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Cartoons are a powerful tool of political speech. Combining journalism, art, and often satire, political cartoons are all the more powerful because of their accessibility. That also makes them a threat to politicians in democracies and autocracies alike. In their new book, Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship, Cherian George, a professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist Universitys journalism department, and cartoonist Sonny Liew illustrate (literally) the power of political cartoons by explaining the various motivations and methods of cartoon censorship across the world. In the interview below, George share insights about how censorship differs across political contexts and why cartoons are so powerful.

What is unique or special about the political cartoon medium?

Political cartoons are a cross between journalism, art, and satire. At their best, political cartoons combine the public purpose of journalism, the emotive impact of art, and the democratizing effect of satire. Of course, not all political cartoons reach these levels. As with other forms of journalism, many are mediocre. Some are toxic.

The impulse to cartoon seems universal, even if the freedom to do so isnt. Its such a basic and low-cost medium for commentary that you can find it everywhere. And it has a long history. So if, like me, you are interested in censorship, political cartoons are an illuminating type of journalism to study.

Governments of all stripes engage in different forms of censorship. What are some of the myriad reasons or motivations for censorship?

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Well, lets start with reasons that dont apply to cartoons: to block exposs of corruption or state secrets. Unlike investigative reporters, political cartoonists arent really in the business of unearthing things that people dont know. Instead, cartoons often crystallize what the public already knows or feels, or make people look at known facts in a new way.

What seems to irritate leaders with an authoritarian disposition is that cartoons embolden citizens. Its like the fable of the boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes. You cannot unsee it. Confident leaders know that satire comes with the territory, and is a strength of an open society. But there are also many self-important leaders who really cannot abide being laughed at.

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There is of course a quite different category of censorship, which is about protecting the dignity of various identity groups racial, religious, gender, and so on. Under international human rights law, states actually have an obligation to prohibit expression that amounts to incitement to discrimination or violence against communities that are too weak to protect themselves in unregulated debate. We could call this good censorship. But although the moral and legal principles are quite clear, implementing them in a just manner is an extremely complex and controversial exercise. Around half of our book focuses on such controversies.

How does censorship differ in authoritarian, semi-authoritarian, and democratic societies?

There is problematic censorship everywhere, but the agents and methods of censorship differ depending partly on the political system. Liberal democracies have checks and balances to stop governments from censoring public discourse, so cartoonists there almost never have to worry about the state. In more authoritarian settings, governments can and do use repressive laws against cartoonists. Even more intimidating is the use of extra-legal tools by various groups, ranging from violence by paramilitaries to harassment by online mobs. In many settings, cartoonists cannot count on the rule of law to protect them from peoples outrage.

Cartoonists everywhere also contend with market censorship. This refers to the biases of capitalist media. The most obvious form is when news organizations refuse to publish something critical of a major advertiser or investor, or something that they fear will generate a strong consumer backlash. When editors exercise purely independent judgment, and decide that a cartoon does not meet the publications standards, I wouldnt call that censorship. Its editorial judgment. But if they go against their own better judgment because they fear the market, thats a problem. Another kind of market censorship is when good public interest media shrink or die, leaving fewer outlets for professional cartoonists.

People who are ideologically wedded to the idea that free markets equal media freedom have a hard time accepting that market censorship is a thing. But it is a universal concern of political cartoonists indeed, of all professional journalists regardless of the political system they work within.

What role did Malaysian cartoonist Zunar play in the downfall of Najib Razak? What does his story tell us about the power of cartoons?

It takes a village to keep democracy alive, and many brave individuals and groups played a part in challenging Malaysias former premier, even when it seemed like he was too rich to fail. In the media sector, Sarawak Report and The Edge come to mind. Their investigative journalism helped to expose the massive corruption that was taking place.

But the struggle was never about just facts and figures, or hard evidence. UMNO was a hegemonic party, the only rulers Malaya had known since 1957. They were the natural, taken-for-granted leaders of the Malay majority. Making their ouster thinkable required years of counter-ideological work by politicians, activists, artists, humorists. Zunar contributed to this effort.

