24 Sep 2015 | mobile, News, United Kingdom
Photograph: Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley
The shock general election result in May gave David Cameron licence to lay out his vision for Britain in the first Conservative Queen’s Speech for almost 20 years. Gone were the concessions to the Liberal Democrats of five years previous, and instead the key planks of the Conservative manifesto were there in full. Expected measures to cut the deficit, reform welfare and introduce an in/out EU referendum were all announced. But, according to many, another common thread ran through the new government’s legislative programme: an assault on free speech.
“We’re deeply concerned that the government says one thing – that it believes freedom of expression is a fundamental British value – but in practice doesn’t believe that and is introducing legislation that could have quite a severe impact on freedom of expression,” says Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship, which campaigns against attacks on free speech across the globe.
Critics of the Conservatives’ record on civil liberties point to the resurrection of plans that were sidelined during the last Parliament, largely because of Lib Dem intervention. Privacy activists are alarmed that the new Investigatory Powers Bill may represent the revival of the so-called snoopers charter, allowing the security services access to everyone’s online and social media records. Plans to abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights have been delayed.
But proposals that have free speech campaigners up in arms are being introduced over the coming months. The Extremism Bill will introduce new banning and extremism disruption orders, giving the home secretary and other agencies the power to intervene against suspected extremist groups, and strengthen Ofcom’s role in tackling broadcasters who transmit extremist content.
Introducing it in May, the Prime Minister said: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”
The bill is part of the government’s five-year counter-extremism strategy to combat Islamist extremism and the increasing number of Britons travelling abroad to fight for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis). A key component of this strategy will be challenging those who promote “non-violent extremism”, said David Cameron in a wide-ranging July speech.
He said: “This means confronting groups and organisations that may not advocate violence – but which do promote other parts of the extremist narrative.
“We’ve got to show that if you say ‘yes, I condemn terror, but the kuffar are inferior’, or ‘violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter’ then you too are part of the problem.” He added that simply condemning Isis atrocities was insufficient, and that “we must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too”.
A lack of clarity on how the government will define what constitutes non-violent extremism has caused alarm among many in the Muslim community. Dr Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said there was concern that the strategy would “set new litmus tests which may brand us all as extremists, even though we uphold and celebrate the rule of law, democracy and rights for all”.
“The Prime Minister hasn’t given concrete proposals. The home secretary was asked to define extremism and she wasn’t able to do that,” says Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim welfare organisation.
Shafiq questioned which views would be considered beyond the pale. “If, for example, you say you believe in sharia law the Prime Minister is suggesting that will make you an extremist and you could potentially face infringement of your civil liberties by expressing those views. It could be a Muslim who says he opposes gay marriage. Does that make him a bigot? I think it’s a really dangerous erosion of civil liberties.
“My approach is very simple – if you believe in freedom of speech as I do, then the likes of Anjem Choudary, Tommy Robinson and other far-right leaders have the right to express their views, and equally we have the right to challenge, debate and expose them.
“But you don’t defeat extremism by taking away an individual’s ability to put their view across.”
In the speech, Cameron said the ideology that underpins Islamist extremism must be countered by “British values”, such as democracy and the rule of law.
But Ginsberg agrees that having such broad definitions of “acceptable” speech means that it is impossible to know what could be deemed extremist. “[Cameron] has talked very vaguely about British values but does that mean that anyone who questions the current voting system, for example, or the current political set up is being un-British? Or says that they favour anarchy even if they’re not actively advocating violence. Is that unacceptable?
“What’s fundamental about democracy is that you should be able to ask questions and to express views that sometimes will conflict with the prevailing political thinking.”
Other upcoming legislation is also causing alarm to free speech campaigners. The Trade Union Bill has been described as the most radical package of union reforms since the 1980s and dramatically alters how industrial action is called for and carried out. The bill would introduce a turnout threshold of 50 per cent on strike ballots, a 14-day notice period on strikes, allows employers to bring in agency workers to replace striking staff and outlines new regulations on picketing to prevent “intimidation” of non-strikers. It has been bitterly opposed by unions and the Labour Party.
