Chris Selley: The censors are in charge now

Even if Russians at War were naked Kremlin propaganda, politicians' efforts to cancel it would be deplorable

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Published Sep 22, 2024  •  Last updated 6 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

One hopes that those trying to censor the documentary Russians at War have at least seen the film. Photo by Handout/TIFF via CP

One personal highlight from my week was being accused of enabling fascism by a member of the King’s Privy Council because I argued a film shouldn’t be cancelled under pressure from politicians and special-interest groups. “For Chris Selley, screening Russian intel operations at (the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)) is free speech: peak Canadian naïveté fuelling Kremlin war propaganda,” former Conservative immigration minister Chris Alexander ventured on X. “If Ukraine’s only friends were as fair-weather as Canada, the war against fascism would be lost.”

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(Here’s a reliable rule of Canadian politics: When someone tells you that something “isn’t free speech” … it’s free speech.)

The film I wrote about was Russians at War, Anastasia Trofimova’s grim documentary about Z-branded soldiers on the front lines of Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Ukraine. (Let me state here, again, not that it makes any difference, that I am 100 per cent on Ukraine’s side in this war.) And the reaction to those deploring the film’s cancellation — not just mine but Marsha Lederman’s in The Globe and Mail, and Rosie DiManno’s and Andrew Phillips’ in the Toronto Star — has only steeled my resolve in this affair.

Censorship is bad. If you need a citation, I would suggest the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the principle predates that document by centuries.

TV Ontario pulled its co-funding credit and support from Russians at War, and TIFF cancelled screenings, after a broad coalition including Alexander, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress complained the film was rank Russian propaganda. I thought it especially disturbing to see politicians and others crowing about their success in cancelling the film even as TIFF claimed to be reacting to threats to public safety.

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“In emails and phone calls, TIFF staff received hundreds of instances of verbal abuse. Our staff also received threats of violence, including threats of sexual violence,” TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey told an audience for Russians at War, which was screened at TIFF’s Lightbox cinema after the festival’s close. “We were horrified, and our staff members were understandably frightened.”

“We did it!” Liberal MP Yvan Baker crowed on social media after TIFF cancelled the film. “Thank you to all who worked to make this happen.”

Yikes.

It’s a funny sort of self-styled propaganda expert who won’t watch propaganda because it’s propaganda

I am among the few who actually watched the film. The fact that the movie did not remotely reflect the accusations against was somewhat beside the point — Russian propaganda is not illegal to screen in Canada — but it made the issue even more confounding. Lederman (who also watched it) accurately called the film “a reproach of war in general.” “There’s no jingoism or flag-waving for Mother Russia in this exposition, no intimation that Putin’s ‘special military operation’ can ever be won, and no camouflaging the horrors of war,” DiManno accurately wrote after watching it.

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Supposedly the film is designed to make Russian soldiers look so inept and pathetic, that the West will think twice about arming Ukraine. If that was the goal — and it’s an odd one, as pro-Russian propaganda goes — it was a spectacular miss.

But let’s get back to me, the fascism apologist. Resisting a powerful urge toward profanity, I asked Alexander several times whether he had seen Russians at War. He certainly implied that he had in his National Post op-ed denouncing it. “The … film … is hopelessly one-sided, giving voice only to the foot soldiers of Russian aggression,” he wrote. “(It) is transparently part of (Russia Today’s) latest elaborate effort to circumvent sanctions by presenting a ‘Russian perspective’ at film festivals that whitewashes the country’s war of aggression against Ukraine and its people.”

How would he know all that without seeing it?

But he hasn’t seen it, he finally confirmed, “for the same reasons I never watched (Russia Today) or Leni Riefenstahl for that matter: propaganda is not designed to inform but to debase, distort and disorient.”

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It’s a funny sort of self-styled propaganda expert, I submit, who won’t watch propaganda because it’s propaganda. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a harrowingly treacly account of the Nazi Party’s 1934 congress in Nuremberg, is perhaps the most famous and influential piece of propaganda there is. It is not considered unwatchable. It’s considered essential. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum includes clips on its website.

So where does that leave us, then?

Having succeeded at TIFF, the censors’ coalition turned its sights on Nova Scotia’s mighty Lunenberg Doc Festival. Senators Stan Kutcher and Donna Dasko wrote a letter to Lunenburg, N.S., calling the film “an exquisite piece of soft propaganda” and “not, as some have stated, an anti-war film,” and demanding its cancellation. They seem to have failed, which is good news: Bruce MacCormack, chair of the festival’s board, released an admirably straightforward statement in its defence: “While not a comprehensive study of the invasion, it does provide a window to observe the devastating impact of distant political decisions on the lives of less powerful individuals.”

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One hopes the senators had at least seen the film. One hopes the Lunenberg Doc Festival’s employees and volunteers didn’t suffer the same harassment TIFF’s reportedly did. And one hopes, though probably in vain, the censors might learn something from all this.

And one more thing. Every time we get into one of these arguments over misinformation, or disinformation, or propaganda, I do find myself wondering: Why is Russian or Chinese or Israeli or Palestinian propaganda apparently so much more serious an issue than the high-test bull-crap Canadian politicians feed us every day? About movies they haven’t seen, for example? And about much, much more important things?

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