The International Day of the Cartoonist 2016

One year ago today, on January 7, 2015, five cartoonists were murdered in Paris in the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. They were Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb--respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). Their murderers were Islamists, and we must never forget that, but they were also part of a larger force that has always been with us. That force is the drive that makes people want to control the lives of other people--a force that will never die but which must always be resisted.

Last year on this date, I proposed that January 7 be named and forever observed as the International Day of the Cartoonist. Right now, I'm the only one to observe it I think. I hope that others will join in, but even if they don't, I'll continue observing it and continue remembering those who have died or who have been imprisoned, tortured, arrested, oppressed, or denied their rights simply for their art.

Recently, the death of another cartoonist was confirmed. Syrian cartoonist Akram Raslan was arrested by the Syrian regime on October 2, 2012, at the offices of the newspaper Al-Fida in Hama, Syria. Raslan was held, apparently incommunicado, in a Syrian jail. He may have been tortured. His death was confirmed late last year as having taken place in the spring of 2013.

Born in Souran, Syria, in 1978, Akram Raslan drew more than 300 cartoons in support of the revolt against the rule of Bashir al-Assad. In 2013, in absentia, he was given the Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning by the Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI). Indiana cartoonist Joel Pett said at the time: "CRNI gives Akram Raslan our annual Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning in recognition of his extraordinary courage in confronting the forces of violence with cartoons that told only the truth." By the time of the award ceremony, which took place on June 29, 2013, Akram Raslan had very likely died as a result of his being jailed.

You can read more about Akram Raslan and other cartoonists at the website of the Cartoonists Rights Network International at the following URL:

https://cartoonistsrights.org/

* * *

Indiana has long given its men and women into service to their country. They of course have included artists, illustrators, and cartoonists. Most returned to civilian life. I know of only one to have died on active duty. His name was Asa Henderson King, and he was born on May 12, 1880, in Boone County, Indiana. His parents were William H. King (1833-1928) and Susannah Jane (Mendenhall) King (1844-1882). Asa was the youngest of their four children and was only two years old when his mother died.

In 1897, Asa Henderson King moved to Clinton County. I know only that he was an artist and cartoonist. On May 4, 1915, three days before the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in New York City. From there he was sent to Fort Jay, New York, for training, then assigned to Company F of the 29th Infantry Regiment. That same year, the 29th Infantry was dispatched to Panama to guard the Panama Canal. The unit returned to the United States in September 1918. Evidently King remained in Panama, for that was where he died, at Camp Gailliard, on June 6, 1919. The cause was heart trouble. Private Asa Henderson King was buried at Corozal American Cemetery in Corozal, Panama. His name is inscribed on the Clinton County War Memorial in Frankfort, Indiana.

Hoosier cartoonist Asa Henderson King (1880-1919). The photograph is from the website Find A Grave.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Cartoonists and Power

On November 13, 2015, Islamic terrorists attacked several sites in and around Paris, in the process killing 130 people and injuring nearly 400 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility. One of the attackers had only recently arrived in Europe in the flood of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war.

The attack of November 13 was the second major attack to take place in Paris this year. On January 7, Islamists attacked the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The attackers killed eleven people and injured eleven others. Five of the dead--Jean Cabut, Stéphane Charbonnier, Philippe Honoré, Bernard Verlhac, and Georges Wolinski--were cartoonists. Wolinski was also Jewish. There were further terrorist actions in and around Paris over the next two days and countervailing shows of solidarity with the people of Paris in the following weeks. Our current president was conspicuously absent from the largest event, which took place on January 11 in Paris and included two million people and more than forty world leaders. 

On November 17 in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry had the following to say about the two attacks:

There's something different about what happened [on November 13] from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of--not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they're really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn't to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.

