months after Paul Foster's week in Brazil, to protect the rights of extreme right-wing marchers who wanted to put on a public demonstration in Skokie, Illinois. The US Supreme Court agreed that the neo-Nazis had a right to march, thereby disgruntling many Americans and mystifying others. Why did the Court support an argument that supported neo-Nazis? Because to prohibit the march would be a prior restraint of speech. This principle, that the law will not prevent possibly offensive speech before it has happened, would have come in handy in Belo Horizonte. But the law in Brazil was different. From the archives we were able to retrieve copies of several newspaper articles from that week in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in early February, 1977. We gathered a bit more background, or context, for Foster's strange experience that week. The Event On Monday 31 January 1977, Foster was the opening speaker at the Eighth American Literature Seminar held in Belo Horizonte. A successful young playwright from the New York theater worlds, he was invited to speak about Modern American Theater. The seminar, attended by Brazilian university professors, was co-sponsored by the USIS (United States Information Service) and UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais [Minas Gerais is a state, its capital Belo Horizonte]). After his remarks, Foster took questions from the press. According to Tuesday's newspaper, "the young playwright, who came yesterday to Rio, made clear that his main theatrical objective is to captivate the hearts and minds of the public. 'My desire is to see the audience emotionally absorbed by my play.... See them feel and understand what I am saying'." So far, so good. Later, in another interview, one question - more significant than Foster then realized - was, "what is your view on government censorship of the arts?" What Foster Said According to Foster, his response was immediate and easy, but reports of his words were neither. On Thursday of that week news began to filter out. Not everything he said was inflammatory: one newspaper quoted Foster, "There are many things that we can criticize about the United States, but censorship of the arts, thank God, is not one of them." Rather, Foster suggested, state subsidies of the arts were generally trouble. He advised: If your theater company is facing difficulties, ask your parents, your relatives, your friends for money, but stay away from the government. For the Brazilian theater, Foster recommended developing touring companies and regional theaters, traveling all over the country using improvised stages, as in the days of Shakespeare and Molière. These tours would give actors more work, educate the public about the theater arts, and attract the public to the theater, developing in the long term a lively theatrical life in Brazil's interior. Foster also suggested that all of this be done without government funding or interference (reasoning that the one results in the other.) Then came the finale: he declared that "censorship is the death of the arts, no matter in what field, but especially in the theater, where communication becomes alive, direct and immediate." Foster later learned that in one sentence he had ignited the civic equivalent of a theater full of oily rags. Manifesto A few days before Foster's arrival, more than a thousand of Brazil's intellectuals had submitted to the Brasilia government a manifesto calling for the abolition of official censorship of speech. Back in Belo Horizonte, Friday's newspapers carried the government's response to the manifesto, released Thursday, the same day Foster's incendiary sentence had been published.
Headline
from Diario de Minas, Belo Horizonte, Armando Falcão, Brazil's Secretary of Justice, had explained that censorship was a part of the fabric of Brazil's constitution since 1934 and could therefore not be abolished. He further pledged that his office would continue to "do its duty, with all seriousness and strength, enforcing the governing laws." Censorship defends society against dissolution and social and cultural degeneration, he stated, and it exists in practically every country. Another news article reported that during one of the many interviews with Foster, the outdoor signs on hotel and financial buildings in Belo Horizonte were set on fire, causing panic and bringing fire trucks to the scene. Wednesday evening's paper mentioned that the fires in Belo Horizonte had caused Foster to change hotel rooms, while in São Paulo "major fires continued to scare the foreigners." Clearly, this was the consequence of much more than a casual press interview with a visiting playwright. Just as clearly, knowing the promises of the First Amendment was no help to Foster or to the thousand intellectuals or to the people running for safety from the flames and smoke. Brasilia's Response Under Brazilian law, it seems the Secretary of Justice was only doing his job. As he put it, in order to accede to the demands of the thousand intellectuals it would be necessary to change the constitution - "an initiative that the government would never consider because it would never abandon the public's interest."