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Its not just that Zunars cartoons were so clever and on-point. Our book presents Zunar as a performance artist, because he is exceptionally talented in the improvisational art of making censorship backfire on his censors. There was nothing that Najib and his government did to Zunar that the cartoonist couldnt turn into an opportunity to mock his oppressor.

Ive seen this happen with other cartoonists as well. Often, its not really about the power of their cartoons. It is more about their own relative powerlessness. When the public sees these defenseless individuals stand up to the most powerful men in the land, it can be very inspiring; and when these powerful men lash out against a cartoonist, that is not a good look.

Unequal battle: Malaysias former Prime Minister Najib Razak versus cartoonist Zunar, as depicted in Red Lines. Credit: Cherian George and Sonny Liew

In discussing China, you mention political scientist Margaret Roberts as saying that modern Chinese censorship uses a blend of fear, friction, and flooding. Can you explain those three tactics?

We normally associate despotic media control with the use of state coercion to create a culture of fear. But researchers looking at China and other modern authoritarian regimes have found that this is not their only or even main form of control. Instead of attempting total bans, which are rarely watertight anyway, states can just make it harder for citizens to access the unapproved content.

The Great Firewall is the classic example. Chinas walled garden is not totally impervious, but it creates enough friction to make it not worth the while of most citizens to look for taboo content. Another example of friction is when governments, in cahoots with internet service providers, slow down speeds during sensitive periods to make it harder to share videos. Users often cant be sure why they are experiencing difficulties, which suits the authorities fine. Governments normally prefer their interventions to be invisible.

Flooding, meanwhile, involves pumping propaganda, or just irrelevant content, into cyberspace to distract from oppositional messages. This strategy suits what some call the attention economy a world where the resource that is most scarce is not information as such but peoples attention. In an environment of attention scarcity, states dont need to apply traditional censorship to manipulate public opinion. They can just drown messages they dont like in a sea of other content.

Art is incredibly powerful, and some would argue that with such power comes responsibility. Where does the responsibility lie to not cause harm through political cartoons? What kind of restrictions are reasonable? Can this question even be answered or will cartoonists always be pushing boundaries even as societies continue to evolve?

The cartoonists I interviewed have an ethos similar to other journalists. They absolutely accept that their responsibility to society is more important than whatever ego gratifications they derive from their art. They exercise self-restraint when they think its necessary. Its not as if all cartoonists have this irrepressible urge to draw the first thought that comes to mind. There are professional cartoonists who will agonize over whether an idea for a provocative cartoon crosses the line into gratuitous offense, even if they have the freedom to draw whatever they like.

There are of course always people who will disagree sometimes violently, unfortunately with the cartoonists judgment. And there are many cases where it is very, very difficult to come to a consensus. Drawings are more open to interpretation than words. This is a strength as well as a liability.

Read more from the original source:
Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship - The Diplomat

A few weeks ago, PayPal and the Anti-Defamation League announced a joint project focused on uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements. As the ADLs CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained, after first looking into how these movements use services like PayPal, the collaboration will aim to ultimately bar them from these platforms and starve them of funds, focusing on everyone from those who marauded through the Capitol to those who were beating up Jews in broad daylight just a few months ago. Sounds pretty uncontroversial. Who could possibly be against that?

Except the trouble, as it always is when it comes to measures like censorship, is that the people doing the censoring usually have a very different definition of what an extremist and hate movement is than you, the reader, does. For them, it might be someone who talks about revolution or eating the rich, someone who protested against police brutality last year, or simply groups and people that fight for the rights of Palestinians.

In fact, this exact thing has already happened once before with PayPal, which has been banning and cancelling the accounts of various groups and individuals over the last few years. In 2018, the company came under fire when, alongside its ban of the far-right Proud Boys, it also threw in the accounts of several anti-fascist groups for good measure. Just like when Reddit included a host of left-leaning subreddits in its purge of violent and hateful content last year, these platforms have a commercial interest in appearing to be equally opposed to extremists on both sides, even when one of those sides is violent racists like the Proud Boys and the other is people who oppose and confront those racists.

But PayPals partnership with the ADL threatens to go even further down this worrying road. The ADL, which was founded in 1913 as the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith, has been on the right side of many issues related to racism and intolerance, but it also has a long history of acting as essentially an informal lobbying group for the Israeli government, and in the process conflating opposition to Israels apartheid policies with actual antisemitism as well as attacking the Left and skirting dangerously close to bigotry itself.

This history goes all the way back to the 1960s, when the ADLs then-leader attacked the famed civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over its anti-Zionist stance, charging it with extremism and ties to the Chinese-Soviet and now Arab propaganda machines, and putting it in the same league as the Ku Klux Klan. In the words, in 1961, of its national director, the ADL for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda and an information-gathering operation since 1948 focusing on Arab state organizations and groups. By 1993, a police raid on its California headquarters found this surveillance went much, much further, encompassing more than six hundred mostly liberal organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU, and the International Indian Treaty Council.

But thats ancient history by now, right? Unfortunately not. Under its former president Abe Foxman, with whom the ADL was virtually synonymous for years, the organization began increasingly embracing Washingtons Islamophobic war on terror and subsuming its stated principle of ensuring a world in which no group or individual suffers from bias, discrimination or hate to the more central goal of defending Israeli apartheid and maintaining the government connections to do so.

When the Right freaked out over the intentionally misnamed Ground Zero mosque a classic case of right-wing cancel culture, targeting a planned Islamic cultural center with a pool and basketball court that was to be built two blocks away from where the Twin Towers had stood Foxman sided with them. Just as survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational, he said to widespread condemnation, September 11 victims families anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted. On the ADLs one-hundred-year anniversary, Foxman claimed that Jews had it worse than Muslims and that anti-Muslim hatred didnt happen after September 11, before explaining that Rep. Peter Kings call for more surveillance of Muslims was a natural response, and blaming Muslim communities that have been brought in and are not assimilating.

Fittingly, the ADL never said a thing about the NYPDs outrageous spying on Muslim New Yorkers, and actually bestowed an award on the man who had overseen it. He was one of the officers who had been trained in the counterterrorism exchange program with Israel that the ADL has sponsored since 2004, educating US police in the tactics used by the countrys abusive security services. For the ADL, a commitment to the defense of the Israeli government came to supersede all other considerations, as when Foxman opposed a congressional resolution to finally label the Turkish slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians a genocide a stance the ADL reportedly adopted to protect Israels strategic relationship with Turkey.

During this period, the ADL often set its sights and energies not so much on white supremacists and neo-Nazis but on liberal Jewish organizations critical of Israel and various college campus groups that organized around Palestinian justice. Among its semiregular list of the Top 10 Anti-Israel Groups in the U.S., it listed institutions like J Street, New Israel Fund, Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a coalition of 380 organizations opposing Israeli apartheid, some of them Jewish, charging they were fixated with delegitimizing Israel and pushing a misleading narrative about the country.

It praised a 2010 Education Department decision to use the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish college students from anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment that crosses the line into anti-Semitism, compared a talk at Brooklyn College about boycotting Israel to the Ku Klux Klan holding an event about maintaining a white-dominated America, and denounced a Harvard conference on the idea of a one-state solution in which Jews and Palestinians would live together within a single state as the elimination of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

This regular conflation of Israel with all Jews everywhere, and the implication that the distinct interests of each were really one and the same, somehow coexists with the organizations practice of lobbing accusations of antisemitism at left-leaning targets over poorly phrased statements that could be interpreted as advancing the racist idea of dual loyalty. To wit, when former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would be trying to torpedo Barack Obamas nuclear deal with Iran by delivering an outrageous speech to Congress as a representative of the entire Jewish people, the ADL didnt condemn this clearly antisemitic trope. Instead, it criticized J Street for asking Jews to sign a petition saying that Netanyahu doesnt speak for me, which Foxman called inflammatory and repugnant. Note that at the same time the ADL fixated on criticism of Israeli policies, and kept a laser focus on pop culture and obvious satire, it was deathly silent about the many, many stunningly racist things that actual Israeli officials regularly said out loud.

All of this was, of course, closely tied to Foxmans personal influence as the longtime, defining leader of the ADL. Perhaps it went away once he passed the torch to Greenblatt in 2015? Unfortunately, the record of the past few years hasnt borne this out. Sure, there were some shifts, like the Leagues belated acknowledgement that the Armenian genocide was, in fact, a genocide. But old habits die hard.

The ADLs often wildly inconsistent standards over who deserved condemnation remains. When Trump made a series of patently offensive statements to a group of Jewish donors in 2015 Im a negotiator like you folks; Is there anyone in this room who doesnt negotiate deals?; This room negotiates a lot. This room perhaps more than any room Ive ever spoken to Greenblatt declared that we do not believe that it was Donald Trumps intention to evoke anti-Semitic stereotypes. When asked point-blank a year later if Trump was an anti-Semite, Greenblatt replied: Absolutely not. In fact, hes been a very strong supporter of the State of Israel and of Jewish charitable causes generally.

Compare this to how Greenblatt and the ADL have led the charge against left-wing (and, incidentally, Muslim) members of Congress over phrasing that it construes as approximating antisemitic tropes, such as over Ilhan Omars demonstrably true point that oodles of money from pro-Israel groups have an impact on US policy in the Middle East. The League later played a leading role in getting college professor Marc Lamont Hill fired from CNN, dishonestly claiming his UN speech calling for a free Palestine from the river to the sea was calling for divisive and destructive action against Israel.

Or look at their campaign against Keith Ellison, now Minnesotas attorney general, when he was running for chair of the Democratic National Committee. After reporters dug up Ellisons 2010 comments that US foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people, meaning Israel, Greenblatt called them deeply disturbing and disqualifying. Tellingly, he also referenced Ellisons positions on Israel-Palestine and the Iran deal, and charged that his words raised doubts about [his] ability to represent traditional Democratic support for Israel, suggesting that the ADLs concerns were about something other than antisemitic tropes. Greenblatt would later cite various left-wing groups criticism of Israel including a line in the Black Lives Matter platform written by a Jewish activist accusing it of genocide to charge that anti-Semitism is creeping into progressivism.

The ADL still regularly conflates activism against Israeli policies, especially on college campuses, with antisemitism, as when it accused Jewish Voice for Peace of increasing anti-Israel radicalism, or when it called the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement modeled on the boycott of apartheid South Africa an anti-Semitic movement motivated by irrational hatred of the Jewish people. When public sentiment toward Israel soured this year over the countrys shocking land grab and subsequent bombing of Palestinians, the ADL put out a widely cited report claiming an increase in antisemitism, which listed swastika graffiti and praise for Adolph Hitler alongside anti-Zionist slogans and comparisons of Israeli policies to Nazi Germany.

And it still veers away from its stated mission into nakedly representing Israeli interests, as when it condemned a UN resolution criticizing the countrys illegal settlements on Palestinian land in 2016, while later praising Trumps inflammatory move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Fittingly, given its partnership with PayPal, at one point it even urged police to infiltrate and surveil antifa activists, before scrubbing the advice under criticism.

In short, the ADL is far from a dispassionate fighter against hate movements, and has consistently twisted or folded that mission into pro-Israel advocacy while conflating left-wing criticism of Israel and US policy toward it with far-right hatred and white supremacy. Greenblatts statement that its work with PayPal will look at groups across the ideological spectrum suggests pro-Palestinian and pro-BDS groups and individuals have much to fear from this partnership, the potential of which we saw eleven years ago, when PayPal froze the account of WikiLeaks under pressure from an irate US government.

Various political forces will continue to push for more and more censorship of the internet, and theyll cite white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other widely reviled groups and figures to justify it, though they will only be some of the targets. And the more this push picks up steam, the more the Left has to fear from them.