It isn't clear whether Kerry was speaking for himself, the President, the United States government, or anyone else, despite his claim that "everybody would feel that." He may not have been speaking in any formal capacity at all. His words sound informal and off the cuff. They are very nearly incoherent. Nonetheless, Secretary Kerry seems to have revealed his true thoughts, and his use of the word "legitimacy," despite any subsequent correction, places him in a category with Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League; cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame; and several members of PEN International, all of whom have suggested that the five murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo provoked their own deaths or even that they deserved to die.

In response to the attacks of November 13, more than two dozen governors have stated that they will not accept Syrian refugees into their states, while at least five others have requested that any refugees be screened before entering. Among the governors not accepting refugees is Kentucky Governor-Elect Matt Bevin. On November 19, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an editorial cartoon by Hoosier cartoonist Joel Pett. The cartoon shows Bevin quaking with fear and hiding under his desk. On the floor is a map of Syria and a newspaper with the headline "Paris." On the governor-elect's desk are three pictures of his children. A fourth is being held by one of Bevin's aides, who is saying: "Sir, they're not terrorists . . . they're your own adopted kids!" I should point out that Matt Bevin is the father of ten children, four of whom are adopted from Ethiopia.

Governor-Elect Bevin responded almost immediately to the cartoon. In an article called "Bevin Criticizes Herald-Leader for Editorial Cartoon Involving His Adopted Children" in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Nov. 19, 2015), he was quoted as saying:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, today, the Lexington Herald-Leader chose to articulate with great clarity the deplorably racist ideology of "cartoonist" Joel Pett. Shame on Mr. Pett for his deplorable attack on my children and shame on the editorial controls that approved this overt racism.

Further:

Let me be crystal clear, the tone of racial intolerance being struck by the Herald-Leader has no place in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and will not be tolerated by our administration.

Pett, who lived in Africa for five years in his childhood, said that he is not a racist. He chalks up Bevin's reaction to "inexperience on his part."

Joel Pett's cartoon may or not be on target. It may or may not be in good taste. That's beside the point. The point is that a cartoonist here in the United States is facing threats, veiled as they may be, from someone far more powerful than he is, simply for expressing himself as an artist. In this country, that threat is ridiculous. Joel Pett is obviously not taking it seriously. In Paris, however, five cartoonists paid for their art with their lives. Contrary to what Garry Trudeau said, they were not operating from a position of power. They were not "punching down." They were in fact punching up against people far more powerful than they were. Their only weapon was a pen. Their killers used firearms and explosives.

What the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists drew may at times have been in poor taste, just as what Joel Pett and other political cartoonists draw may at times be. The issues, however, are simple: either artists have the right to express themselves or they do not. The threat or use of force against them is either legitimate or it is not. Where the Islamic terrorists stand on these issues is clear. Their position is not surprising. What is less clear is just where John Kerry, Garry Trudeau, and Matt Bevin stand. That's the part that is surprising, and I have to say, alarming.

Original text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Stand or Kneel?

May has arrived and P.E.N. is in crisis. Officially non-political, the international organization of poets, essayists, and novelists is faced with a divide in its ranks. Some members wish to condemn the suppression of free thought, free speech, and free expression imposed by political extremists at work in a member nation. Others would rather not kick the hornet's nest of a growing and very aggressive and violent threat, a threat not only to Western liberal values but also to European Jews. As one prominent member of the group writes, "It is better to remain silent than to show disapproval. If we protest, we shall provoke an international squabble . . . . It is for us to remain neutral and silent."

You might think the controversy involves the upcoming PEN Literary Gala, scheduled for Tuesday, May 5, 2015, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. At that event, PEN America plans to bestow upon the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. The award is for Charlie Hebdo's fierce resistance to attempts to deny its writers and artists their freedom of expression, a freedom we recognize as essential to our way of life and inseparable from ourselves as human beings. Editor and cartoonist Stéphane Carbonnier, who went by the nom-de-plume "Charb," led his newspaper in its resistance to oppression, famously vowing, "Je prefere mourir debout que vivre à genoux"--"I would rather die standing than live on my knees." That's a rare expression of courage among Western journalists. Now, with the actions of 145 PEN members, a sizable number of Western and non-Western writers can be included among those who would wish to silence dissent and to deny free expression, an extraordinary irony given their vocation, and a betrayal of everything that they ought to hold sacred. Incredibly, Joyce Carol Oates is among them.