But one small line in an accompanying consultation document to the bill has drawn particular gasps of astonishment. It proposes that unions must inform employers and police 14 days ahead of strike action of any online or social media activity it plans to adopt and whether a loudspeaker or banners will be used on the picket line. Failure to comply could result in an enforcement order being served or a fine. “It would mean there are enormous levels of employer and political scrutiny of trade union protests, beyond what we think is the norm among modern democracies in the developed world.
The worry is that the package of measures in the bill taken together substantially undermine the basic democratic right to strike,” says Nicola Smith, head of economic and social affairs at the TUC.
Although ministers say that restrictions would not apply to individuals, labour groups say that employees who already have little legal protection will feel intimidated and less likely to publicly support strike action. Many also believe it would be unworkable.
“It will be impossible to police. Who can control Facebook or Twitter? Who will monitor that?” says Carolyn Jones, director of the Institute of Employment Rights, a labour movement thinktank. “If one stray person – who may not be in the union – if they send something out, does that mean the strike is then illegal? And then the union has got to run the very expensive, very-time consuming ballots because this is seen to be illegitimate.
“The threat is there – it’s intimidation. What happened to freedom of association? There are so many bits of international law that it would threaten to break. It’s madness – is it proportionate to the problem? No.”
Union concerns are shared by free speech campaigners. “It’s an attack on freedom of expression, it’s a potential attack on freedom of assembly… The idea that you might have to seek permission from government or that government might be vetting the kinds of people who can and can’t say things is extremely worrying,” says Ginsberg.
But the government defended the bill as a whole. A Department for Business, Innovation & Skills spokesperson says: “People have the right to know that the services on which they and their families rely will not be disrupted at short notice by strikes supported by a small proportion of union members.
“The ability to strike is important but it is only fair that there should be a balance between the interests of union members and the needs of people who depend on their services.”
Index on Censorship is to launch a campaign against the Extremism Bill, and unions are resisting the changes to strike laws. But campaigners are gloomy about the prospect of the government changing tack over the long-term and abandoning policies they believe infringe on free speech. “This has been the direction of travel for a long time,” says Ginsberg, particularly in relation to national security. “The problem is that there is only one direction that it’s going in and that’s to restrict further free expression. We’re not seeing any move back or any relaxation of the foot on the pedal.”
This article originally appeared on 23 September 2015 at Big Issue North.
23 Sep 2015 | Magazine
In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is an article by children’s book author Norma Klein, on the censorship of children’s books, taken from the spring 1987 issue. It’s a great starting point for those who plan to attend the Banned books: controversy between the covers session at the festival this year.
Index on Censorship is a global quarterly magazine with reporters and contributing editors around the world. Founded in 1972, it promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
I used to feel distinguished, almost honoured, when my young books were singled out to be censored. Now, alas, censorship has become so common in the children’s book field in America that almost no one is left unscathed. Some of the most conservative writers are being attacked; it’s reached a point of ludicrousness which, for me, was symbolised by my most recent encounter with ‘the other side’ in Gwinett county, Georgia, in April 1986.
Usually, my books are attacked for their sexual content. The two school board meetings I had attended in the early 1980s, one in Oregon, one in the State of Washington, had centred on two books for older teens, It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me, a book about two 18- year-olds having a love affair, and Breaking Up, a novel about a 15-year-old girl who discovers her mother is gay. I might add parenthetically that these books have just been published in England for the first time by Pan Books in a new series aimed at teenagers, ‘Horizons’. Already, as in America, they are selling well and already, as in America, I have been told of indignant parents storming into bookstores and objecting to certain passages. It seems that things are not very different in other countries.
What was unusual about the Gwinnett county case was that the book selected to be attacked was one of my early ones, Confessions of an Only Child, about an eight-year-old girl. The offending sentence was one where the girl’s father is putting up wallpaper. Here it is in its entirety:
‘God damn it,’ Dad said as the wallpaper swung around and whacked him in the face.
When the paperback publisher of Confessions first heard of the attack, he attempted to defend the book in the following way:
Abrasive words are sometimes used by writers to add definition to a character or a story; they give the reader an understanding of the situation or kind of person speaking, but are not meant to be words which the reader should use or admire. It is our belief that the family relationships are so positive in this book that they far outweigh the use of realistic language.
My attacker, Theresa Wilson, a stunning blonde, had been heartened by her success in having another book she objected to, Deanie by Judy Blume, removed from the shelves. Her first attempt to remove my book was defeated by a 10-member review panel consisting of six parents, three teachers and a librarian. Ms Wilson claimed to have ‘stumbled’ upon the offending passage one afternoon while in the Beaver Ridge library looking for books that contain material to which she might object. In her thirties, she has no profession and, in a sense, being a censor has led to her becoming a local celebrity; she now, whether her attacks succeed or fail, appears regularly on TV and radio and is covered widely in local newspapers. The 10-member panel voted to keep Confessions on the shelves; only one person voted to keep it on a restricted shelf. ‘The consensus is that the book had literary merit for the age group intended,’ said principal Becky Hopcraft.
Incidentally, Ms Wilson said she didn’t object to my heroine’s mother saying, ‘Ye Gods,’ in the next line, because she does not believe ‘Gods’ refers to the Christian god. She wants every book containing the word ‘damn’ restricted from Gwinnett elementary schools. She cited a US Supreme Court ruling against hostility toward religion and said the use of God Damn in Confessions indicated a ‘hostility toward Christianity’.
All this, the initial attack on my book and its initial success in being retained on the shelves, helped to achieve an important result — the founding of a group called Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education. Initially a small group, it now has nearly 500 members. Its president, Lorna Cox, said she was amazed at the diversity of the group’s members, proving that liberals in America are not, as some right-wingers insist, an elitist minority. ‘We’ve got people who didn’t graduate from high school,’ Ms Cox said, ‘college graduates, doctors, professionals, and people who aren’t even affiliated with a school but have a deep, burning desire to be involved in education.’ The group participates in workshops to learn more about censorship at the local and national levels and contacts school administrators each week to learn about potential book bannings.
As in the cases involving It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me, and Breaking Up, my travel expenses to Georgia were paid by the author’s organisation, PEN. They have a Freedom to Read committee with a fund for cases like this. My own reason for attending these meetings is that I feel having the author appear and help argue the case not only gives heart to the local anti-censorship organisations involved, such as Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education, but may focus national attention on the case. Perhaps it was co- incidental, but CBS did appear in the courtroom to cover the debate for a TV segment on ‘secular humanism’.
Before flying to Georgia I was interviewed by phone. I was quoted as saying, ‘I’m not a religious person… To me the phrase god damn has no more negative a connotation than the expression, Oh gosh. I added that I attributed the swing toward censorship in America to the conservative mood of the Reagan administration. When I arrived, I was told by two of my supporters that the negative reference to Reagan was a mistake. ‘Everyone is for him down here,’ they said. I have to add parenthetically that one of the reasons I write the kinds of books I do and am, perhaps ingenuously, surprised at the reaction they provoke, is due to the fact that I’ve lived all my life in New York City and know personally only liberal people. I’ve never met anyone who voted for Reagan; I am always amazed when the Republicans win an election. But it’s probably similar that in a two-week stay in London’ in the spring of 1986,1 didn’t meet anyone who was for Margaret Thatcher either. This may, however, give me a kind of inner freedom from certain restrictions, due simply to underestimating the power of the right.
The school board meeting I attended was crowded with supporters from both sides. It was conducted as a kind of mock trial. Both sides were allowed to question anyone from the other side about anything that was relevant to the case. I was pleased and relieved that every time Ms Wilson tried to bring the questioning around to my own personal religious beliefs, she was told that was not relevant to the book. In a perverse way I found her performance at the trial fascinatiing. She alternately flirted with, and tried to antagonise, the three-member school board which consisted of two men and a woman. Luckily for me, her case was weak and she overstepped the bounds of tolerance — even within a conservative, religious community — by telling the school board members that if they didn’t ban my book, they would, on Judgment Day, go straight to Hell. ‘One day each and every one of you will stand before God almighty and you will answer to how’you believe, how you voted, how you stand.’ Evidently this threat did not frighten anyone sufficiently.
The closest Ms Wilson got to making me come forward and state my personal beliefs was when she asked if I considered myself to be ‘above God’. I responded, ‘I assume that’s a rhetorical question.’ She laughed nervously and said she didn’t know what ‘rhetorical’ meant.
Confessions of an Only Child is about a family in which the mother gets pregnant and loses her baby. It shows how this affects the heroine who was enjoying her only child status. In deciding that Confessions had ‘redeeming educational value’, one of the board members, Louise Radloff, stated, ‘I think this book has much literary merit and it shows an open discussion within the family’. I had argued in my presentation that I felt that books could be an avenue to open discussion… a way to bring parents and children closer together, that simply having a book available was not forcing it on anyone.
What amazed me, though, was that in their closing remarks, though each school board member re-iterated the literary values of my book, all three said that, indeed, the phrase ‘God damn’, was offensive and should have been left out. One board member said he, thank heaven, had never used that word. Another said he had used it once, at the age of 10 and had been beaten so severely by his parents for this that he had never used it again. I am utterly unable to judge the sincerity of these remarks. What I did feel was the pressure on everyone living in these suburban communities to conform to what is felt to be a general set of beliefs. People are terribly afraid to come out and say they are feminists, atheists, or even, God forbid, Democrats.
In a sense this is a success story. Not only will my book remain on the shelves, but the Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education feel heartened that the positive publicity they received will help them in future battles. But Theresa Wilson is, seemingly, not daunted. She’s already after another book, Go Ask Alice. ‘I don’t love publicity,’ she said when interviewed on a local radio show the day after the hearing. ‘I love showing the glory of God.’ Sadly, even the local people who are against her regard her as good copy. Although she had lost her case, she was brought forward to be on the radio show with me and most of the time was spent, not debating the issues involved, but in baiting her with peculiar call-in questions from the audience. What a pity. But still, no matter how absurd and tiny this one case is, I feel I would do it again for my own books and would encourage other authors to do the same. Passivity and inaction only encourages censorship groups even more. I think now they are beginning to realise they will, at least, have a fight on their hands.
Reporting the Third World
World leaders, or their top ministers, in an effort to arrive at something we call ‘balanced coverage’. Most Third World leaders feel you are either for ’em or against ’em and there is not much middle ground to walk upon. Some, as in Saudi Arabia, just don’t want to talk to the Western press. I can remember one visit to the Saudi kingdom in early 1981 when four American correspondents — from the New York Times, Time magazine, the Associated Press, and myself from The Washington Post — jointly applied for an interview with either King Khalid or Crown Prince Fahd. Each of us knew it was unlikely either would bother with an interview for just one publication, but here was a broad segment of the US print media asking collectively for an interview. After waiting around for two weeks, we collectively gave up and left.
One major problem for American correspondents is the near total ignorance of Third World leaders about how the Western media work and how to use them for their own ends. While the correspondent may regard his or her request for an interview with a leader or top minister as a chance to air their views, they seem to look upon it as a huge favour which they are uncertain will be rewarded in any way.
Other forms of indirect censorship come in control over a correspondent’s access to the story or means of communication. Israel restricted, or at least tried to restrict, access to southern Lebanon after its invasion in June 1982 to those it felt were sympathetic to its cause or important to convince of its view. The policy never really worked because correspondents could always get into Israeli-occupied territory from the north through one back road or another. But it got more difficult as time went on. The Israeli attempt at restricting access to southern Lebanon was hardly the worst example of this kind of censorship I experienced in nearly two decades of working in the Third World, however. Covering the war between Iran and Iraq was, and remains, far more difficult. In four years, I never once got a visa to Iran. I got to Baghdad several times, but imagine my surprise the first time customs officials seized my typewriter at the airport and told me I would have to get special permission from the Information Ministry to bring it in. (At the airport in Tripoli there was a roomful of confiscated typewriters the last time I visited there in September 1984.) Whether one was allowed to the Iraqi war front depended on either an Iraqi victory or a lull in the war. As for permission to travel into Iraqi Kurdistan, it was never granted to any Western correspondent I can think of in the four-to-five years I was covering the Middle East.
The other game Iraqi information officials play is attempting to censor your coverage of the war. When I first went there, there was a Ministry of Information official sitting at the hotel who had to okay your copy or you could not send it out by phone or telex. This kind of direct censorship of copy was rare in my experience, however. Other than Israel, where military news is supposed to pass through the censor’s office, and Iraq and Libya, I can think of no examples where I had to submit my copy before sending it.
