Fearing fear, and fearing evil

Sophie Scholl : The Final Days, which is a true story about student dissenters in Nazi Germany (all of whom were executed), sounds like a good movie. Indeed, Stephen Holden of the New York Times certainly thinks it is:

"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it?

Now, at this moment, I'm thinking about the threats made and murders committed by vocal Islamofacists all over the world, aimed at stifling publication of a handful of cartoons that take on the fact that radical Muslims commit incredible violence in Mohammad's name, and the fact that Muslims who are silent are complicit. To me, that's a no brainer comparison. I'm also assuming at this point in the review that Holden is blushing that he works for a media outlet that, at the first sign of a threat, started appeasing so hard you could see the flop sweat pouring of the Times' windows. (Of course, that appeasement didn't stop the Times from publishing a dung- and pornography-covered picture of the Virgin Mary to show that, one it comes to religion, it's willing to hit hard. But I digress.) Strangely, though, that's not at all what Holden thought of. Rather than focusing on the Times' real cowardice, in the face real threats, he found an entirely different analogy:

In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?

Yes, folks, Holden is worrying about a completely hypothetical fear (and one that falls a lot closer to Bush Derangement Syndrome than to reality). He ignores entirely the fact that it has happened here, and the fact that the NY Times and all of its employees failed that test. Well, even though Holden isn't embarrassed, I'm embarrassed for him. Talking to Technorati: Cartoonistan, Kartoonistan, New York Times, Media, Mainstream media, Nazis, White Rose, Dissent, Cartoon riots