Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Art confronts politics
The Bush administration is embarrassed into backing away from its censorship of foreign writers. But the battle isn’t over yet.

THE BUSH administration last week showed that it is capable of embarrassment, which is no small matter for a group as self-righteous and arrogant as this. But when it comes to the right of free expression, and of dissident voices to be heard, the White House has still not demonstrated it is capable of doing the right thing.

On December 17, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a rule "clarifying" a policy that had restricted the right of American publishers to work with authors in Cuba, Iran, and Sudan, countries under economic embargoes imposed by the United States. "OFAC’s previous guidance was interpreted by some as discouraging the publication of dissident speech from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want," said Stuart Levey, a top Treasury Department official, in a written statement. "This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy."

The agency’s press release made no mention of it, but the new policy — dropping a requirement that American companies obtain a government license before publishing the work of Cuban, Iranian, and Sudanese writers and artists — was issued just three months after the agency was sued in US District Court in New York. Among the plaintiffs seeking to force the government to drop its oppressive policy: the PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) American Center and Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The noted author Salman Rushdie, president of the PEN American Center, has put it this way: "Writers in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan cannot publish freely in their own countries. It is a tragic and dangerous irony that Americans may not freely publish the works of those writers here, either."

The Bush administration’s censorious approach — which included the possibility of a $250,000 fine and a 10-year prison sentence for individuals, or a $1 million fine for a publishing house — was clearly becoming untenable. Recently the Los Angeles Times ran a story observing that had such a policy been in effect in the 1950s, Boris Pasternak’s landmark anti-Soviet novel Doctor Zhivago could not have been published in the United States. The paper also reported that publishers had already dropped plans for books on Cuban architecture and birds.

This past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review — which went to press before the December 17 announcement — included an essay on censorship in which the OFAC policy came in for some well-considered criticism. Among other things, the article observed that requiring American publishers to obtain a license before dealing with writers from forbidden countries was itself censorious. "I’m not going to ask permission. That’s the Iranian way of doing things," one of the plaintiffs, Richard Seaver, editor-in-chief of Arcade Publishing, was quoted as saying.

The new policy grants to Americans a "general license," allowing them to engage in publishing activities with ordinary citizens in Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, but not with the governments in those countries. It is a step in the right direction, but it clearly does not go far enough. As Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat, has pointed out, OFAC has now enshrined the notion that it has the authority to license the activities of American publishers — a clear violation of the First Amendment, even if the new policy is less oppressive than the one it replaces. (Berman is the author of the so-called Berman Amendment, which exempts information from economic embargoes.)

"OFAC is still acting like they have the authority to grant permission and that interferes with our fundamental right to freedom of expression," Berman says in a statement on his Web site. He also argues that the agency erred by offering general licenses only to publishers rather than to all segments of the artistic community. "Why should it be okay for a publisher to commission a book from an Iranian dissident, but not for a film studio to work with a Sudanese filmmaker, or a recording studio to collaborate with a Cuban musician?" asks Berman. "This makes absolutely no sense, and reflects the fact that these regulations were issued in a desperate attempt to head off mounting legal and political pressure — not as part of a serious effort to rationalize an indefensible and counterproductive policy."

The Bush administration’s initial attempt to censor the work of foreign writers and artists was outrageous, and its clarification is only slightly less so. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that no one can be pre-emptively prevented from speaking or publishing. That is the essence of freedom of speech. OFAC’s regulations are derived from the Trading with the Enemy Act, a 1917 law passed at the height of World War I, a time when real and imagined enemies of the United States were arrested, imprisoned, and deported. Since then, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly made it clear that — in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — speech may not be suppressed unless it poses a "clear and present danger" to national security.

Far from protecting national security, the odious rules and regulations promulgated by the Bush White House eliminate the judgment of publishers and substitute that of the government, while simultaneously taking away the publishers’ First Amendment right to act freely. At a time when it is more important than ever that we shine a beacon of freedom across the world, our government seeks to emulate the repressive tactics of the very countries whose citizens are the most in need of American-style liberties. It’s a disgrace, and last week’s "clarification" does little to alter that.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com


Issue Date: December 24 - 30, 2004
Back to the News & Features table of contents
Click here for an archive of our past editorials.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group