Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 4 – Yesterday, a
court in Tomsk oblast fined two Russians for posting on the Internet the
classic 1942 Donald Duck cartoon, “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” It did so because the
cartoon was listed as extremist in 2013, even though or perhaps because under
Putin it makes fun of Hitler (omsk.ru/news/view/105990
and grani.ru/Society/Law/m.244043.html).
The Walt Disney cartoon, part of
American anti-Nazi films during World War II, won its director an Oscar at the
time and was subsequently declared one of the 50 best cartoons of all time. But
two years ago, it was included on the Russian government’s list of extremist
materials (sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/counteraction/2013/08/d27809/).
In reporting this new action of the
Russian judicial system, the SOVA human rights monitoring organization points
out that “it is obvious” that courts are not considering each clip separately
but choosing instead to prohibit anything listed however incorrectly by Moscow
(sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/counteraction/2015/09/d32717/).
“Such
a case,” SOVA continues, “yet again testifies about the unnecessary quality and
even harmfulness of the Federal List as an instrument [of the Russian legal
system] and serves as a reminder that the best way out of the current situation
is to dispense with it altogether,” lest more such outrages happen.
This
ban on an anti-Nazi Disney cartoon is not the first example of this. In May,
under pressure from the authorities, the main bookstores in Moscow took off
their shelves Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, “Maus,” which portrayed Nazis as
cats and Jews as mice, a work for which its author had won the Pulitzer Prize (grani.ru/Politics/Russia/m.240612.html).
That
action backfired on the Russian authorities, the Moscow publisher of Spiegelman’s
novel said. In three days, it sold out its entire print run of the novel, a run
that it had calculated would be enough for five months. The decision of the
Tomsk court is likely to have the same effect, increasing interest in Donald
Duck’s “Der Fueher’s Face.”
Given
the cartoon’s anti-Nazi and anti-dictator messages, that will mean that out of
this case at least some good will come.
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