Litrature review

Leonard Freedman Wit as a Political Weapon: Satirists and Censors

POLITICAL SATIRE—THE MOCKING OF EVERY ASPECT OF THE

political process—is offensive, acerbic, disrespectful. Its practitioners especially relish aiming their fire at the politically powerful. Some of those targeted are not amused and try to censor the satire and its authors. This is especially the case in authoritarian systems, but censor- ship of political satire also exists in democracies.

In this essay I compare the constraints on political satire in authoritarian and democratic systems in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, an era when new mass media and institutional changes brought a vast expansion of political satire as well as increased efforts to suppress it.

POLITICAL SATIRE IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES Censorship is a defining characteristic of authoritarian regimes. Although there are vwde differences in the rigor vwth which censorship is exercised, satirists in many autocratic systems must play a danger- ous game, confronting deletions, bans, and confiscations of their work, and personal penalties ranging from flnes, prison, exile, even death.

The past hundred years or so have been a particularly turbulent period for despotic systems. First, a new and particularly potent form of tjTanny—totalitarianism—brought a deadly increase in repression. Then, most of the totalitarian systems collapsed or were substantially modifled, and a number of other autocracies followed suit or are now under threat. Yet in the twenty-flrst century, authoritarianism is still

social research Vol. 79 : No. 1 : Spring 2012 87

very much alive, and political satirists in several countries continue to play their cat-and-mouse game with the censors.

Though never as efficient or omniscient as Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984 (1949), the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century invented tools of control that reached into almost every aspect of the daily life of the citizenry through a single party, informers, and the secret police; brought all forms of association into instruments of the state; and used the new media of movies and radio, programmed to promulgate an all-embracing ideology and build a cult of personality around the omnipresent face and voice of the leader.

Among the regimes adopting this model of repression. Hitler's Germany provides the most complete twentieth-century example of the censoring of political satire. The Nazi state quickly throttled the Weimar Republic's explosion of irreverent satire. From 1933 to 1945 in Germany, there was no published criticism of the regime and its lead- ers, no hint of the international satirical onslaught that would make Adolf Hitler its perennial target.

Instead, the regime used political satire for its own ends. Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wanted to show the world that Nazis had a sense of humor, and promoted satirical journals. Among them was Simplidssimus, which had specialized before World War I in Kaiserwitz, the ridiculing of the absurd, stmtting Wilhelm II. But now the targets of the state-run Simplidssimus were Jews, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and domestic slackers—never the Nazi leaders and their regime (Bytwerk 2004, 122). Though "whispered jokes" were told in bars and people's homes, they had better be literally whispered, for if overheard, they could lead to a concentration camp or even a death sentence (Lipman 1993, 34).

While Soviet Communism displayed many of the same tech- niques of brutal repression that characterized the Nazi state, the story of political satire in the two systems is very different. Scholars of Russian literature can point to an impressive list of satirical novels and essays by Soviet authors (Ginsberg 1964; Henry 1972; Chappie 1980; Brown 1993). Lenin tolerated, even encouraged, an emption of satire.

88 social research

The 1920s saw the founding of the satirieal magazine Krokodil and the publieation of several novels and popular stories poking fun at Soviet life. Even Stalin, who suppressed most dissent and demanded "soeial- ist realism" in literature, defended Mikhail Bulgakov's 1926 play. The Day of the Turbins, from the attaeks of party hard-liners, and read the anti-bureaueratic stories of Mikhail Zoschenko to his young sons. Some of the works suppressed by Stalin were published under Khrushchev; and though another clampdown followed with Brezhnev in power, Fazil Iskander was able to publish a fiercely satirical fable of the Soviet system. Rabbits and Boa Constrictors in 1982.

And yet, during most of the Soviet era, political satirists were constantly under an attack that was far more intrusive than any managed by the censors under the czars. The hacks of the official writ- ers' organization. The Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), could make or break the ability of a satirist to publish. Zoschenko was assailed by Stalin's cultural enforcer, Andrei Zhdanov, as "an unprincipled liter- ary hoodlum" (McLean 1963, xxv) and his works were banned. Mikhail Bulgakov completed The Master and the Margarita, a surrealistic assault on the Stalinist world, just before his death in 1940, but it could not be published until 1967,14 years after Stalin's death. During the Brezhnev era, Vladimir Voinovich was expelled from the Writers' Union after the publication abroad of a brilhant spoof of the Soviet system. The life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. Harassed and threatened

by the KGB, Voinovich went into exile.

The general rule from Lenin onward was that it was permissible to make fun of problems of everyday life, corrupt party officials, the bungling of the lesser bureaucracy, and the residual bourgeois attitudes allegedly left over from czarist days. What was not acceptable was satire that brought the Soviet system into disrepute.

Most especially there must be no lèse majesté, no criticism of the leaders themselves. For all of Lenin's support for satire during the 1920s, none of it presumed to laugh at Lenin. As for Stalin, he was enraged when the poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a verse lampoon of him and his henchmen, depicting Stalin as a repulsive sadist surrounded by

Wit as a Political Weapon 89

groveling acolytes. Mandelstam read it to a small group, it was leaked by an informer, and Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to the prov- inces. Accused later of "counter-revolutionary activities," he died on his way to the gulag. Iskander's Rabbits and Boa Constrictors did include a fearsome Stalinesque Great I ^ h o n , but this was long after Stalin's death; and Iskander's less ambiguous description of Stalin as a para- noid despot in a collection of stories did not survive the censor's cuts.

