I’ve no idea how many people died violent, premature deaths during the
course of January this year. But I’m sure almost every single one of them went
unreported. And even if you narrow the death toll down solely to people killed
by the actions of so-called Islamists, you can safely assume the vast majority
of those deaths went unreported too, whether it was men and women killed in
defence of the Syrian city of Koubani or anybody else unfortunate enough to
live under the necrocratic tyranny of the self-styled Islamic State which
straddles the geopolitical ruins of Iraq and Syria.
If you narrow it down even further - to people killed by the actions of so-
called Islamists on a single day in January this year - we’ll never know the
names of most of those murdered people. Worse, there’s not even agreement
on the number of people who were killed by Boko Haram in Baga in northern
Nigeria on 7th January. Was it 2000, according one local government official,
or 150, as claimed by the central Nigerian government? Or none at all, as the
head of the regional government insisted afterwards? Remoteness, the fog of
war, the claims and counter claims of rival propagandists make the truth
almost impossible to grasp - almost as impossible to grasp as two of the three
alternative realities on offer from Baga. Whatever the precise number of
corpses, it’s standard for the horror, pity and disgust to be informed more
qualitative factors than quantitative ones. Right up to when you lose count of
the body count, that is. It was the failed seminarian and atheist mass-murderer
Josef Stalin who observed that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is
just a statistic.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the murders at the offices of Charlie
Hebdo in Paris on 7th January echoed round the world, and continue to
reverberate: the size of the horror is graspable, and we know the names. They
also took place in the heart of a Western capital city teeming with millions of
people. Indeed, the murder of police officer Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim of
Algerian descent like his murderers Said and Cherif Kouachi, was caught live
on CCTV. Mustapha Ourrad, a copy taker at Charlie Hebdo, was also of
Algerian descent, and was also murdered by the Kouachi brothers, with what
surviving witnesses described as calm, execution-style deliberation. Also
murdered were Frédéric Boisseau, Charlie Hebdo’s building maintenance
man; Franck Brinsolaro, another police officer assigned as a bodyguard to the
magazine’s editor-in-chief; Elsa Cayat, a psychoanalyst who was also Jewish
and the only woman killed in the atrocity, though the Kouachis specifically
spared the lives of other women in the room; Bernard Maris, a Professor of
Economics and shareholder in Charlie Hebdo; and Michel Renaud, a 69 year
old French journalist due to guest edit a future edition of the magazine.
And yet what made the Charlie Hebdo killings apparently so exquisitely,
exceptionally horrific was the five other victims, who were all cartoonists.
This, it seemed, was a brutal and bloody assault on laughter. Which meant it
was also an assault on the very fact of being human itself.
Laughter, after all, is one of the things we’re best at (along with killing each
other, as it happens). That’s because laughter is a hardwired evolutionary
survival tool that stops us going mad with existentialist terror at the horrors
life throws at us. These include death, sex, shit, our friends, our leaders and
our enemies. And while anthropologists have claimed that it’s uniquely human
to use laughter as a means of social control through mockery, we’re never as
unique as we’d like to think. Our genetic cousins chimpanzees laugh to tell
other chimps they’re only playing, an important consideration when one
chimp jumps playfully on top of another chimp but doesn’t want immediately
to be killed. So laughter, while it can be cruel, aggressive, exclusionary,
taunting and bullying, is also playful. Although it’s often deadly serious, the
point is it’s never serious enough to be deadly. That’s because, according to
the countless nuanced rules which govern how humans interact with each
other and demonstrate one another’s current power status, you’re meant to get
the joke. Satire in particular fails or flourishes around this point.
But the ultimate counterploy of the mockee - whether it’s a despotic
government or a picked-upon kid in a playground - is always to grab back the power
advantage, refuse to get the joke and kill the mocker to shut them up. In other words,
just hunker back into the comfort of your chimp brain and pretend you didn’t hear the play
signal. And that, in a nutshell, is what happened in Charlie Hebdo’s offices on 7th
January 2015. Although, as you’d expect, it was far far more complicated than that.
Nonetheless, without stretching the point too far, there’s a hint of the inherent
violence in all humour if you consider that the murdered cartoonists - whose
names we know - were all famous not for their names, but for their noms de
plume: Charb was Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier;
Tignous’s real name was Bernard Verlhac; Philippe Honoré and Georges Wolinski
both signed themselves, like Giles or Low, with just their surnames,
while Jean Cabut shortened his already shortened name to Cabu.