As everyone who follows world events should know by now, Stéphane Charbonnier--along with fellow cartoonists George David Wolinski ("Wolinski"), Jean Cabut ("Cabu"), Philippe Honoré ("Honoré"), and Bernard Verlhac ("Tignous")--were murdered on January 7, 2015, in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. The murderers were Islamists who were themselves killed two days later by French police. At the same time, a coreligionist of the two men murdered four Jews at a kosher supermarket, also located in Paris. Like the Charlie Hebdo murderers, he, met his end at the hands of the police. In the aftermath of the shootings, millions gathered in Paris, claiming in solidarity with the murdered journalists, "Je suis Charlie." Within days, on January 11, world leaders gathered in Paris, where they attended an enormous rally, the largest in France since World War II. Our current president, who had, in a speech of a two years prior, said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," was conspicuously absent from the event. Instead he sent James Taylor to France to sing to our grieving allies a little song while the King of Ketchup looked on.  

The recriminations began instantly upon the slaughter of the cartoonists. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights stated as clearly as anyone the opinion that the cartoonists got what was coming to them when he wrote: "Stéphane Charbonnier, the paper's [editorial director], was killed in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn't understand the role he played in his tragic death." (1) Have you got that? Mr. Donahue--and those who share his opinions--is saying that Charbonnier was responsible for his own murder. Giving new meaning to the term "yellow journalism," some newspapers declined to publish the offending images from Charlie Hebdo. British police actually kept track of people who bought the first issue after the attacks, with the implication that buying a copy of Charlie Hebdo makes a person suspect of planned or actual criminality. (2) Perhaps it soon will be a crime to disagree with official state opinion if Ed Miliband becomes prime minister of England.

There was far more support than disapprobation, however. Even some Muslims decried the violence and carried "Je suis Charlie" or even "Je suis Juif" signs. Vladimir Putin, no great friend of human rights, condemned the attacks. So did Julian Assange, who "tweeted" (boy, now we're scared--somebody tweeted something): "The world must now avenge Charlie Hebdo by swiftly publishing all their cartoons." (3) Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, no stranger to controversy, said, "We all have to stand up today, whether we are humorists or not." (4) Not all cartoonists shared that opinion. A cartoon in the local paper where I live, essentially agreeing with Bill Donahue, suggested that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists invited their own murders. Bizarrely, a reader wrote to the paper praising the local cartoonist's "courage" in drawing what he did. In the current state of affairs, and among people of certain political persuasions, up is apparently down and down is apparently up.

More recently, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who may or may not be a member of PEN, fell into line against freedom of expression when he spoke the following words:

Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks. (5)

I have met Garry Trudeau and found him to be a gracious person. His wife, Jane Pauley, is a fellow Hoosier. We in Indiana are proud of her as we are of anyone from our state who has made something of herself. But I find Mr. Trudeau's words preposterous. There is much to refute in what he has said. I will leave it at this: How can the man who has been gunned down, his blood spilled, spattered, and pouring from multiple bullet wounds, possibly be more powerful than the man who has killed him?

Garry Trudeau won a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1975 for his work on the newspaper comic strip Doonesbury. It was the first time that a comic strip had won the award. I don't know if there was any controversy at the time. Political cartoonists may be a little prickly about comic strip cartoonists butting in to their territory. That was certainly the case the next time a comic strip cartoonist, Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County, won the Pulitzer, in 1987. Regardless of whether comic strip cartoonists are deserving of Pulitzer Prizes in cartooning, it comes as no small irony that the 145 PEN writers of today, who seem to share an opinion with Garry Trudeau, find that the five dead cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, who stood alone--alone--against violence and threats of violence, are undeserving of an award for courage. Novelist Peter Carey, a signatory of the PEN letter opposing the award to Charlie Hebdo, echoes the words of Mr. Trudeau: "All this [the controversy over freedom of speech] is complicated by PEN's seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population." (6) Again, apparently, people who murder are powerless, while people who are murdered are powerful. And they only get what is coming to them.