Thus, other than in the Soviet Union's own extensive crop of "whispered jokes," the rule against mocking the top leaders prevailed, broken at last only when an actor in a Voinovich play did a hilarious imitation of Gorbachev. Though Gorbachev's daughter was in the audi- ence and did not applaud, the play's run continued and the actor was not punished. Satirists, it seemed, no longer had to fear the legacy of Stalin (Remnick 1993-94,148).

There is much less to say about political satire under the third great totalitarian tyrant of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong. Though there is a strong anti-official satirical tradition in China in the form of poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and "fast tales" (rhymed stories accompanied by bamboo or metal clappers), Mao, a devoted follower of Stalin's doctrine of intolerance of any but the "correct line," allowed no laughter at the expense of himself or his regime (Link 1983, 2000).

There was a brief period in 1956 when satirists joined in an explo- sion of free expression provoked by Mao's call to "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom." But in 1957, Mao took alarm and introduced the Anti-Rightist campaign. From 1966-1976 Mao imposed the Cultural Revolution, a reign of terror against any criticism of the regime, during which the only satire took the form of marching professors through the streets wearing dunces' caps (Feinberg 1971, 231-237). Mao, at last, reigned in the zealots. But there was no real let up in the prevailing repression until his death.

Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, introduced a more relaxed era in which party officials and other local tyrants were lampooned in short stories, plays, fast tales, and eartoonists' sketehes on walls in the cities including a Democracy Wall in Beijing. Still, Deng spoke out against

90 social research

extending bourgeois notions like free speech to "counterrevolution- aries"; the Democracy Wall was closed dov^oi; and the line was all too clearly dravm in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

With the ignominious shattering of the Thousand Year Reich, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, not much is left of the twentieth-century totalitarian model, other than its macabre relic in North Vietnam, echoes of the system in Guba and North Vietnam, and elements of Stalinist-style rule in former parts of the Soviet Union, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Ghina, once the standard-bearer of Gommunist rigidity, is no longer in the grip of Maoist terror, and under post-Deng leaders things have become somewhat easier for satirists. A comedian in 2000 made fun of Deng's sueeessor, Jian Zemin, and was not punished, and in 2002 there was a performanee of Orwell's Animal Farm in Beijing.

Satirists eould also take heart from the eollapse of a number of other despotic regimes around the globe. After World War II, the struc- ture of European colonialism began to crumble, signaled by Britain's withdrawal from India. Although there had been a good deal of anti- British satire during the Raj in published novels, cartoons, poems, and artieles, satirists always had to be aware of the watehful eye of the eensor; and as the pressure for independenee intensified, so did the raids on bookshops, along with eonfiseations, bans, and interminable sedition trials (Darnton 2001; Barrister 1974). But the British censors packed their bags and were gone by mid-century, and their British and European counterparts in the rest of Asia and Africa followed.

In South Africa, race as a determinant of power was another casu- alty. Under their apartheid regime the authorities, anxious not to exac- erbate international hostility to their racist pohcies, had allowed a good deal of leeway to the satirical barbs of playwright and solo performer, Peter-Dirk Uys. Even so, some of his plays were censored, and in his performances, he recognized that he had to be careful not to upset his audiences too much, so "there had to be more tickles than punches" (Uys 1983, 79). After the end of the apartheid system he no longer pulled his punches.

Wit as a Political Weapon 91

Another common system of authoritarian control in the twenti- eth century—rule by the generals—suftered a number of setbacks. The military had taken power in several Latin American countries, and did not relish being pilloried by satirists. In Argentina in 1966, for example, the military banned the popular humor magazine, Tia Vicenta, edited by the cartoonist "Landm" (Fultz 1970, 192); and in the 1970s, a political cartoonist and his two daughters were kidnapped and murdered after he portrayed members of the junta as extraterrestrials. But the throttle- hold of the generals throughout the continent was broken in the 1980s and 1990s.

Then in 2010 came the removal from power of yet another general, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Political satire had long been a feature of Egyptian culture, and in the 1920s and 1930s, satirists had harassed the Icing and the British, who still had bases in Egypt (Kishtainy 1985). But after World War II, a military coup ousted both the monarch and the British; and though the first of the new military leaders, Gamal Abdel Nasser, collected and enjoyed the jokes about his alleged omnipo- tence, the jokes soon palled. The press came under stringent control. The Eg3^tian constitution banned censorship—except during a state of emergency, which happened to have been in force from 1981, the year the third of the generals, Mubarak, took over. M-Yousef, the most Uvely of the anti-government magazines in the 1920s, still existed, but it had been taken over by the state. Though more anti-regime satire survived in Egypt than in most other Middle Eastern countries, one cartoonist complained that there were four taboo subjects: "sex, the president, religion, and social values." (Bar'el 2005) In 2000, cartoonist Essam Hanaft was in prison on a charge of libehng the deputy prime minister, so he was unable to attend the Cartoonist Rights Network ceremony honoring him for "Courage in Editorial Cartooning." By 2004 books began to appear with contemptuous caricatures of the president on their covers. But most satirists still avoided directly confronting the presidential taboo—until at last the taboo was smashed beyond repair by the massed protesters exultantly waving caricatures of Mubarak in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

92 social research

In 2011 yet another military despot, Libya's bizarre Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, came to an ignominious end, documented by an emption of long-banned caricatures of the dictator as a bloody tyrant.

There were even some hopeful signs coming from Myanmar. In its former incarnation as Burma, the British colonial mlers had been scathingly satirized in George Orwell's novel Burmese Days (1934). There was also a lively Burmese tradition of political cartoons, which contin- ued after the British left in 1948. But a military coup in 1962 introduced a system more repressive than existed under colonialism (Larkin 2005), and the cartoonists' association was closed down. After a brief emp- tion of a "democracy movement" in 1988, the generals cracked dovm, newspapers were banned, and cartoonists were arrested or went into exile. When the popular comedian Maung Thura Zarganar mocked the generals, he was banned and then, in 2008, sentenced to a draconian prison term. However, his release as part of a mass amnesty of political prisoners in 2011, following the release of the opposition leader Aung San Suu K)̂ , suggested the possibility that yet another military regime might accept the necessity of change.

To all these indications of widespread resentment of the power of despots, the twenty-first century brought a new facilitator in inno- vative information technologies: the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter. Censorship would be more difficult to enforce in an age in which these technologies exist.

Unfortunately, these encouraging trends are confronted by the continuing grip of despots over a large part of the globe; and those who would ridicule their power from within continue to face serious risks.

In China, power is still centralized in the hands of a single party, and the suppression of dissident viewpoints was made clear by the incarceration of Liu Xiaobo and the government's furious reaction to Liu's 2010 Nobel Prize. While there are periodic outbreaks of discon- tent on specific local issues, most published criticism of official policies and its attendant satire is to be found not on the mainland, but in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in the works of writers in exile like Ha Jin in the United States and Dai Sijie in France.

Wit as a Political Weapon 93

In Russia, Vladimir Putin is no Stalin, but he frowns on open debate of his policies or jibes at himself. A satirieal television puppet show during Yeltsin's era, Kukly, had so parodied Yeltsin that his family asked the station to tone the ridieule down. Yeltsin intervened, insist- ing that there be no interference with the program. But when Kukly turned its attention to Putin, Yeltsin's successor, he would have none of it. First he required the removal of the Putin puppet. When they replaced the puppet with a disembodied voice from the heavens, Putin had the station closed down. Subsequently, Putin has tolerated a good deal of humor at his expense on the Internet—but not on television.

The decline of the power of the military is as yet far from univer- sal. Mubarak's departure in Egypt was arranged by the generals, but unrest has continued to seethe at the persistent power of the military. In Myanmar, too, the generals have not decided to give up their politi- cal role. And they are still a force to be reckoned with in Pakistan.

As for colonialism, while its demise is more complete than that of militarism, this does not mean a new dawn for satirists through the former empires. Several of the African countries replaced their imperial overlords with indigenous tyrants. In Zimbabwe, a stand-up comedian was beaten up by President Robert Mugabe's thugs, and felt compelled to write to a newspaper that gave his act a favorable review: "Are you trying to get me killed?" (Langeveldt 2004)

In Syria, after a long era of repressing dissent and the banning of satirical magazines, the new president, Bashar al-Assad, had allowed the publication of a satiric magazine. The Lamplighter, in February, 2001. Under its publisher, Ali Farzat, it featured a ferocious cartoon showing a man being tortured while his torturer is moved to tears by a mushy tele- vision show. Another showed a man being beaten for insisting, against the official line, that 1-H=2 (Farzat 2005). Soon the government began to complain, and in 2003 the magazine was closed down. Eight years later, the authority under which this kind of censorship was enforced was the subject of furious protests, especially in the city of Homs, where the protests included spoof videos moclcing the security forces.

94 social research

Ali Farzat, A Pen of Damascus Steel: Political Cartoons of an Arab Master (Seattle: Cune Press, 2005). (See article text on page 94.)

Kurt Westergaard, "Bomb in the Turban," Copenhagen, September 30, 2005. ©Kurt Westergaard, used with permission. (See article text on page 105.)

Wit as a Political Weapon

But the regime responded by equally furious repression. Among the victims was Ali Farzat; when he posted cartoons online mocking Assad and family members, he was attacked by masked thugs who broke his drawing hand and warned him of worse to come if he persisted.

In Iran, even though the censor was an ever-present reality under the shahs, there had been a long and impressive history of satire. But afrer the suppression of dissent imposed by the postrevolutionary regime, the government cracked down on critical cartoons and on troupes of actors who performed anti-regime skits in the streets. A number of satirical performers left for Britain and the United States, where they beamed their lampoons of the government and the mullahs into Iran via satellite TV, reaching large and appreciative audiences.

Though Iran's mostly Shia regime is at odds with the Sunni- dominated countries in the region, they all share one feature inimi- cal to the satirist: the combination of political and religious rule. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have allowed a limited amount of satire in the press and on television, but any public derision of Mohammed and his teachings has led to newspaper and magazine bans and prosecutions. Death threats against alleged blasphemers have become commonplace from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. Afatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for his 1988 novel, Satanic Verses, was pronounced by Iran's supreme political and religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Then, as we will discuss later, the publication of 12 cartoons mocking Mohammed by a Danish newspaper in 2003, and their republication by several European newspapers, set off deadly riots in several Muslim countries and continuing death threats against the cartoonists.

Thus far, the examples cited have all been from clearly authori- tarian regimes. Yet Freedom House, which issues annual democratic- authoritarian rankings, divides nations not only into "free" and "not free" categories, but assigns several to an in-between, "partly free," status.

For example, Singapore has a parliamentary system, but one party dominates and there is tight control of the media. Political

Wit as a Political Weapon 95

cartoons tend to cling to a tradition of "consensus-shaping." According to one cartoonist: "There are so many things to satirize, but at the news- papers, the editors shoot them down" ( Lent 1994,109-110). Singapore has an active Board of Film Censors that imposed 27 cuts on a film by Royston Tan about violent teen gangs. He retaliated with Cut, a musi- cal spoof of the censors that won an international award and a reproof from the government.

In Malaysia in 1999, the national laureate, Shahnon Ahmad, published Shit, a best-selling novel (written in Bahsa Malaysia, except for the title). The novel flagrantly broke the lèse majesté barrier, for the action takes place in a large intestine, and the country's politicians, obviously including the prime minister, are depicted as lumps of excrement. Despite strong pressure by government ministers to ban the book and strip him of his literary title, Ahmad continues to write and be pubhshed. On the other hand, Malaysia still has a 1948 Sedition Act on the books, and periodically the government has banned critical cartoons. In 2011, the government proposed repealing this and other restrictive laws, but skeptics questioned whether full-scale reform was in prospect.

Venezuela removed its military dictator, and satirists rallied to their elected president, Hugo Chavez, when he was briefly ousted in a US-approved coup. But when Chavez moved to extend his control by changing the constitution and attacking dissenting views in the press, satirists took him on. The painter and cartoonist León Zapata, though a man of the left, skewered Chavez as a militarist in a 2000 cartoon. A furious Chavez went on television and demanded to know whether Zapata really believed this or drew it for the money—to which Zapata replied with another cartoon thanking Chavez for promoting his work. Zapata, though an internationally recognized painter, had said that this was a time in Venezuela when it made more sense to be a cartoonist than a painter (Zapata 2002).

Taken together, those in the authoritarian and partly-free catego- ries comprise more than half of the world's nations. Moreover, at the

96 social research

end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, assessments of pros- pects for free expression around the world were generally gloomy. For example, in its 2011 global report. Freedom House found that 2010 was the fifth consecutive year of decline in political rights and civil liber- ties—a reversal of the previous five years. There was a similar assess- ment by Reporters Without Borders; and the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2010 Index of Democracy was subtitled: "Democracy in Retreat." These assessments would have to be reconsidered in the light of the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East. But it is far firom certain that throughout the region the regimes that emerge out of the "Arab Spring" v^U be tolerant of dissent and anti-regime political satire. Even the new communications media that played a significant role in the upheavals may not always be free from official interference—it too might become tools of oppressive regimes.

Over a large part of the globe, autocrats would continue to harass satirists—other than those who poured scorn on the regime's opponents.

POLITICAL SATIRE IN DEMOCRACIES For pohtical satirists these gloomy assessments of the state of civil liber- ties around the world today must be set against an enormously liberat- ing development: the major expansion of the number of democracies in the second half of the twentieth century.

Of course, just as authoritarian states vary in their degree of repression, so do democracies vary in their degree of openness. Thus, one survey rates several, including India, Poland, Mexico, Hungary, Brazil, South Africa, and Israel (Benvenisti 1983; Nossek 2003) as "flawed democracies."^ Even France was moved down from a "full" to a "fiawed" status in a 2010 assessment (Economist Intelligence Unit 2010). In fact, as political satirists remind us, all democracies are "flawed"; all are prone to deep systemic problems. Indeed, the very idea of democracy, dependent on electorates that are often profoundly uninformed about fundamental issues, is itself vulnerable to the shafts of caustic wits like H. L. Mencken.

Wit as a Political Weapon 97

Nonetheless, democracies provide satirists with an array of opportunities to publish or display their work. Its pluralism provides an abundance of satirical targets at every level. And—the most critical distinction of all—satirists need not bow down before the principle of lèse majesté, for they can aim at the highest levels of political power: presidents and prime ministers.

The United States provides an excellent example of receptivity to satire aimed at politicians, and especially at the holder of the irre- sistible target—the presidency, an office that combines a staggering array of executive, legislative, party political, military, and ceremo- nial responsibilities. Every president has been subject to ridicule. Even Lincoln was mercilessly mocked in innumerable cartoons as a bumbling fool, a despot, a trivial joke-maker. But the satire has been especially fierce since the emergence of the modern presidency—the institution that was vastly expanded by the New Deal, World War II, and Hiroshima, then by the foreign entanglements that led Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to speak of an "imperial presidency." Entmsted there- fore with the greatest concentration of economic and military force in history, the modern presidency has oftered satirists several avenues of attack. They have luxuriated in the human fallibilities of presidents. Some were said to be not very bright. Ronald Reagan was featured in 1981 in a Doonesbury tour of "Reagan's Brain" And George W. Bush's unending succession of grammatical, S3Titactical, and factual errors achieved a ldnd of comic grandeur that satirists could only record verbatim.

Then there were the moral deficiencies revealed in the glowering malice of Richard Nixon (Washington Post cartoonist Herblock depicted him emerging from a sewer, David Levine drew him as Captain Queeg), or the reckless self-indulgence of "Slick Willy" Clinton ("A Great President" limned Paul Conrad, "From the Waist Up").

And, of course, presidential policies provoked the satirists' spleen. Left-of-center satirists mbbished Reagan and Bush for cosset- ing the rich, Johnson and Nixon for Vietnam, George W Bush for Iraq and waterboarding, Obama for Afghanistan. Conversely, satire on the

98 social research

right has been directed mostly at the vast expansion of government spending, taxing, and regulating since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society, and Obama's health care reforms. And, ironi- cally, when presidents were not faulted for employing too much power, they were disdained for not being powerful enough, as when Tmman, Carter, and Obama were st5anied by congressional obstreperousness. In every other democracy, satirists take on a similar assignment, eagerly excoriating politicians up to the highest level of leadership.

British prime ministers from the office's earliest incarnation in the eighteenth century to the present day have been mercilessly ridi- culed. Among recent incumbents, Harold Wilson was portrayed as a near-paranoid Nixon; Margaret Thatcher as "a cross between a B-2 bomber and a saber-toothed tiger" (Parris 2003); Tony Blair as a pious control freak at home and America's lapdog abroad; Gordon Brown as both an ill-tempered bully and a gross incompetent; and David Cameron as a PR operator so smooth in style and appearance that one cartoonist drew him with his face encased in a condom.

France, too, has a strong record of laughing at its political leaders in newspaper cartoons and columns, satirical magazines, a long-running puppet show on TV, and the Internet. Though no recent president has matched the majestic aura of Charles de Gaulle as a subject for satiri- cal de-mystification, charges of pre-presidential corruption by Jacques Chirac, and the impetuous, erratic style of Nicolas Sarkozy, have been relentlessly memorialized in jokes and cartoons.

Elsewhere, from Australia to India, from Norway to postapartheid South Africa, satirists in democracies aimed their darts at politics and politicians, particularly those at the apex of power. Yet this outpouring of ridicule is not totally unchecked. There is censorship in democra- cies. It is not as monolithically centralized as in authoritarian systems; rather the censors are to be found in a number of locations.

Government officials may be given censorial powers. The British Lord Chamberlain was charged until 1968 with protecting the theater from sexual indecency and insults to the monarchy,^ and the US Federal Communication Agency, empowered by a 1974 Supreme Court deci-

Wit as a Political Weapon 99

sion, has levied heavy fines on broadcasters for airing allegedly obscene material by George Carlin and Howard Stem.

Libel suits may be a problem for satirists—not in the United States, where they are protected by the First Amendment—but more so in France, and most especially in Britain.^ There the notorious libel laws place the burden of proof on the libeler, so that the satirical magazine. Private Eye, must spend a quarter of its budget to pay for libel defeats; and a suit by Prime Minister John Major for a published allegation that he was having an affair with his lady caterer was settled out of eourt with eosts that bankrupted the satirieal magazine Scallywag.

Industry self-regulation, sueh as that in the US and British movie industries until the end of the 1960s, did not eneourage biting politi- eal satire. However, the eensors were more eoneerned with sex than polities, so that Charlie Chaplin's trenehant send-up of the industrial system. Modem Times, survived almost intaet by removing a few sexu- ally suggestive lines.

But the most frequent arena in which political satirists must face the censor is the news media, for there, everyday decisions must be made about which information and opinion to include and which, therefore, to exclude. Who is authorized to make those decisions, and what political criteria they employ, become crucial factors. The prob- lem cannot be avoided no matter who the deciders, whether they be pubhc bodies like the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose charter calls for political neutrality,'' or privately owned television channels, which must be sensitive to the interests of sponsors, or the editors and owners of newspapers (several of whose subscribers to Doonesbury, for example, refused to carry the "Reagan's Brain" series).

In this respect, Italy has provided a particularly hazardous setting for satirists, because there, the public and private control of media has been brought together by one man, Silvio Berlusconi. Not only does Berlusconi own newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and Mediaset, which controls three TV networks, but as thrice-elected prime minister, he was in a position to apply pressure to state televi-

100 social research

sion. Until his ouster as prime minister in 2011, he used this pressure not only to protect himself against persistent lawsuits dealing with his business affairs and his sexual exploits, but also to force programs sati- rizing him off the air. In one instance, a series was cancelled after the first episode because, the state TV director explained, "I love satire . . . but . . . I said 'satire' and not political campaigning" (Hooper 2003).

Though no other democracy suffers under quite this degree of media influence by one man,^ problems for satirists intensify as more and more newspapers go under and media outlets fall into fewer hands. So whenever a political cartoon is rejected, there is httle the cartoonist can do about it. All of these sources of censorship, actual or poten- tial, are intensified when satirists go up against deeply and emotionally entrenched public attitudes, especially those engendered by reference to war, sex, and race and ethnicity.

The outbreak of war confronts satirists with a formidable join- ing of forces. Then the top political leaders are joined by the military, usually well regarded in democracies, and public opinion, stirred into patriotic fervor at the outset of most wars. This potent combination brings not only official and editorial censorship, but also self-censorship by all but the boldest satirists. This has been repeatedly demonstrated when America has gone to war. Mark Twain, having written The War Prayer, a bitter satire of popular support for the war in the Philippines in 1905, deferred publication until the war fever had subsided in 1916. In World War 1, American cartoonists were pressured to ply their trade as part of a government-sponsored Bureau of Cartoons. Some who opposed the war were indicted; and though the trials ended with hung juries, their magazine, Masses, went under.

During the Vietnam War, according to the Smothers Brothers, who first introduced sharp political satire to American television, Nixon was ftirious at their hostile take on the war, and forced the cancellation of their program. In the Cold War's fraught atmosphere, several news- paper owners cancelled Bill Mauldin's cartoons criticizing the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Walt Kelley's introduction of a

Wit as a Political Weapon 101

villainous Senator J. Malarky into his Pogo comic strip cost him many cancellations.

After the 9/11 attacks, most satirists turned their anger against the enemy. Gartoonists drew weeping Statues of Liberty. Saturday Night Live stopped its lampooning of the president. The daily postings of Bush- isms on the Internet did not appear. The satirical magazine the Onion, suspended publication. Bill Maher's television show was cancelled after he made a quip questioning the official line on 9/11. And when the attack on Iraq began, jokes on television were mostly patriotic; French opposition to the war led to their becoming "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" on the Simpsons; and cartoonist Michael Ramirez showed a series of ineffectual UN resolutions imprinted on a roll of toilet paper.

Britain demonstrated the same phenomenon of discouraging dissident views in wartime. During World War I, George Bernard Shaw was furiously attacked for his opposition to harsh prison sentences on pacifists. The most trenchant satire on the war, Joan Littlewood's revue. Oh! What A Lovely War (1965), appeared several years later. In World War II, government officials and publishers opposed the publication of George Orwell's Animal Farm because it satirized the Soviet leaders, then our wartime allies. At last, Orwell found a publisher, but the novel did not come out until August 1945, when the war was over. During the Falklands War, the satirical magazine Private Fye debunked the war fever whipped up by Murdoch's daily tabloid, the Sun. Nevertheless, most satire about the war in novels and plays had to wait until well after the war's end.

However, at least in the context of unpopular wars, satirists opposing the war are less likely than in the past to be intimidated. If Nixon succeeded in cancelling the Smothers Brothers television show, he clearly did not dampen criticism of his war policy. The 9/11 pause in satirizing the president and his policies was, unhke the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, short-lived. Griticism of Bush's anti-terrorist Patriot Act and his economic policies mounted. The Onion resumed publication after a week. Maher was back on cable television with a new program.

102 social research

After the initial rallying round the fiag in the Iraq war, there was an eruption of opposition comparable to the anti-Vietnam movement. A campaign to ban the distribution of Michael Moore's 2004 antiwar documentary Fahrenheit 9¡11, backfired and helped make it the highest grossing documentary in history. In Britain the near-total parliamen- tary support behind the Iraq war soon dissolved in a furious onslaught against the war, continuing a long tradition of anti-war protest that included the contributions of a number of cartoonists and other sati- rists.

It appears, then, that opposition to wars in democracies is no longer as dangerous for satirists as it was in the past. But this is tme only when wars become unpopular—and satirists must always run up against a wall of disapproval whenever sentiment is inflamed by intense patriotic emotions.

In light of the contemporary openness about even the most explicit descriptions of sex in most democracies—in sharp contrast to current authoritarian regimes—it is difficult to recall that some democ- racies, including the United States and Britain, have imposed more censorship on sex, together with sexually charged language, than on any other subject. Even now satirists must watch their step. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times axed a Paul Conrad cartoon that mocked congres- sional bipartisanship by drawing a Republican elephant humping a Democratic donkey, and editors have killed various other cartoons for being too vividly sexual (Wallis 2007). Yet these are exceptions to a strong current of acceptance of openness about sex. Though the seven "dirty" words are still prohibited during prime time on American TV networks and the BBC, the same words are repeated mantra-like on cable and in the movies. And if Jon Stewart still bleeps out his use of any of those words, their mere mention is enough to produce a laugh from the studio audience.

This is not the occasion for a detailed account of how the change occurred. However, particularly relevant to this analysis is the change in how the media has handled sexual scandals involving political leaders.

Wit as a Political Weapon 103

In America the unending series of sensational accounts of the sexual dalliances of members of the two houses of Congress, all delightedly seized upon by satirists, is a recent phenomenon. Until the sexual revo- lution of the sixties, the traditional prurience of family newspapers had kept many sexual scandals out of the headlines. But this changed after a 1974 scandal in which Democratic Congressman Wilbur Mills was pulled over for drunken driving, and his companion, Fanne Foxe, the "Argentine Firecracker," fied and had to be rescued from Washington's Tidal Basin. Satirists poured on the ridicule and thereafter, other members of Congress became fair game for cartoonists, especially where their behavior conflicted sharply with their professed espousal of "family values."

It would take longer for the presidency to be affected by this change in media behavior. There was total media silence in the face of President Kennedy's sexual liaisons v̂ dth an extraordinary array of women, including White House staff members, Hollywood stars and starlets, and the mistress of a Mafia boss while his brother, the attomey general, was engaged in a fierce onslaught on the Mafia (Dallek 2003, 475-476). No cartoons, no mischievous column commented on behav- ior that was known to at least some in the Washington media.

It was Bill Clinton's misfortune that, otherwise a canny political operator, he failed to grasp the extraordinary change that had occurred since Kennedy's time in the readiness of the media—augmented by the Internet—to spare no one from its enthusiasm for detailed interest in sexual indiscretions. Consequently, no previous president had endured quite the avalanche of cartoons and satirical articles related to one fool- ish event that descended on Bill Clinton.

In not every democracy, however, was the media appalled by Clinton's conduct. Indeed, the French were astonished by the American reaction. After all, François Mitterrand maintained two families while president of France, both at public expense, both present at his funeral in 1996, with hardly a comment in the press, nor a jibe from any of France's many satirists. When a reporter asked him during his presi-

104 social research

deney whether he had a daughter outside his marriage, he responded: "Yes, it's true. And so what? It's none of the publie's business." Whieh, in the view of the editors and publishers of the Freneh press, it was not.

In faet, it wasn't even the business of most French satirists. Le Canard enchainé, France's leading satire magazine, insisted that "Le Canard stops at the bedroom's threshold." For them, this was not the result of outside pressure, for le Canard enchainé survives solely on its reader subscriptions without advertising or subsidy. When one satirist, Stéphane Guillon, failed to accept this dictum in 2009 by criticizing leading Socialist and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn for his notorious womanizing,^ he was furi- ously eondemned by President Sarkozy and his radio program was eaneelled.'̂

With raee and ethnieity, we arrive at a different kind of sensitivity for satirists. For there we are dealing not with the most powerful elites but rather with those who historieally have been at the bottom of the power hierarehy: Afriean Amerieans and Hispanies in Ameriea; immi- grants from former eolonial dependeneies and other low-ineome coun- tries in Britain and Western Europe. Satirists who delight in expressing their hostility to abusers of power may draw baek from hurling ridieule at those who are grossly underrepresented in the power system.

In Ameriea, some erities argue that this sensitivity has moved too far in the opposite direetion: "As eaeh minority group demanded a reeonfiguration of its image and appellation in the mainstream press in the 1990s, 'political correctness' had become more than a trend for cartoonists: it has become a bad joke" (Hess 1996, 147). Indeed, the tension between majority and minority cultures projected political satire into a major international political crisis—the uproar over the publication of the Danish cartoons in 2006.

The issue arose when Jyllands-Posten, Copenhagen's leading paper, published twelve cartoons on the prophet Mohammed, some of them harshly satirical, especially one, by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, depict- ing Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. The cartoons provoked a

Wit as a Political Weapon 105

furious response from the governments of Muslim countries, a boycott of Danish goods, and death threats against the cartoonists. The furor intensified when newspapers in several European countries repub- lished the cartoons, upon which deadly riots broke out in several Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa, Danish embassies were burned down, the cartoonists had to live in safe houses under police protection, and threats were made to bomb the Jyllands-Posten building.

The issue appeared to be clearly and sharply drawn. Jyllands- Posten explained that it commissioned the cartoons after the Danish publisher of proposed children's book complained that several artists had refused to draw illustrations for a children's book on intercultural understanding because of possible reprisals by Muslims, who insisted their religion forbade pictorial representations of the prophet. This, said the newspaper, was an intolerable infringement of the right of free expression. The Muslim nations replied that free expression did not extend to gross insults to their prophet, and that the real motivation of the newspaper was to infiame the anti-immigrant sentiment then grovwng in Denmark.

Neither side in this debate was free from elements of h5T3oerisy. In faet, Jyllands-Posten had previously rejeeted an unsolieited eartoon satirizing Jesus sinee it might "provoke an outery" from the paper's readers. The Muslims' argument, too, was tainted by the faet that demand for respeet for their religion did not extend to the Jewish reli- gion, sinee the blood libel fietion was a frequent feature of eartoons in the Arab press. Nonetheless, once several European newspapers had expressed solidarity with Jyllands-Posten by reproducing the cartoons, the issue emerged on the world stage as a clear-cut conflict of cultures, with a call for censorship confronting the claim for uninhibited press freedom.

Yet when the issue was reported in the American and British media, the clarity of the confrontation was lost, for most newspapers in both countries decided to straddle the issue, upholding the right of the Danish paper to act as it did but arguing that publishing the

106 sociai research

cartoons themselves would be needlessly provocative. Among the few exceptions, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the bomb in the turban cartoon as part of an elaborate process of consultations with Muslim theologians and experts on press freedom; the New York Sun published two of the cartoons; and a few US and British TV channels provided a quick glimpse of some of the cartoons.

Even Britain's most liberal newspaper, the Guardian, did not reproduee the eartoons, insisting that it believed "uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty gratuitously to offend," where those offended were a politically weak minority {Guardian 2006). The philosopher Ronald Dworkin, a leading exponent of the right of free expression, defended the decision not to pubhsh the cartoons on the grounds that the public does not have a right "to read or see whatever it wants no matter what the cost"—such as inflicting pain on Muslims, and the possibility of further riots (Dworkin 2006). Further, as the Guardian suggested, readers eould readily find the eartoons on Wikipedia.

Thus, even those traditionally opposed to eensorship drew the line on two grounds: first, the pereeption that a powerless minority should have some proteetion against having its deepest beliefs erudely moeked;^ and seeond, eoneern that following the European newspa- pers' example eould provoke more riots and death threats. This last eoncem surfaced again in 2010, when Yale University Press published a book detaihng the Danish cartoon confrontation, but decided against including the cartoons—a decision made after extensive consultations with lav r̂yers and security experts who warned against provoking more riots (Klausen 2009).

These are not trivial concerns. In 2011 the office of the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, was firebombed after it printed another cartoon of Mohammed. Nonetheless, the decision of the British and American papers—and then of Yale University Press—not to include the cartoons raises uncomfortable questions for the right of satirists.

In democracies, the right of free expression is at the core of the media's creed. For them to agonize over inflicting gratu-

Wit as a Political Weapon 107

itous pain on Muslims is understandable on compassionate grounds. To impose censorship in face of the threat of violence is another. In the view of the president of the American Association of University Professors, Yale Press was declaring: "We do not negoti- ate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands" (Nelson 2009).

The extent of censorship in this case is limited: the cartoons are indeed readily accessible online. Indeed, the same is true of other examples of censorship of satire in democracies we have cited—in the era of the Internet and the various social media, absolute censorship in democracies is impossible.^ Still, censorship in the mainstream media persists as a problem. In almost all circumstances, it should be resisted. Though much political satire is crude, tasteless, even gross, at its best its impertinent wit is a source of entertainment and enlightenment. And, most important, it contributes to the central value of democra- cies—the right of free and open dissent.

In doing so, it exemplifies the core difference between authori- tarian and democratic societies. There is satire in some authoritarian systems, but typically it remains under threat. There is censorship of political satire in democracies, but usually it is limited. The distinc- tion is not absolute but, as this article suggests, it is still of very great importance.

NOTES

1. Israel is blessed with an array of satirists who show no mercy to their political leaders. However, in November 2011, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed concern about pressures v^dthin Israel to curtail women's rights and civil liberties. Furthermore, severe limits have been set to free speech and assembly in the West Bank, first by the Israeli military and then by the Palestinian Authority, which ordered a popular satirical TV show off the air for having crossed "red hnes" in August 2011.

2. The dysfunctional marriages of several members of the British royal

108 social research

family in the 1990s tumed these ultimate celebrities, long protected by deference and adoring gossip, into the butts of a barrage of deri- sion. However, lèse majesté laws still protect monarchies in some democracies. Thus in 2007 the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves was fined for publishing a caricature on its cover depicting a royal couple engaging in sexual intercourse.

3. In Hustler v. Falwell (1988), Chief Justice William Rehnquist mied that a defamation suit by a public figure must prove that it is based on a deliberate or reckless falsehood; and "a lampoon could not be factu- ally false."

4. Although the BBC has presented a number of acerbic programs of political satire on television, the corporation's board cancelled a weekly series. That Was the Week That Was, after it featured a savage parody of the Conservative prime minister. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, during the 1964 election campaign.

5. Even Rupert Murdoch, despite the global reach of his multime- dia empire, never had the degree of media control in one coun- try enjoyed by Silvio Berlusconi during his prime ministerships. Moreover, Murdoch's considerable political influence in Britain has been substantially reduced by the scandal surrounding the grossly illegal conduct of his News of the World tabloid in 2011. The Murodch family has also become a favorite target of satirists.

6. In 2011 the dismissal of the charges of attempted rape of a New York hotel worker by Strauss-Kahn was greeted by many in France as his being blanchi, or cleaned of the charges against him. But others ques- tioned their media's code of silence about his reputation as a chaud lapin, a hot bunny, unable to keep his hands off any woman vwthin reach.

7. Of all recent political leaders none has attracted as much interna- tional ridicule for his sexual behavior as Silvio Berlusconi. Yet his resignation in 2011 was forced not by the barrage of mocking stories about his wild "bunga bunga" parties involving platoons of starlets and prostitutes, or the lawsuit alleging that he had paid to have sex

Wit as a Political Weapon 109

with an underage prostitute, but by his government's inability to

handle a disastrous economic situation.

8. Critics of this view noted that, whatever the realities at the outset

of the controversy, the power relationships changed dramatically

once the political and economic weight of the Arab nations had been

applied, followed by the riots and the still continuing death threats

against the cartoonists.

9. However, the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra has

suspended the website of cartoonist Aseem Trived and charged him

with treason and insulting national sentiment. Indian satirists report

that they must also tread very carefully with respect to India's vola-

tile religious and ethnic divisions.

REFERENCES

Bar'el, Zvi. 2005. " A n j ^ i n g But Sex, Religion, and the President." Haaretz,

August 9.

Barrier, N. Gerald. 1974. Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control

in British India, 1907-1947. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Benvenisti, Meron. 1983. Israeli Censorship of Arab Publications. New York:

The Fund for Free Expression.

Bytwerk, Randall L. 2004. Bending Spines. East Lansing: University of

Michigan Press.

Brown, Deming. 1993. The Last Years of Soviet Literature: Prose Fiction 1974-

1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chappie, Robert L. 1980. Soviet Satire of the Twenties. Gainsville: University

of Florida.

Dallek, Robert. 2003. An Unflnished Life. Boston: Little Brown.

Darnton, Robert. 2001. "Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The

Contradictions of British Imperialism." BookHistory 4 (1).

Dworkin, Ronald. 2006. "The Right to Ridicule." New York Review of Books,

March 23.

Economist Intelligence Unit. 2010. Democracy Index 2010. <www.eiu.

com/democracy>.

Farzat, Ali. 2005. A Pen of Damascus Steel. Seatfle: Cune Press.

110 social research

Feinberg, Leonard, ed. 1971. Asian Laughter. New York: Weatherhill.

Freedom House. 2011. "Freedom in the World, 2011." <wv^^w.freedom-

house .org /template.cfni?>.

Fultz, Barbara, ed. 1970. The Naked Emperor. New York: Pegasus.

Editorial. 2006. "Insults and Injuries." Guardian, Feb. 4.

Ginsberg, Mirra. 1964. The Fatai Eggs and Other Soviet Satire. New York:

Grove Press.

Heniy, Peter, ed. 1972. Classics of Soviet Satire. London: Collet's.

Hooper, John. 2003. "Watch What We Tell You." Cuardian, November 27.

Hess, Stephen, and Sandy Northrop. 1996. Drawn and Quartered: The History

of American Political Cartoons. Montgomery, AL: Elliott and Clark.

Kishtainy, Khalid. 1985. Arab Political Humor. London: Quartet Books.

Langeveldt, Edgar. 2004. "I'm No Tool." Zimbabwe Independent, May 23.

Larkin, Emma. 2005. Finding George Orwell in Burma. London: Penguin.

Lent, John A. 1994. "Political Adversaries and Agents of Change: Editorial

Cartooning in Southeast Asia." Asian Thought and Society 19 (56):

109-110.

Link, Perry. 1983. Stubborn Weeds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

. 2000. The Uses of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lipman, Steve. 1993. Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust.

Northvale, N.J.: Nathan Aronson.

McLean, Hugh ed. 1963. Nervous People and Other Satires by Mikhail Zoschenko.

Bloomington: Indiana University Presss.

Nelson, Cary. 2009. "Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press." Press

release, <www.aaup.org>.

Nossek, Huillel, and Khalil Rinnawi. 2003. "Censorship and Freedom

of t h e Press Under Changing Political Regimes." Gazette: The

International Journal for Communications Studies 65 (2).

Parris, Matthew. 2003. Chance Witness: An Outsider's Life in Politics. London:

Penguin.

Remniek, David. 1994. Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New

York: Vintage.

Reporters Without Borders. 2010. Press Freedom Index 2010. <www.rsf.

org?press-freedom-index -2010>.

Wit as a Poiiticai Weapon 111

Uys, Peter-Dirk. 1983. Author's note to Selle ou Souri. Johannesberg: Ad

Donker.

Walhs, David, ed. 2007. Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War on Free

Expression. New York and London: Norton.

Zapata. Interviewed by Ehzabeth Famsworth. 2002. The News Hour. PBS,

June 18.

112 sociai research

Copyright of Social Research is the property of New School for Social Research and its content may not be

copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.