ABSTRACT
Michael Scammell, an internationally recognized expert on censorship, views censorship as a political tool and limitations of freedom of expression as “an instrument to assist in the attainment, preservation or continuance of someone’s power.” For Scammell, censorship is merely “the extension of physical power into the realm of the mind and the spirit.” If one wants to analyze censorship as a political instrument, one could do so effectively within the comprehensive framework of regime types. Limitations of freedom of expression are rarely imposed haphazardly: they are an outgrowth of patterns of social behavior, institutions, and political philosophies. Totalitarian regimes exhibit a tendency to monopolize under governmental control all means of effective mass communication, such as press, radio, and motion pictures. Artistic control, and even more so control over journalists, tends to be systematic, comprehensive and rigidly imposed. Some of the definitional problems plaguing “totalitarianism” also plague “authoritarianism.”
