NINOTCHKA AND OUR NEW AGE OF CENSORSHIP

Anna: You know how it is today. All you have to do is wear a pair of silk stockings and they suspect you of counter-revolution. - 'Ninotchka' (1939)

We are living in Orwellian times here in Britain, and my head is spinning from all the doublethink at play—especially from the current Prime Minister, who just yesterday spoke with pleading earnestness about the importance of sovereignty for Palestine, while conveniently forgetting his own dismissal of British sovereignty after the Brexit vote. From a man who aggressively attempted to overrule the decision of 17.4 million voters through the court system simply because he didn’t like the emphatic outcome of a seismic and historic exercise in democracy it appears sovereignty is a precious thing—just not when it comes to his own country, which he appears to detest with the quiet passion of a lawyer.

But perhaps more concerning of late is the speed at which Labour is enforcing insidious censorship through blanket legislation—conveniently rolled out during summer recess, while most politicians are away on holiday.

With the recent introduction of the Online Safety Bill—presented as a measure to protect children, but already (within days) revealing itself as a tool for the state to censor news events shared by citizen journalists, and even restrict access for certain users to platforms as benign as Spotify—the direction of travel is all too clear. It's less of a drip drip drip and more of a fast moving stream that will soon become a tidal wave of suppression.

Of course, it’ll take some time for the grim reality to sink in for the normies, but eventually, this veil of censorship—steadily tightening like a noose around the throats of those who dare to speak truth to power—will become blindingly obvious.

Artists and outsiders often see the writing (or propaganda) on the wall before the rest of society, so it’s with no sense of glee that I fear my own (and many others’) Orwellian prophecies—of an increasingly anarcho-tyrannical police state in Britain—are now coming to pass.

For some reason, all of this has got me thinking about Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo, and how brilliantly it captures—especially in the second half—the dreary, joyless years of Soviet rule under Lenin in Communist Russia, contrasted with the sparkle and élan of free-market Paris (in the first half), before the Nazi occupation. We don’t have Lenin or Stalin, but we do have Starmer—who seems to be on a turbo-charged mission to usher in a new dark age of censorship in the UK, ironically via legislation initially drafted by the reckless and feckless Conservative Party. This confirms yet again that the “uni-party” machine is not some lazy conspiracy theory, but a functioning reality, with Whitehall civil servants providing the bureaucratic continuity behind the façade of alternating administrations.

One scene in Lubitsch's masterpiece political comedy that poignantly conveys the issue of censorship involves Ninotchka sharing an apartment in Moscow with some suspicious-seeming cohabitants. She attempts to read a letter from her French lover, only to find all his words struck through with black pen. In a film where so much of the comedy is found in what is communicated—through words—between a man (Gaston) and a woman (Ninotchka), it’s a stark reminder of what happens when the conversational music of love is silenced. And for a film famously promoted with the tagline “Garbo laughs,” we, the audience, are definitely not laughing at this crucial stage of the story where the usually stoic Ninotchka breaks down at her kitchen table.

In our own new dark age, it will be fascinating to see who emerges as natural authoritarians—siding with the establishment and their spurious justifications for enforcing new powers—and who becomes freedom fighters, prepared to defend the centuries-old legacy of liberty and democracy that traces all the way back to the Magna Carta. I already have my suspicions about who will become the new Stasi-like curtain twitchers (see also The Lives of Others) and who will speak up for what’s right. No doubt, many of the same people who delighted in barking orders at the unmasked during COVID will revel in the increasing clampdowns on freedom, while the rest will have to decide whether to stick around and make a stand—or watch democracy (and freedom) die in darkness.

Then again, there is a sort of macabre comedy in watching the distorted purity tests of the woke, where things have gotten awfully weird, awfully fast. And there’s no doubt there will be plenty of Mitchell and Webb moments of “Are we the baddies?” for many of them down the line—though sadly, long after it’s possible to reverse course on the path to ruination we’re currently set upon.

It takes courage to take a stand when things get real, and more often than not, we prefer to deny what’s happening rather than say anything at all. But given the water is now 'boiling the frogs' to such an extent it resembles a thick pea soup, now might be the time to get a little brave.