Sunday, April 8, 2007

Auto censorship

This posting exceptionally is known not to be true. But it might be just as well...

Years after the Finnish Winter War against the Soviet Union in WW II, Väinö Linna wrote a different book of the war, 'Tuntematon sotilas' (The Unknown Soldier), that was published in 1955: no longer heroic patriotic stories, but a realistic view that aggravated many.

In the book a Soviet machine gun fires at a Finnish ambulance and sets it afire. When the screaming men are pulled out of the burning van, the gun kills them all.

In 1955 a film was made of the book, and later on the film was shown on national TV on every independence day. The story goes that after one such show a Soviet diplomat would have protested against the film bluntly stating that "The Soviet soldiers never shot at ambulances", after which the film would have been re-cut not to show the ambush.

In reality the director of the film had censored the part himself already in advance: in the film the ambulance is not shot by a ground based Soviet machine gun, but by a Soviet airplane: From air the ambulance would have looked like any ordinary van on a forest road.

This all happened in the times of Finlandization (Finlandisierung): With a large military power as a neighbor, truth has little value.

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