Silencing the Court Jesters.
10 years ago cartoonists were murdered for drawing offensive things. Things have not been getting better.
I know, I know. I’m meant to be funny on here— It’s a humorous newsletter and I’m supposed to distract you from the boundless horrors of the world. But if you’ll indulge me for one day, I want to talk about something close to my heart. I promise I’ll return to drawing silly cartoons about New York tomorrow.
~ J
It was ten years ago this week that two Islamists went into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering a caretaker on their way in. They proceeded to ask for the editor, Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, and four other cartoonists by name. They then murdered them all. They also killed three other editorial staff members, a police bodyguard, and a guest at the weekly editorial meeting they were in.
At the time, the world stood shocked, watching the graphic video of the terrorists shooting a policeman on the Paris sidewalk (A fellow Muslim named Ahmed Merabet, as it happens.) As they celebrated the mass execution of unarmed civilians, they casually stepped back into their black hatchback, calmly closed the doors and drove away.
The world stood in solidarity with the dead cartoonists. Even if they didn’t agree with the offensive cartoons they’d published, artists everywhere— myself included— drew cartoons in defiance of the attack, denouncing the horrific terrorist attack and professing the profound importance of free speech in a working democracy. For a while.
People marched in the streets, arm-in-arm, in protest of the despicable act of violence. Slogans like Je Suis Charlie flooded social media and banners around the world. Until they didn’t.
People become outraged about these things, and then things simmer down and slowly get worse under our feet while we rage about people in red hats and activists with blue hair. I personally feel that they should move World Press Freedom Day from May 3rd to January 7th, so people never forget what happened that day in Paris.
I was in Paris in May and found myself in the 11th Arr, where the incident took place. I wandered over to Rue Nicolas-Appert and felt a chill down my spine remembering the video. Everything was so quiet and empty. There’s a mural of the murdered cartoonists on the wall.
I was interviewed on the day after the massacre on morning TV. It was all still very raw, and I hadn’t slept at all. This was before my time as President of the National Cartoonists Society, so I wasn’t quite as articulate on cartooning matters as I would have liked. Still, the general thrust of my argument remained: Silencing cartoonists for doing their job is wrong. It always will be. Cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine of any working democracy. When their voices begin to be censored, something has gone seriously awry.1
Related Reading:
Yes, there’s a spectrum. But be it billionaires killing a personally unfavourable story in the newspaper they own or Islamists killing artists for drawing unfavourable cartoons, it still operates on the same continuum of suppression. When the frog slowly boils2 to the day when we look around the room to find no more people speaking truth to power, holding the hypocrites accountable, we have lost something very precious. Wielding any power as a weapon against those who question it is an act of supreme cowardice.
On New Year’s Eve, I found my badge from the annual Association of American Editorial Cartoonists conference. I joked on Instagram, “I wonder how long this will last in 2025.”
Turns out, the answer was four days.
This week, Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post when one of her cartoons was rejected on the grounds of blatant censorship. The newspaper’s slogan has always been Democracy dies in darkness. Well, today the lights went out.
I’m simultaneously nauseated and terrified by what this portends for America in the coming years. Dread. I feel pure dread. The loss of Ann’s voice from WaPo is sad. The silver lining is that she will be sharing her crucial, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, here on Substack.
Subscribe to Ann’s substack if you care about cartoonists being able to share their work without being censored by tech billionaires and their spineless flunkies. I just cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. I suspect I won’t be the only one.
Related Reading:
Artists Spotlight on Ann Telnaes @ jasonchatfield.com
Cartoon by Peter Kuper
You may think I’m being shrill by comparing the murder of cartoonists over anti-religious cartoons to the censoring of a cartoonist for offending the fragile egos of tech billionaires. But this is one topic on which I’ve never wavered, despite the moral outrage over the cartoons that were drawn by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, allegedly goading the terrorists into a confrontation. Sam Harris articulated it very clearly a decade ago:
“People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis,”
You can’t respond to offensive speech or satire with murder. The specific content of the cartoons is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating the justification for such violence. The act itself—murdering people for expressing themselves through art or speech—represents a profound moral failing that cannot be excused or contextualized by the perceived offensiveness of the material. Yet, people tried—a lot of people.
Freedom of speech is a non-negotiable value in a working democracy. It is fundamental to a free and open society. Allowing violent or otherwise punitive reactions to dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech erodes this freedom and sets a dangerous precedent.
Yes, I know this is a fallacious analogy, but give me this one.
Editorial cartoonists condense complex issues into easily understood images.
Fewer people have time to read editorials.
Editorial cartoonists who report impartially are becoming rarer.
Images can be manipulated.
This is an important and impassioned essay for free speech. Nothing speaks truth to power more effectively or louder than a great cartoon.