In fairness to Garry Trudeau, the 145 PEN writers, and their muddled ideas, PEN is also fully capable of gobbledygook. Here is part of the organization's response to the controversy: "There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayable." (7) This is by an organization of writers who I believe must pride themselves on their ability to write. The local reader who wrote to the local paper praising the local cartoonist's "courage" could not have said it worse or with less conciseness, clarity, or sense.

I began this essay with a description of a crisis. The crisis of which I write is not actually the current crisis--despite the preceding eight paragraphs--but one that occurred eighty-two years ago this month. From May 25 (or 26) to May 28, 1933, members of the International P.E.N. Club met in Ragusa, Italy (now Dubrovnik, Croatia), for their 11th annual congress. (8) The issue that divided the German-speaking attendees was book-burning. Earlier that month, on May 10, 1933, members of the German Student Union, essentially a Nazi organization, burned in Berlin upwards of 25,000 books by Jewish, liberal, leftist, communist, and pacifist authors. "The book burnings became the central focus of the International PEN Club meeting in Ragusa in May 1933," wrote Donald G. Daviau, who continued:

When the Austrian PEN delegation introduced a resolution condemning the students' action, the German representatives walked out of the meeting in protest, accompanied by the Austrians Grete von Urbanitzky, head of the Austrian group, Felix Salten [source of the quote in the opening paragraph of this essay], the publisher Paul Zsolnay, Egon Caesar Corti [,] who even at this early juncture was a convinced National Socialist, and others. (9; boldface added)

The political divide between the Austrian writers became a permanent split in June 1933 when a number of pro-Austrian members of the Austrian P.E.N. Club passed a resolution "defending intellectual freedom and condemning the abolition of human rights and the persecution of writers in Nazi Germany." (10) A dozen and a half (or more) writers resigned from the club in protest. "The organization [as a result] was reduced to so few members . . . that it could no longer function." (11) Its successors drifted into Nazism.

In response to the current crisis in PEN, Salman Rushdie has some advice: "What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them." (12) The signatories to the current PEN letter could learn something from the experience of the pro-German, pro-Nazi, or at least not anti-Nazi writers who left the Austrian P.E.N. Club in 1933: Felix Salten, a Jew (and the author of Bambi), was forced to flee Austria and died in exile in Switzerland in 1945. Grete von Urbanitzky, her works prohibited in Nazi Germany in 1941, left that country for France before going into exile in Switzerland. Paul Zsolnay, also a Jew, left Austria in November 1938 for Great Britain (after the Anschluss) and did not return to his homeland until after the war. Even the National Socialist Egon Caesar Corti was denied certain benefits of membership in his party because of the Jewishness of his wife. In other words, the Nazis, in time, went after the men and women who had supported them or refused to denounce them as they were rising to power. I might have read of a similar situation, but I can't remember where.

Totalitarianism was on the rise in the 1930s. That is clear enough in hindsight. The problem of the totalitarian mind was diagnosed as well as by anybody by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements in 1951. We should recognize by now the nature of totalitarianism and its mortal dangers, no one so much as the thinker, the writer, the artist, and the journalist. And yet here we are, threatened once again by totalitarian systems, while the very people who should know better sympathize with, identify with, support, defend, and apologize for those who would wish to impose those systems upon us. The man who pulls the trigger is bad enough, but in the end he may simply be one among the myrmidons of a far worse thing, the man possessed of a murderous idea, even if that idea has every good intention behind it. My question is this: Have we learned nothing?

Notes

(1) From USA Today, January 15, 2015, p. 7a, column 4.
(2) See "Police from Several UK Forces Seek Details of Charlie Hebdo Readers" on the website of The Guardian, Feb. 10, 2015.
(3) From USA Today/Indianapolis Star, January 8, 2015, p. 2B, column 3.
(4) Ditto.
(5) From "The Abuse of Satire" by Garry Trudeau on the website of The Atlantic, April 11, 2015.
(6) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler on the website of PEN America, here. Ironically, the subtitle of the website is (in  part) "Free Expression."
(7) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler, the original story in the New York Times, April 26, 2015, here.
(8) The acronym PEN is made two ways: P.E.N. and PEN. It stands for or stood for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, and seems to have been changed somewhere along the line. I have used the first formation for the old controversy and the second for the new controversy.
(9) From "Introduction" by Donald G. Daviau in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 62.
(10) Ditto, p. 63.
(11) Ditto, p. 64.
(12) From "Salman Rushdie Slams Critics of PEN’s Charlie Hebdo Tribute" by Alison Flood and Alan Yuhas in The Guardian, April 27, 2015, here.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Mightier Than the Sword

"No political cartoonist is worth his salt who misuses his valuable space by drawing inoffensive, pretty pictures about the news. A political cartoon is a weapon of attack to be used against the evils and the follies of society. It is potentially the strongest weapon in modern journalism. Often it is drawn in good humor and often it is not. It does not matter how it is drawn if it achieves the purpose of the cartoonist. His purpose is not to be well-liked and popular. It is to reveal injustice and deflate humbug. His purpose is to sting you to awareness of what he regards as a social evil."

--Scott Long 

In his preface to The McDonald Book: A Collection of Editorial Cartoons by the Grand Forks Herald’s Award Winning Cartoonist [Stuart McDonald] (1963)

* * *

"In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands."

--James A. Garfield

Quoted in Our American Heritage, Charles L. Wallis, editor (1970)

Thanks to BH for the first quote.

Artists Murdered for Their Art

Today, in Paris, five cartoonists were murdered for their art. Their names were Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb--respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). One cartoonist, Corinne Rey, escaped with her life. In all likelihood, there have never been so many cartoonists to die in one day, certainly never in a single incident. Those five murdered cartoonists probably outnumber all other murdered cartoonists in history. The men who murdered them subscribe to a belief system that readily and perversely claims martyrdom in murder. The true martyrs today were the cartoonists themselves. Ironically, they worked for a leftist and anti-religious newspaper called Charlie Hebdo, and in consequence might very well decline conventional martyrdom. Perhaps significantly, one of the cartoonists was Jewish.

Like artists everywhere, those five French cartoonists sought to bring new things into creation, to express themselves through their art, and to throw the light of truth upon a benighted earth. And like cartoonists everywhere, they wished to expose the evil, corruption, folly, and oppression that exist among men and their institutions. For that they were murdered by the kind of men who have existed in every time and place, men who seek to deny free expression and to deprive others of their rights, their freedoms, their property, and their lives, men who prefer darkness to light and lies to the truth. These men go by a different name today than they did during much of the twentieth century, yet we have seen their kind before and we have defeated them before. We can defeat them again by recognizing the threat, by taking action against those who threaten us and our way of life, but perhaps most importantly by not sympathizing or collaborating with them, and by not supporting them or excusing their actions in any way, as so many in Europe, Great Britain, and America seem so willing to do. An added irony is that today's murderers did by violence what some Western governments, certain journalists, and various individuals have wished to do by disapprobation, censorship, or force of law--they silenced the voices of dissent.

If we are to survive, we must have the clarity of vision, the uncompromising desire to tell the truth, and the quotidian courage of the artist--the cartoonist--who stands at the barricades against murder, lies, tyranny, and oppression. I have a modest proposal: Let January 7 forever after today be the International Day of the Cartoonist.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley