A survivor's guide for cartoonists in an age of rising intolerance

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Terrorism must never destroy freedom of speech, by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

How does one define terror? The best definition, to my mind, is in a book published in 1901, a time when terrorism as we know it today, didn’t exist. Christopher Hitchens quotes from it in his memoir Hitch 22. It comes from HFB Lynch’s Armenia: Travels and Studies: “Terror, the most abject terror, is in the atmosphere about us — a consuming passion, like that of jealousy — a haunting, exhausting spectre, which sits like a blight upon life. Such a settled state of terror is one the most awful of human phenomena. The air holds ghosts, all joy is dead; the sun is black, the mouth parched, the mind rent and in tatters.”

Terror

Over the last few weeks we have seen a spate of terror attacks, each one very different from the other. There was the lone wolf attack in a Sydney cafe. There was the unprecedented massacre of more than a hundred schoolchildren in Pakistan. And then, most recently, the terror strike in Paris.

The horrific shooting at the offices of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo though is different from the usual. It was more than mere bloodshed. It was an attack on something abstract, a treasured French value — the freedom of speech, which also includes the right to insult. The gunmen violently attacked individuals who stood for and executed these values, every working day of their lives. The French have a grand tradition of satire, and Charlie Hebdo had its own glorious past. It was not just fundamentalist Islam that their cartoonists lampooned. The Pope wasn’t spared either. Neither were governments around the world. Nor were homophobes and racists. The idea being that there are no holy cows. Everything that should be sent up was sent up. Behind the joke lies something very serious. It’s about questioning and critiquing the world around us. And doing so in as provocative a manner as possible. You ruffle feathers, you ruffle feathers. There is no polite way of going about it. Read more here.