Was Victor Laszlo a Heckler? UPDATED

Writing at PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman has an interesting take on my recent post about the La Marseillaise scene in Casablanca.  He calls it "the greatest heckler's veto in cinema history," explaining that "Major Strasser and the Nazis are Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter or Charles Murray; everyone else in the bar are angry campus liberals or SJWs; and the latter spoke so loudly over the former as to drown-out its speech, make it impossible to be heard, and cause them to stop speaking."

Howard has written a series of posts about the heckler's veto, in which he expresses some sympathy for disruptive counter-speech.  He therefore raises the La Marseillaise scene as a much admired example of drowning out an objectionable speaker -- in this case actual Nazis.  He asks rhetorically, and perhaps sarcastically,  "Perhaps the Allies in the bar should have allowed the Nazis to finish their song and then sung their own. Or they should have gone to another space. Or they should have listened to the ideas in the Nazi song and given them a chance to persuade."

Of course, the analogy is imperfect, but Howard does a good job of using it to raise an interesting question. Let me just point out that the Nazis in Casablanca were a nearly-occupying army, and thus the de facto government, so this was not a case of merely competing speakers.  In any case, the point of singing La Marseillaise was not so much to prevent the Nazis from singing (although they did quit) as it was to raise the spirits of the refugees.  The Nazis, after all, were not singing to a willing audience in the first place, and there was nothing to keep them from continuing to sing among themselves.  The only thing Laszlo prevented was the imposition of Die Wacht am Rhein on unwilling listeners.

The contemporary issues are more complex, but I generally come down on the side of letting everyone speak. 

UPDATE: There is a longer discussion of these questions in the comments to Howard's post on Prawfs.

Comments

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

The best cinematic portrayal of Nazis played out in the Blue's Brothers. A Chicago Copper in response to Jake and Elwoood sardonically says, "fuc--- bums, won their court case." Jake replies, "I hate Illinois Nazis." Jake and Elwood gun the motor on their Mt. Prospect police auction surplus Dodge and force the Nazis off a bridge into a lagoon. This movie is so relevant and beautiful for today in our President Banion/Trump world.

[Howard Wasserman]

I thought of that scene when, right after Charlottesville, everyone marveled at how hard it was for Trump to say "Nazis. I hate Nazis."