The rest is here:
PayPal and the ADL: A Match Made in Censorship Hell - Jacobin magazine

Horror films are so often about women, but, historically, horror stories on film have rarely been told by women. That has started to change in the last decade, with directors like Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Anna Biller (The Love Witch), Karyn Kusama (The Invitation), Alice Lowe (Prevenge) and Rose Glass (Saint Maud) making eerie films about women who do much more than scream and cower. Joining that list of great female horror directors is Prano Bailey-Bond, whose feature debut, Censor, is one of the most striking British horrors in years.

Set in the 1980s, Censor takes place amid the furore over the Video Nasties. This broad group of horror films were banned by the British Board of Film Classification for being too obscene for the public. These days, many of those films Evil Dead, Suspiria, Dawn of the Dead look relatively tame (while some are even considered classics), but at the time it was believed that merely watching them would be enough to warp peoples minds and inspire copycat crimes.

Censor follows Enid (BAFTA-nominee Niamh Algar), an apparently level-headed censor who is shaken after she watches a movie that seems to echo the events that led to the disappearance of her sister. As Enid obsessively tries to find out more about the film, the line between reality and fantasy starts to blur.

Niamh Algar in Censor. CREDIT: Maria Lax / Magnet Releasing

I had the idea for Censor around 2012, Bailey-Bond tells NME. I was reading an article about Hammer Horror [the British studio that made the likes of Dracula, The Mummy and Curse of the Wolfman] which looked at how film censors worked in that period. It made me think, If violent images are meant to make us lose control, what prevents the censor from doing that? It was that hypocrisy of thinking, I can watch this, but if you watch it youre going to go out and shoot someone.

Censor could have been set at any time, but Bailey-Bond settled on the Video Nasty period because that era is fascinating and rich when it comes to our relationship with horror. The UK had one of the most conservative censorship bodies. This was a time when VHS was taking off: as more people than ever could watch films at home, prudish types were worried children would be taken over by something evil from the TV set. It was also a time of extreme conservatism in government: Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the country was deeply divided as blame and fear pervaded.

The films 80s setting gives Bailey-Bond a fractious backdrop for her horror story. Enids own mind starts to fall apart as fear overtakes her, but the world around her is almost as irrational. There was a convenient scapegoating of anything terrible happening in the world, says Bailey-Bond of that era. Lets not look at the government or what theyre taking away from society Lets blame it all on a bunch of horror films.

Censor director Prano Bailey-Bond. CREDIT: Maria Lax / Magnet Releasing

Bailey-Bond was too young to be aware of Video Nasties at the time (she was born in 1982), but the 80s was also when she began her horror education. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Wales, with my parents VHS shelf as my way into cinema, she says. They had really good taste, fortunately. There were lots of John Carpenter and David Lynch films. The youngest of three siblings, she was always keen to see what her older brother and sister were watching. I remember when I was in primary school they watched Twin Peaks and it was mind-blowing. Its not necessarily horror, but it was surreal and uncomfortable and bizarre and scary. I think that was a big influence on me. That influence took Bailey-Bond into an early career of directing short films and music videos, all with the same sinister beauty she brings to Censor.

If horror directed by women has only recently become more commonplace, Bailey-Bond says she was always aware that there were women in horror if you looked. One of my favourite films when I was a teenager was American Psycho, which at the time I didnt know was directed by a woman [Mary Harron]. And then there was Near Dark [Kathryn Bigelow]. There werent masses, but they have been there.

Bailey-Bond has watched on as the landscape has changed, with more and more women making horror films. When it came time for Bailey-Bond to shop around her idea for her directing debut, it wasnt so unusual anymore. The way were talking about gender and representation [now], that feels like its allowed a platform where were actually celebrating and lifting up female directors working in the genre more than we have in the past.

