The power of political cartoons
One of my earliest memories is of a newspaper cartoon marking the liberation of Belsen. It shows a shocked GI shining his torch into a cave in which an ape-like monster wearing a Nazi armband stands, glowering, amid a pile of corpses. That image stayed with me and sparked a lifelong interest in the power of political cartoons to influence people.
As with all forms of satire, there is a darker side to the art of the political cartoonist, epitomised by the grotesque depictions of Jews in ‘Der Sturmer’, Julius Streicher’s hate-filled Nazi paper, which served as a blueprint for antisemitic representations of Jews worldwide.
In recent times, both the ‘Independent’ and the ‘Guardian’ in the U.K. have found themselves in hot water for publishing cartoons allegedly making use of antisemitic tropes in their portrayals of Israeli politicians. In the former, a cartoon showing Ariel Sharon devouring a baby had clearly not given thought to the vicious blood libel which has haunted Jews for centuries. The cartoon in the ‘Guardian’ depicted Netanyahu as a Shylock figure cutting out from his own body a piece of flesh labelled “Gaza”, a cartoon which resulted in the dismissal of the cartoonist.
Both cartoonists vigorously refuted the charge of antisemitism, claiming that no such intention was meant. “Tread softly”, says the poet William Butler Yeats, “because you tread on my dreams”. It might be added that the political cartoonist also has the power to bring nightmares to life.
Traditionally, the political cartoonist has a licence to focus on any personage or group deemed newsworthy and place them in a fanciful setting which symbolises their failings. Just as a picture can say more than a thousand words, so can a few strokes of the artist’s s pen and brush inflict more harm on a politician than a thousand articles. By the same token, the political cartoonist has the power to elevate a public figure to the status of a hero.
Ironically, many public figures thrive on the prominence accorded them by cartoonists. In the controversy which raged around the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin is said to have positively enjoyed being portrayed as a monkey. Others, however, especially politicians of a totalitarian bent, have remarkably thin skins and will go to great lengths to suppress an unflattering cartoon image. The grandmaster of political cartooning, David Low, discovered that he and some of his fellow cartoonists had incurred the fury of Hitler and Goebbels and been placed on a Nazi death list drawn up in anticipation of the successful invasion of Britain by Germany.
More toxic for the cartoonist’s business than political sensitivities are religious ones. The massacre of staff at the Charlie Hebdo satirical publication headquarters in Paris in 2016 sent shock waves round the world, so much so that nowadays it takes a bold cartoonist to lampoon the prophet Muhammed.
The political cartoonist today walks a tightrope between legitimate commentary and gratuitous offence, but in a free society protected by laws against libel and race hatred, such a distinction is invariably subjective and a conclusion is usually best arrived at through civilised discourse. So let us all raise our glasses and drink a ‘lechaim’ to the warrior-artists of the free press, our political cartoonists.