Are the techniques of indirect censorship getting worse? In the areas of the world where I have worked, I am not sure. If Syria has become worse, Iraq is probably better today. Egypt has definitely got better, and so had Kuwait until recently. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has restricted access to a far greater degree in the past two years, and Bahrain has become more sensitive. South Africa has taken a turn for the worse. Countries that were always difficult to cover, such as Zaire, Malawi, Ethiopia and Angola, remain more or less the same.
As economic problems have got worse or rulers have felt a greater threat to their regimes, Third World governments seem to be tightening up when it comes to outside press coverage.
If this is indeed the underlying principle governing the degree of press censorship, then the problem may be more cyclical than linear, getting worse or better according to the political and economic health of a country or the special challenges it is facing at that time.
Who believes it?
‘That is how the theory goes: Restrict the press to supportive comment, and a country’s life will be calmer and better. But experience and reason suggest that the opposite will happen. Faulty government policies, if they are not subject to real criticism, grow worse. Autocrats become more autocratic. Can anyone believe that repression of criticism leads to efficiency in a society, to new ideas?’
Anthony Lewis, The New York Times, February 1987
© Norma Klein and Index on Censorship
Join us on 25 October at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015 for Question Everything an unconventional, unwieldy and disruptive day of talks, art and ideas featuring a broad range of speakers drawn from popular culture, the arts and academia. Moderated by Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg.
This article is part of the spring 1987 issue of the global quarterly Index on Censorship magazine. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
17 Sep 2015 | Campaigns, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree on Wednesday 16 September banning at least 38 international journalists and bloggers from Ukraine for one year. The decree, published on the presidential website, says those listed are banned for being “actual or potential threat to national interests, national security, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Poroshenko said the people targeted were involved in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the current aggression in eastern Ukraine.
“This ban is a serious blow to media freedom,” Index senior advocacy officer Melody Patry said. “There is no explanation whatsoever on what press coverage constitutes an actual or potential threat to national security. We appreciate that the situation in eastern Ukraine is sensitive but preventing journalists from reporting from within the country is not the solution and it’s undermining freedom of information.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the 34 journalists and seven bloggers named in the ban come from Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The original list included three BBC media staff members – Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg, producer Emma Wells and cameraman Anton Chicherov – who were later removed from the ban list, media reported.
“We cannot accept that kind of censorship”, said Mogens Blicher Bjerregård, president of the European Federation of Journalists. Censorship is never the right answer, even to counter propaganda or to sanction journalists who allegedly crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border illegally. The ban is simply inappropriate. Peace and Development of our democracies need press freedom not banning journalists. We and the international society must firmly urge the Ukraine government to lift immediately the ban on named journalists.”
Over 380 people in total have been banned, including activists and Russian officials.
This measure was added to the Mapping Media Freedom platform, which monitors and map threats and violations to media freedom in Europe, including Ukraine and Russia.
The environment for media freedom in Ukraine has been deteriorating against the backdrop of the conflict in the eastern part of the country, making it one the the deadliest countries for journalists, with at least eight media workers killed since the beginning of 2014.
This statement was updated to reflect the later removal of three BBC journalists from the ban list.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
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16 Sep 2015 | Magazine
In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is an article by cartoonist and author Martin Rowson, who regularly draws for the magazine, on the power of propaganda in wartime, taken from the spring 2014 issue. It’s a great starting point for those who plan to attend the War, Censorship and Propaganda: Does It Work session at the festival this year.
Index on Censorship is a global quarterly magazine with reporters and contributing editors around the world. Founded in 1972, it promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
As a political cartoonist, whenever I’m criticised for my work being unrelentingly negative, I usually point my accusers towards several eternal truths.
One is that cartoons, along with all other jokes, are by their nature knocking copy. It’s the negativity that makes them funny, because, at the heart of things, funny is how we cope with the bad – or negative – stuff.
Whether it’s laughing at shit, death or the misfortunes of others, without this hard-wired evolutionary survival mechanism that allows us to laugh at the awfulness running in parallel with being both alive and human, apes with brains the size of ours would go insane with existential terror as soon as the full implications of existence sink in. Which, for most people, would be when you’re around three years old.
And if that doesn’t persuade them, I usually then try to describe that indescribable but palpable transubstantiation that occurs when you shift from the negative to the positive, and a cartoon sinks from being satire to becoming propaganda.