The Secretary provided an example of how minimal censorship was in real life: out of 4,740 films examined, only 6 had been prohibited. He also declared that blocking out some foreign works is only to protect the public against "solicitation of obscene materials." Not all politicians agreed. Brasilia's Mayor, Alencar Furtado, countered that "censorship does not exist in order to control immorality, as the Minister of Justice claims, but to fundamentally censor political manifestations in Brazil." Furtado continued, "Censorship reflects the fear that the government has of the culture and the truth, thus it lives in agonizing fear of the national culture..." For him, the claim made by the Secretary of Justice "defending the behavior of censorship, only puts the censors in confrontation with the culture, turning this into a huge public ordeal." Friday's papers were full of Secretary Falcao's remarks. At the end of one such article was a little squib noting that, "in Belo Horizonte, the American playwright Paul Foster remitted a letter to the Estado de Minas [State of Minas Newspaper] declaring that in his interview with the press last Wednesday, 'I never, at any time referred to the censorship problem in Brazil'." State Department spin, apparently, to de-fuse Foster's plight, and to tone down a situation that had recently seen the (permanent) disappearance of an American Time magazine reporter. The Story of Elizabeth I Interestingly, the Brazilian press picked up on Foster's experience presenting his play, Elizabeth I , in Bucharest in 1971. Careful to point out that Romania was a socialist country, one Brazilian report revealed that the play had run into problems with government censorship, and that the play's director and two principal actors were arrested and confined. The newspaper in Rio said the creative decision to use the sugar-bowl as a potent symbol of corruption and tyranny came to them while they were behind bars. Said another article: "They learned that even in a system like the one in Romania, it is possible to stage a play without mutilating its true sense. So the translator and the producer of Elizabeth I knew how to trick the censors and keep in the script the phrases that the public could understand." One example of such a potent line (spoken by the Queen) was : "Burghley, there are no eternal enemies, and certainly no eternal friends. There are only eternal interests." It is easy to imagine that a Romanian - or a Brazilian - might begin to read between those lines.
Declaration Enemies may come and go, but at all times in the last century it seems there were committed enemies of free speech. Is there international law to protect the rights of all citizens of the world to free expression? No, but there is international (unenforceable) accord on the subject, at least on paper. Adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 states:
Eleanor Roosevelt struggled in the years after World War II as chair of the United Nations committee that wrote - and then got ratified - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the toxic aftermath of the war, many nations were willing to support some basic human rights, if only wishfully. Eventually, the General Assembly approved the final language and the document was adopted. Since then some remarkable changes - the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa are two examples - might provide some hope that human rights in general and free speech in particular will triumph. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, itself, was never meant to provide legal protection. It is a statement of beliefs, and no more, designed to inspire individual nations to create their own legal structures of rights. Needless to say Article 19 has been ignored from time to time, place to place, since its inception. More than fifty years later, have we become able to generalize about rules on free expression throughout the world? Here's what the Secretary-general of the United Nations believes:
True, if Foster were to re-play his visits to Bucharest and Belo Horizonte today, his remarks would probably meet with a good deal less tension than in the '70's. If he were instead to go to Tibet, and trigger talk about the Republic of China's restrictions on all forms of expression - well, he wouldn't actually be able to visit Tibet. But while preparing this article it was easy to find a list of human-rights violations imposed on Tibet by the Chinese for the last forty years. How? With the help of Google, the logical-ands Internet search engine. Nectar of the Internet The Internet is changing things, as it tends to do. It threatens to accelerate the spread of a worldwide doctrine on the right to free expression. To start, the Internet itself is a medium of free expression protected by the First Amendment - the US Supreme Court said so in 1997. In the United States, at least, we are assured of wide latitude when we express ourselves over the Internet. But it goes much further. As a practical solution to the very old problems of censorship, the Internet offers instantaneous and global communication. Individuals are far more able to send and receive information and opinion without regard to timezones, heavily armed national borders, hateful ethnic divisions, or domestic governmental prohibitions against free expression. While many governments espouse free speech, and many national journalists' organizations have codified their beliefs, there remain important differences from one country to the next. In Germany, for example, neo-Nazi hate speech is prohibited on the Internet. That country determined the potential damage resulting from unimpaired Internet access for skinheads and their ilk was great enough to support what the US would prohibit as a prior restraint of speech. As one commentator puts it: "[M]any democratic countries do not believe that restrictions on public speech harm democratic discourse; on the contrary, they often believe that such restrictions are necessary to foster such discourse." These kinds of principled differences among nations are likely to endure, even though the notion of a "national" rule about anything on the Internet may seem impossibly anachronistic. An American far from home is still subject to the unexpected delights and grim surprises that can accompany foreign travel. The United States, for all its muscle, cannot protect a person's Constitutional rights outside of the United States. Meanwhile, domestically, this nation continues its sometimes awkward journey. We still struggle with the consequences of the belief, as stated in the 1940's by then-Governor Thomas E. Dewey, that "the cure for the problems of democracy is more democracy." Time for our medicine?
