Sir Tom Stoppard is a British Academy Award winning screenwriter and Tony Award winning playwright. In the TimesOnline, he recently described his 1968 view of the cultural revolution in England:
A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”
In that same piece, Stoppard added:
In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll. What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.”
Editor’s note: ‘Rock’n’Roll’ is a play by Stoppard about the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the democratic movement in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia.