CSotD: There is no night that lasts forever
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Better to headline today's blog with the hopeful words of Musa Kart than the more pragmatic words of HL Mencken:
(T)he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Not that Kart doesn't know this, I'm sure. Kart and his colleagues were arrested as part of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's crackdown on an attempted coup in which he seems, at the least, to have exaggerated the breadth of the plot in order to justify casting a wide net over all who have raised objections to his rule.
A rule which, whatever the facts of the coup may have been, had already begun to limit human rights and move Turkey away from its strictly secular governmental system, even as it was attempting, somewhat paradoxically at that stage, to gain admittance to the European Union.
Musa Kart seems to be one of those fellows who has a clear vision of justice and fairness and who is only unpleasant out of a sense of necessity.
Even then, he seems to express more hope than fury in his refusal to knuckle under.
Kart was recently sentenced to three years and nine months in jail as part of Erdogan's silencing of the opposition paper, Cumhuriyet, for which he draws and, while he is free pending appeal, he is not permitted to leave the country, thus missing the chance to accept the 2018 International Press Cartoon Prize in Geneva on World Press Freedom Day last week.
His courage is not confined to his pen. This video could easily be the most uplifting five minutes of your week. Maybe month.
The day also served as the occasion to announce the winners of Cartoon Movement's "Art of Resistance" contest, which attracted 1781 entries from around the world.
This piece, by China's Liu Qiang, is one of many honorable mentions in a very long display of cartoons at that site.
Meanwhile, the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists is among several press groups to express concern for and solidarity with Musa Kart, but their statement contains an element you wouldn't have found a short time ago:
In normal times it would be unthinkable that American journalists and satirists would fear for their freedom. These are not normal times. The current occupant of the White House has repeatedly attacked the press, even reviving the Stalinist phrase “enemy of the people” to describe us, all while encouraging violence against his opponents. It’s no longer unthinkable that one who irritates the leading political figure in America won’t be made to pay a price.
The dark path Turkey has taken is one that we in the United States must guard against.
I don't think we're under any danger of cartoonists being thrown into prison for their views, but the wider concern is not misplaced.
Commercial pressure can silence voices as effectively as police action, and, meanwhile, as Tom Tomorrow notes, we have a leadership in which "truth" has become bizarrely subjective, in a nation in which accusing the president's press secretary of lying is denounced as an attack on her physical appearance.
And although people keep citing Orwell's "1984," I think "Animal Farm" is more apt, since the former posits a well-constructed system of intrusive government, while the latter simply suggests that a small group of (literally) fascist pigs could gain power by just rewriting the truth and counting on foolish animals not to notice.
Or, to quote Mencken again,
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Thus "Four legs good, two legs bad" becomes "Four legs good, two legs better," and anyone who notices the change is denounced as foolish and a threat to the community.
And the collapse of their windmill is blamed not on poor planning but on sabotage by the former leader.
We don't have to wait for it to happen.
It's here, and we're part of it.
This Clay Jones cartoon is a few days old, and I have already discussed how Benyamin Netanyahu brought an outdated PowerPoint presentation to Washington, in which he "revealed" a number of issues that were already well-known and which had factored into the Iran Agreement.
An agreement, I would note, that chickenhawks continue to portray as between Obama and the ayatollahs, when, in fact, it was negotiated by Iran's political leadership and the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, China and Germany.
In fact, at one point, the Iranian negotiators raised an objection to being depicted as blindly religious medievalists in turbans, noting that they dressed in Western garb and were nearly all educated in the United States.
It's one thing to depict "Uncle Sam" talking to a "turbaned Iran" in a cartoon, but quite another to depict a specific American leader talking to what is clearly intended to be a backward religious zealot.
More to the immediate point: I don't intend to go against this site's Prime Directive, but, were I to do so, I could show several contemporary cartoons in which a conservative cartoonist claims that the Iranians have developed a nuclear weapon in defiance of the pact.
Granted, it would be, if naive, within reasonable commentary to echo Netanyahu's outdated accusations.
But even he, as deceptively and deliberately out of context and self-serving as his presentation was, did not go that far.
Which leaves the question, are these cartoonists deliberately lying, or cataclysmically stupid, or simply too lazy to Google the basic facts behind the rantings of rightwing talkradio hosts?
Or are they honestly convinced that we have too many young people in this country and need to cull another four or five thousand as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Whatever the answer, we'd be foolish to worry about dungeons and torture when we're fully capable of doing the damage to ourselves, ourselves.
Hang on. Here we go again.
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