This has long been the fashion among cartoonists, exceptionally among
journalists. And while it may be the only point of connection between, say,
Trog or JAK and Stalin and Trotsky, cartoonists’ noms de plume are a lot
closer to noms de guerre than we like to think. Satire, and particularly visual
satire, has always had more in common with political violence than stand-up
comedy. It’s dark, primal voodoo, sympathetic magic designed to do the
victim harm. And it gets even deeper with the magic associated with names
and namecalling, changed names and the sacredness of the unnameable: not
speaking the name of god was - is - as powerful a taboo among many religions
as portraying the Prophet Muhammad remains within a branch of Islam.
But even if you ignore all the cultural and anthropological baggage, at its heart
visual satire is still assassination without the blood. That’s my job as I
understand it, and it was also the job of my murdered colleagues. There’s a
defining grimness at the heart of it, although once again it’s important to
remember that bit about being without the blood. Because the purpose of our
craft, however dark, is to leaven it all with laughter. And it works because
your body releases all those lovely endorphins when you laugh which quite
simply make you feel better. That’s why cartoonists tend to be loved far more
than assassins.
Two of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in particular were deeply and widely
loved, and heavy with fame and honours as a consequence. Wolinski was
awarded a Légion d'honneur in 2005, while Cabu was famous - very famous -
among other things for regular featuring drawing cartoons on French
children’s TV. Imagine Rolf Harris being deliberately gunned down by
masked assassins - but a good Rolf Harris, in his pomp and before his
downfall - and you begin to creep towards what these murders actually mean
in France. Imagine, if it’s easier, Giles being murdered by terrorists. Go back a
couple of generations and try to imagine the same happening to Illingworth or
Low or Vicky. Or even Heath Robinson. (All of whom, incidentally, were on
the Gestapo Death List, due for summary execution had the Nazis invaded
Britain.)
These cartoonists weren’t just famous and loved, they were old too. Honoré
was 74, Cabu 76 and Wolinski 80. That should tell us something else about
Charlie Hebdo. These were men of the 68 generation, whose sensibilities were
informed as much by Surrealism and Situationism as by France’s much
vaunted Secularist tradition. That places them not so much within journalism
than as part of the European artistic Avant Garde, home to composers like
KarlHeinz Stochkhausen, who described the 9/11 attacks as "the biggest work
of art there has ever been".
Their spiritual ancestors would also include the Surrealist film director Luis
Bunuel, who was so convinced his debut film "Un Chien Andalou" would
trigger a riot he stood behind the screen at the premiere with his pockets filled
with rocks to throw at the audience if they turned nasty. His next film, "L’Age
d’Or", did succeed in provoking riots with its final reel depicting the dissolute
roues from de Sade’s "120 Days of Sodom" leaving the scene of their orgies
accompanied by Jesus Christ. The film was banned, but the purpose all along
had been to shock and provoke authority into reaction.
Forty years after Bunuel’s films, Situationism, a weird hybrid of Surrealism
and Trotskyism, in its turn sought to spark Revolution by creating a "situation"
through provocation. (Situationism only really took seed in Britain in
Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols, Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the
increasingly bizarre contrarianism of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s
Brendan O’Neill and Claire Fox at Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas.)
Then add to all that how the magazine had been born, as an act of defiance to
the reaction of an instigating provocation. Charlie Hebdo’s immediate parent
was Hara-Kiri Hebdo, which was banned by the French Government in 1970
after it had mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle by comparing it to a recent
disco fire which had killed 149 people: "Tragic Ball in Colombey [...les-Deux-
Eglises, de Gaulle’s home]: 1 dead."
It was, of course, a funny, provocative and ironic gag to name the reborn
magazine after the dead de Gaulle. Irony is woven into the DNA of humour in
general and satire in particular. Think of Swift’s "A Modest Proposal". In the
babel of "whataboutery" that came in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo
massacre, while many people claimed the magazine’s covers had been
increasingly racist in tone, its defenders, on top of saying Charlie Hebdo
attacked absolutely everyone, insisted that those covers were ironic. But
ironies get lost, deliberately or otherwise, and always have done. Three
centuries ago, Daniel Defoe wrote "The Shortest Way with Dissenters" as an
ironic attack on growing Tory hostility to Dissenters, concluding his satirical,
sarcastic defence of the Church of England with the line "Now let us Crucify
the Thieves!" He was pilloried and imprisoned by magistrates who thought (or
claimed to think) he was being serious. Then again, there’s no evidence Julius
Streicher, editor of the cartoon heavy anti-Semitic hate sheet Der Sturmer,
ever for a single second contemplated the irony defence at his Nuremburg
trial, at the end of which he was hanged.
A professional translator friend of mine from Northern Ireland, where they
know about these kinds of thing, is far more familiar with Charlie Hebdo than
many, and emailed me the following observation, invoking Streicher:
"The Mohammed pics remind me of the Garvaghy Road - someone's told us
we can't do this so we have to. I could mail you some scans of an old Hara-
Kiri from about 1976 but we'd probably have the rozzers round. However...
[the] Charia Hebdo issue [CH’s defiant response to the bombing of their
offices in 2011] ... looks to me like South Thanet Ukip had some bright ideas
after a night in the Dog and Duck, and asked Julius Streicher if he could do
anything with them. That's just me."
So. Do you get it, or don’t you? Because the more you consider Charlie
Hebdo and its aftermath, the thicker and more tangled the ironies become.
Henri Roussel, the now 80-year- old founder of Hara-Kiri wrote an article in
Nouvel Observateur denouncing Charbonnier for making his defiance of the
jihadis who’d bombed his offices so provocative he deliberately invited the
murder of Roussel’s old friend Wolinski. The editors of Nouvel Observateur
subsequently felt compelled to justify publishing the article in the name of free expression.
Meanwhile, a 16 year old schoolboy in France was arrested for posting on Facebook a parody
of a Charlie Hebdo cover which had originally shown bullets flying through a
copy of the Quran into a turbanned figure with the headline "The Quran is
Shit"; the parody showed bullets passing through the original cover into the
body of a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist.
Then there’s the irony of a satirical magazine receiving a million euro subsidy
from the state it was created to attack (that’s free expression for you). Or the
further irony of some of the world’s grislier leaders "marching" in support of
Charlie Hebdo, including a representative of Saudi Arabia, two days after Raif
Badawi received the first 50 lashes of his 1000 lashes and 10 year prison
sentence for "insulting Islam". Also present were Binyamin Netanyahu, whose
Israeli government arrested and imprisoned Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed
Saba’aneh for five months in 2013 for "being in contact with a hostile
organisation", and Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority is
investigating the same cartoonist as I write this, for a sympathetic cartoon of
the Prophet Muhammad published in a Ramallah newspaper.
I very nearly drew something similar for The Guardian two days after the
murders. My cartoon was going to show Muhammad with one hand covering
his face in despair, the other stroking his cat Muezza, and wearing a "Not In
My Name" t-shirt. Given the sensitivities involved, I emailed Alan Rusbridger
with the idea a good 36 hours before I’d need to start work on it, and it was
only after very lengthy deliberations at the highest levels of the paper,
including long phone conversations between myself and Jonathan Freedland,
that it was finally decided to go with something else. That was another
cartoon, of me slumped on my drawing board and describing the first cartoon
but admitting my loved ones slightly baulked at the idea of me dying to afford
the readers a wry smile.
I entirely respect The Guardian’s decision, which was reached after a great
deal of careful and, I suspect, agonising thought. One reason for their decision
was that they’d already run an editorial explaining why they weren’t going to
publish previous Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad; they also, like
Roussel, saw no profit (and right now I won’t ask you to excuse the pun) in
ramping up and widening the provocation. Having discussed the implications
of producing my first planned cartoon with my family, I also subsequently
discovered that, despite initially agreeing to me proceeding, our children, both
in their twenties, became physically ill with anxiety at what might befall me if
I had. (Although, to his credit, our son did email me to say that if I was going
to be assassinated, could I make sure it was him who did it. This, incidentally,
was a joke.)
The hundreds of online posters who then accused me and The Guardian of
unspeakable cowardice and appeasement in not drawing Muhammad seemed
oblivious to the further ironies of their denunciations being anonymous (you
know, like in those bastions of free expression, Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union). Perhaps they don’t care. They certainly seem indifferent to my
welfare, as it became clear to me that one bunch of masked maniacs would be
happy to kill me for what I might draw, while another pack of idiots, digitally
masked this time, were berating me for what I hadn’t drawn and demanding I
be prepared to die to further their geo-political agenda. Though in baying for
reprisals against an entire faith group in revenge for killings by its individual
members, my detractors were unconsciously endorsing what we might term
the "Kristallnacht Protocol".
Anyway, the cartoon I actually regret not drawing wasn’t that one; it was the
one of all those world leaders who’d boldly claimed "Je Suis Charlie", a week
later holding up signs reading "Je Suis King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia".
Still, as we should expect nothing from our leaders beyond bitter ironies
sliding effortlessly into stinking hypocrisy, there’s no reason why this
shouldn’t apply to our prospective leaders either. These include the masters of
the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists’ murderers, who’s mission is to make everyone
on earth the same as them (something denounced rather eloquently by
Jonathan Swift in "Tale of a Tub"). A week after the killings I wrote in my
regular column in Tribune:
"To my eyes [these murders] look most like a mafia hit against soft targets
sending a simple message. Moreover, I suspect the message wasn’t even
addressed to "The West", but to al Qaeda’s greatest rivals, Islamic State.
These were showcase killings to demonstrate that bin Laden’s old mob were
still in the game, via a global promo video (courtesy of Western TV) aimed at
recruiting all those confused and angry young people locked in their bedrooms
cruising the internet and, appalled by the actions of the West, being tempted
into opting for IS’s brand of holy barbarism instead of AQ’s."
Interestingly, Tariq Ali came to the same conclusion in a piece for the London
Review of Books, likewise recognising in this whole affair that things are both
deeper and shallower, simpler and infinitely more complicated than they
appear. Just like a cartoon can trigger many different responses in different
circumstances targetting receptors both deep and hidden in our psyches or as
shallow as the sweat on our furious faces.
In that light, I’d go further and insist this atrocity wasn’t even about cartoons.
In truth, and eternally, it was about totalitarianism, whether secular or
religious (and I can’t tell the difference); it was about totalitariarism’s
instinctive intolerance of laughter mocking its innate absurdity; it was about
the lumbering, ludicrous thug in the kindergarten playground who comes over
and thumps you just for looking at them, and for whom absolutely anything
they choose will be offensive whenever they choose it to bed, and will
therefore justify them in doing the most offensive thing anyone ever can.
Which, should we be tempted to forget, is killing someone else, the eternal
prerogative of the tyrant. And every joke, as Orwell observed, is a tiny
revolution, a little act of defiance and resistance, and off it goes again.
I believe both the World and my profession will recover from this, as will
mockery, satire and the giving and receiving of offence, and probably very
quickly. The dead, however, will remain dead. Although it was their memory I
betrayed the week following the massacre. In its immediate aftermath, I found
myself besieged by the media, doing a great deal of TV and radio, usually
saying exactly what I’d said already. By the next Tuesday, I thought I’d found
refuge at a day long meeting of a Wildlife Conservation Charity of which I’m
a trustee. However, when I turned my phone back on afterwards, there were
texts from the Today Programme, Sky News, Newsnight, 5Live and LBC all
wanting me to fill their dead air with my response to the Charlie Hebdo
survivors’ issue. I deleted them all, and silently concluded that if they couldn’t
do without me they could always turn off their transmitters and give us the rest
of us a break.
But then the cartoonist within me kicked back in. I should, I now realise, have
gone on all those platforms, pointed to the magazine’s cover of Muhammad
holding his "Je Suis Charlie" sign (out of shot, inevitably) and said "This is
scandalous! I’ve never seen anything so offensive! These people call
themselves satirists and they produce this kind of mawkish shit? They
should’ve had Muhammad dancing on the graves laughing "Those lippy
Froggie Cunts had it fucking coming!"* Then, in faux surprise, I would have
said, "Oh! Sorry! Didn’t you want that much Free Expression?"
But it’s always had its limits, as any idiot could have told you from the
beginning. My job is to stretch them as far as they’ll go; they pushed them til
they broke.
*I’ve since been told Charlie Hebdo’s first response, within hours of the
massacre, was a mock up of the cover that got Hara-Kiri banned, headlined:
"Tragic Ball in Paris: 12 Dead"