A meeting of the films censorship board. CREDIT: Magnet Releasing / Press

For the role of Enid, Bailey-Bond chose, by both fortune and accident, an actress who is ascending as quickly as her director. She and Niamh Algar actually met well before they started on Censor: in 2018 they were both included in Screen Internationals Stars of Tomorrow list, and were put on the same table at a dinner celebrating the honourees.

We just kind of hit if off, sitting and talking about movies, says Algar, who is nothing like Enid in real life. Where Enid is brunette, English and quiet, Algar is blonde, Irish and gregarious. About six months later, my agent sent me a casting and I saw Pranos name and immediately thought, Oh thats someone I want to work with.

For Algar, Censor caps a very strong couple of years career-wise. Shes played a lead role in the Ridley Scott TV series Raised By Wolves (and has already shot the second season) and she was BAFTA-nominated last year for her role in Calm With Horses. Although it wasnt strategised that way, adding Censor to her CV is a good way to show she has great taste in both big budget projects and indie movies. I always want to play characters that I suppose people wouldnt put me in the same box as, she says. The best compliment Ive had was when Mark Kermode said, Niamh Algar is a character actor. Yes! Theres certainly no doubting that Enid is a role that asks a lot of Algar. We wont spoil where the film goes, but Algar has to show a lot of different shades to Enid. It will be no surprise if it brings her a second BAFTA nomination.

One of the most striking things about Censor is that even though its set nearly 40 years ago, it could take place at almost any time. Censorship is something that always exists: there will always be people trying to police what others watch, out of fear dressed up as concern. On the day NME speaks to both Bailey-Bond and Algar, Twitter is aflame with pearl-clutching types objecting to Lil Nas X kissing his male back-up dancer at the BET Awards and doing a pixelated nude prison dance in his Industry Baby video.

I think there are parallels you can draw right now with the 80s, says Bailey-Bond. Weve seen these moments of hysteria happen over the years. In the 50s, it was comic books and people worried about their effect on little boys. More recently, weve had video games, Marilyn Manson videos and rap music.

There will always be someone insisting that we must think of the children. And hopefully there will always be someone like Prano Bailey-Bond to hold a mirror up to them and scare them into self-reflection.

Censor is out in UK cinemas on August 20

Originally posted here:
Censor: behind the screams on 2021s most striking horror film - NME

Everyone has a problem with platforms. If youre on the left, youre worried about unmoderated speech. If youre more like me, youre worried about limitations on speech. And most people get annoyed or creeped out by the massive, personalized datasets for ad targeting that keep the whole thing financially afloat.

Democrats want to impose more speech guidelines on platforms, whether managed by government bodies or non-profits. Republicans want to fight back against existing content controls by removing liability protections from platforms or imposing legal counterweights to the types of speech that may be removed. The latter group is missing the point.

So long as the platforms that most people are centralized by design, there will always be a single administrator for powerful groups, public or private, to target. Control the administrator and you can control the platform.

This arrangement works very well for political actors with enough power to exert control over the administrator. Republicans are almost never among them. The bills that they do manage to pass are only as strong as the judge that will inevitably decide their legal fate.

Spending time and energy to pass unconstitutional or merely controversial anti-censorship bills that eventually get thrown out by some judge wastes precious political momentum. To achieve the goals of free speech and freedom from control on the internet, liberty-minded policymakers should think about ways to encourage and use decentralized alternatives.

Decentralized technologies have no central administrator that can be captured to effectuate the goals of powerful groups. They are either federated, like email, and allow people to connect freely through a third-party service or with their own personal servers, or they are distributed, like Bitcoin, and are fully peer-to-peer.

There are many working decentralized alternatives for the platforms that draw the most controversy, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Critics of these companies should learn about and use these decentralized technologies. Policymakers should think about how they can encourage their development.

This conversation dives into my recent James Madison Institute study, Deplatforming and Freedom: A Primer for Policy. We talk about how technology can be both a tool for resistance and control, the difference between centralized and decentralized technologies, and why people on the right should familiarize themselves with decentralized platforms that have freedom built into them by design.

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It's The Centralization, Stupid! - beacontn.org - beacontn.org