Though here, of course, I’m not being entirely honest, because in many ways cartoons are propaganda in its purest form. This is because the methodology of the political cartoon has most in common with the practices of sympathetic magic and, likewise, its purposes are invariably malevolent.
Indeed, I’ve often described caricature in particular and political cartooning more generally as a type of voodoo, doing damage at a distance with a sharp object, in this case (usually) a pen.
Certainly the business of caricature is a kind of shamanist shape-shifting, distorting the appearance of the victim in order to bring them under the control of the cartoonist and subjecting them thereafter to ridicule or opprobrium. In short, political cartoons should truly be classified not as comedy but as visual taunts. And taunts, of course, have been an integral ingredient of warfare for millennia.
Within the twisted plaiting of taunts, posturing and brinkmanship that ultimately ended in the hecatombs of the Western Front in World War I you can just about tease out one thread trailing back to a cartoon.
The original sketch for the allegorical 1896 cartoon Nations of Europe: Join in Defence of Your Faith! was by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, though he left the job of the finished artwork to professionals. Its purpose was to stiffen the resolve of European leaders against the “yellow peril” coming from east Asia, and to this end the Kaiser presented a copy of the cartoon to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
It’s generally agreed that the cartoon played a small but significant part in influencing the Tsar’s confrontational policy towards Japan, which ended in Russia’s humiliating defeat in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war.
The subsequent revolutions, regional wars and growing European instability erupted nine years later with the general mobilisation of the Great Powers, and the cartoonists were mobilised along with everyone else.
Although a perennial taunt against the Germans is that they have no sense of humour, they had as rich a tradition of visual satire as anyone else. In the pages of both Punch and the German satirical paper Simplicissimus, the enemy was caricatured identically as alternatively preposterous and terrifying. Both sides showed the other in league with skeletal personifications of Death, or transformed into fat clowns, foul or dangerous animals or, in British cartoons about Germans, as sausages.
There were also scores of cartoons showing German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies in portrayals of “The Beastly Hun” and, later, cartoons showing the Germans harvesting the corpses of slain soldiers for fats to advance their war effort.
All sides taunted each other by attacking their nations’ supposed leaders, using the caricaturist’s typical tools. Thus the Kaiser, mostly thanks to his waxed moustache, acted as a synecdoche for Germany’s defining perfidy. In one cartoon from 1915, when Britain’s George V stripped his cousin, the Kaiser, of his Order of the Garter, his garterless stocking slips down, revealing a black and hairy simian leg. In 1914, meanwhile, the German cartoonist Arthur Johnson (his father was an American) showed the British Royal Family, German by descent, in a camp for enemy aliens.
These taunting cartoons bore little relation to the realities of modern warfare, and most of them would now be dismissed purely as rather ham-fisted propaganda. This shouldn’t downplay their effectiveness, however.
A century earlier Napoleon Bonaparte admitted he feared the damage done by James Gillray’s caricatures of him more than he feared any general, because Gillray always drew him as very short. (To bring this up to date, Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu told me that every time he drew Nicolas Sarkozy as short, Sarkozy complained personally to his editor; the next cartoon would make him even shorter, and Sarkozy would complain again, until in the end Plantu drew the French president as just a head and feet.)
Nonetheless, an unforeseen consequence of this barrage of caricature was that in the end people stopped believing it to be anything more than merely caricature: the truth that should be exposed by the exaggeration got lost. In the 1930s, many people assumed reports of the genuine atrocities of the Nazis were, like the bayoneted babies or harvested corpses blamed on the Kaiser, just propaganda.
Posterity shouldn’t concern cartoonists. We’re just journalists responding to events with a raw immediacy. This is what gives the medium a great deal of its heft.
Some cartoons, however, encapsulate a time or an event and so become part of the more general visual language. Gillray’s The Plum Pudding in Danger is a perfect example, depicting the specific geopolitical struggle between William Pitt and Napoleon in 1805, while also capturing eternal truths about geopolitics itself. But I’m not aware of any political cartoons from World War I that do the same thing.
And yet the medium operates in many ways, and the most effective and popular cartoonist of World War I was undoubtedly Bruce Bainsfather, a serving artillery officer who drew gag cartoons about the slapstick of everyday life in the trenches in his series featuring “Old Bill”. The serving soldiers loved these cartoons, and they are another instance of humour being used to make the harshest imaginable reality simply bearable.