About the Author: Anne Carley edits the Newsletter. To the best of her knowledge and belief her life has never been threatened in a foreign country. Resources: Elsewhere in this Newsletter, in Paul Foster's article, Forbidden Theater, he recounts the Romania and Brazil stories alluded to here. Published in the United States this spring, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders (New Press, 2000) presents the results of an investigative journalist's research on the CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency) and its secret sponsorship of the arts internationally, from after World War II into the mid-1960's. Aimed at defending the free world from communism, the CIA gave its operatives lavish budgets and a free hand. ISBN: 156584596X For a history of United States law on hate speech (including the Skokie march) see Franklyn Haiman's essay at http://www.aclu.org/aclu-e/course1_haiman2.html Eleanor Roosevelt's key role as chair of the UN group that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is presented here http://www.udhr50.org/UDHR/default .htm For more on UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan's remarks on international human rights at the National Press Club, Washington DC 16 October 1998, see http://www.un.org/D ocs/SG/quotable/hrights.htm#speech Journalists Unions around the world have adopted codes of conduct. Their positions on free expression are detailed, alphabetically by country, at http://www.presswise.org.uk/Freed om.htm At the section, "INTERNATIONAL LAW," Tibet's free-speech conflicts with the Republic of China are examined. http://www.tchrd.org/public/annu al99.htm Commentator James J. Black compares free speech in the US and Germany. James J. Black, Free Speech & The Internet: The Inevitable Move Toward Government Regulation, 4 RICH. J.L. & TECH. 1, (Winter 1997). http://www.richmond.edu/~ jolt/v4i2/black.html The Supreme Court 1997 decision striking down the Communications Decency Act as unconstitutional is an important case that established freedom of speech on the Internet under United States law. Anne Carley wrote about it at http://www.silentpc.com/nysba_2.htm From the Paul Foster Collection at Rutgers, Brazilian clippings consulted were: Diario da Tarde / Estado de Minas / Belo Horizonte, Monday 31 Jan 1977 Arte na semana by Morgan Motta Diario da Tarde / Belo Horizonte, Wednesday evening, 2 Feb 1977 [society pages - listings - 2 items - one on Seminar; one on Paul Foster, vanguard director] Jornal do Brasil / Rio de Janeiro, Thursday 3 Feb 1977 Paul Foster: A Censura E O assassinato da arte by Luis Fernando Emediato Estado de Minas / Belo Horisonte, Thursday 3 Feb 1977, [front page] Foster ve a censura como morte a arte O Estado de S. Paulo, / dateline Belo Horizonte, Thursday 3 Feb 1977 Para dramaturgo americano, censura e um "ato homicida" Estado de Minas / Belo Horizonte, Thursday 3 Feb 1977 Paul Foster e o teatro moderno by Wilson Simao Diario de Minas / Belo Horizonte, Friday 4 Feb 1977 Teatro americano e muito promissor Diario de Minas / Belo Horizonte, Friday 4 Feb Governo responde o manifesto dos intelectuais Falcao explica as razoes de censura Estado de Minas / Belo Horizonte, Friday 4 Feb 1977 Falcao: Censura do caira se a constituicao mudar The Foster Theatrical Collection, archived at the Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, contains the writer's complete body of work. Fully catalogued, the collection (Call Number MC865) comprises 21 cubic feet of manuscripts and other theatrical papers. For further information, contact the Library by email to edskip@rci.rutgers.edu or write to Dr. Ron Becker, Head of Special Collections, The Alexander Library, Rutgers University, 69 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. Dr. Becker's kind assistance providing research materials is gratefully acknowledged. |
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