The other truly great cartoon to emerge from the World War I was published after it was all over. In his extraordinarily prophetic drawing Peace and Future Cannon Fodder for the Daily Herald, Will Dyson showed the Allied victors of the war exiting the Versailles peace conference and the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau saying: “Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping.” Behind a pillar a naked infant labelled “1940 class” is crying into its folded arms.
None of the protagonists in the next war doubted the power or importance of cartoons. Again, they were used by all sides to taunt and vilify their foes, perhaps most notoriously in Der Sturmer, the notorious anti-semitic paper edited by Julius Streicher, later hanged at Nuremburg.
Simplicissimus was, once more, taunting the British, this time drawing wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, as a fat and murderous drunk; in the Soviet Union Stalin’s favourite cartoonist, Boris Yefimov, returned the compliment to the Nazi leadership (Yefimov’s older brother Mikhail first employed him on Pravda before being purged and executed in 1940; Boris survived him by 68 years, dying aged 108 in 2008). No cartoonist in either country would have dared caricature their own totalitarian politicians, but they were given full rein to exercise their skills on their nation’s enemies. In Britain, with its largely legally tolerated history of visual satire going back to 1695, things were slightly different, though also sometimes the same.
The New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low discovered in 1930 from a friend that Hitler, three years away from taking power in Germany, was an admirer of his work. Low did what any other cartoonist would do in similar circumstances and acknowledged his famous fan by sending him a signed piece of original artwork, inscribed “From one artist to another”.
It’s unknown what happened to the cartoon – maybe it was with him right to the end, in the bunker – but it soon became apparent that Hitler had mistaken Low’s attacks on democratic politicians for attacks on democracy itself. He was soon disabused. Low harried the Nazis all the way from the simple slapstick of The Difficulty of Shaking Hands with Gods of November 1933 to the bitterness of his iconic cartoon Rendezvous in September 1939, so much so that in 1936 British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, after a weekend’s shooting at Hermann Goering’s Bavarian hunting lodge, told Low’s proprietor at the Evening Standard, Lord Beaverbrook, to get the cartoonist to ease up as his work was seriously damaging good Anglo-German relations. Low responded by producing a composite cartoon dictator called “Muzzler”.
The Nazis had a point that Low entirely understood, and it was why he, along with many other cartoonists – Victor “Vicky” Weisz, Leslie Illingworth and even William Heath Robinson – were all on the Gestapo’s death list. In a debate on British government propaganda in 1943, a Tory MP said Low’s cartoon were worth all the official propaganda put together because Low portrayed the Nazis as “bloody fools”. Low himself later expanded on the point, comparing his work, which undermined the Nazis through mockery, with the work of pre-war Danish cartoonists who unanimously drew them as terrifying monsters. Low’s point was that it’s much easier to imagine you can beat a fool than a monster, and taunting your enemies as being unvanguishably frightening is no taunt at all.
The enduring efficacy of cartoons’ dark and magical voodoo powers were acknowledged in victory, when both Low and Yefimov were official court cartoonists at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunals (Low claimed Goering tried to outstare him from the dock): now the taunting was part of the humiliation served up with the revenge. Likewise, when Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans, the editor of the Evening Standard, Michael Foot, marked the dictator’s demise by giving over all eight pages of the paper to Low’s cartoons of Mussolini’s life and career.
Of course Low, unlike Yefimov, was actively hostile on the Home Front as well, producing cartoons critical of both the military establishment and Churchill. When Low’s famous creation Colonel Blimp, the portly cartoon manifestation of boneheaded reactionary thinking, took on fresh life in the Powell and Pressburger movie The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Churchill tried to have the film banned. When the Daily Mirror’s cartoonist Philip Zec responded to stories about wartime profiteering by contrasting them with attacks on merchant shipping in his famous cartoon The Price of Petrol has Been Increased by One Penny – Official, both Churchill and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison seriously considered shutting down the newspaper. (When the Guardian cartoonist Les Gibbard pastiched Zec’s cartoon during the Falklands war 40 years later, the Sun called for him to be tried for treason.)
And yet cartoons, for all their voodoo power, can still spiral off into all sorts of different ambiguities thanks to the way they inhabit different spheres of intent. Are they there to make us laugh, or to destroy them? Or both?
Ronald Searle drew his experiences while he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese, certainly on pain of death had the drawings been discovered, but taking the risk in order to stand witness to his captors’ crimes. Just a few years later, many of his famous St Trinian’s cartoons don’t just deal with the same topics – cruelty and beheadings – but share identical composition with his prisoner of war drawings.
And when Carl Giles, creator of the famous cartoon family that mapped and reflected post-war British suburban life weekly in the Sunday Express, was present as an official war correspondent at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the camp’s commandant, Josef Kramer, revealed he was a huge fan of Giles’ work and gave him his pistol, a ceremonial dagger and his Nazi armband in exchange for the promise that Giles would send him a signed original. As Giles explained later, he failed to keep his part of the bargain because by the time he got demobbed Kramer had been hanged for crimes against humanity.
Those twinned qualities of taunting and laughter go some way to explaining the experience of cartoonists in the so-called war on terror, if not the power of their work. In the aftermath of 9/11, in the Babel of journalistic responses to what was without question the most visual event in human history, then visually re-repeated by the media that had initially reported it, the cartoonists were the ones who got it in the neck. While columnists wrote millions of words of comment and speculation, and images captured by machines were broadcast and published almost ceaselessly, the images produced via a human consciousness were, it seems, too much to stomach for many. Cartoonists had their work spiked, or were told to cover another story (there were no other stories). In the US some cartoonists had their copy moved to other parts of the paper, or were laid off. One or two even got a knock on the door in the middle of the night from the Feds under the provisions of the Patriot Act.
Despite a concerted effort by some American strip cartoonists to close ranks on Thanksgiving Day 2001 and show some patriotic backbone, the example of Beetle Bailey flying on the back of an American Eagle didn’t really act as a general unifier. Unlike in previous wars, there was no unanimity of purpose among cartoonists. An editorial in The Daily Telegraph accused me, along with Dave Brown of The Independent and The Guardian’s Steve Bell, of being “useful idiots” aiding the terrorist cause due to our failure to fall in line.
The war on terror and its Iraqi sideshow were anything but consensus wars, and many cartoonists articulated very loudly their misgivings. These included Peter Brookes of the Murdoch-owned Times drawing cartoons in direct opposition to his paper’s editorial line. This has always been one of visual satire’s greatest strengths: sometimes a cartoon can undermine itself.
Moreover, because a majority of cartoons were back in their comfort zone of oppositionism, the taunting had less of the whiff of propaganda about it. Nor was there ever any suggestion in Britain of government censorship of any of this.
That said, the volume of censuring increased exponentially, thanks entirely to the separate but simultaneous growth in digital communication and social media. Whereas, previously, cartoons might elicit an outraged letter to an editor – let alone a death threat from the Gestapo – the internet allowed a global audience to see material to which thousands of people responded, thanks to email, with concerted deluges of hate email and regular death threats. I long since learned to dismiss an email death threat as meaningless – a real one requires the commitment of finding my address, a stamp and possibly a body part of one of my loved ones – but it’s the thought that counts.
More to the point was the second front in the culture-struggle at the heart of the war on terror, in which both sides fought to take greater offence. Amid the bombs, bullets and piles of corpses across Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali, Madrid, London and all the other places, the greatest harm you could suffer, it seemed was that you might be “offended”. People sent me hate emails and threatened to kill me and my children because they were “offended” by my depiction of George Bush, or by a cartoon criticising Israel, or a stupid humourous drawing of anything that might mildly upset them or their beliefs.
It was into this atmosphere that the row over the cartoons of Mohammed published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten erupted, resulting in the deaths of at least 100 people (none of them cartoonists, but most of them Muslims, and many shot dead by Muslim soldiers or policemen). But that, of course, is another story. And – who knows? – may yet prove to be another war.
Martin Rowson’s cartoons appear regularly in The Guardian and Index on Censorship. His books include The Dog Allusion, Giving Offence and Fuck: the Human Odyssey.
© Martin Rowson and Index on Censorship
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This article is part of the spring 2014 issue of the global quarterly Index on Censorship magazine, with a special report on propaganda and war. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
