The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  “I felt like I’d been hit by this tremendous exhaustion. We would sit around in deserted holiday areas out of season with no one around and nothing to do,” Westergaard explained.

  One cool spring day in 2008, Kurt and Gitte Westergaard were being moved yet again, this time closer to family and friends: a hotel apartment in Fredensgade in the center of Aarhus. As they retrieved their luggage from the car, two couples of Middle Eastern appearance passed by on the other side of the street. One of the men recognized Kurt.

  “May you burn in hell!” he shouted.

  “Can we talk about it now or should we wait until we meet there?” Westergaard quipped. He had always had a sharp, sometimes bracing, sense of humor. But the upshot of that involuntary encounter was that Kurt and Gitte had to put their luggage back in the car and return to their previous city.

  Throughout his tribulations, Kurt Westergaard has never doubted his feelings about religion: “I’m an atheist, and I can only say that the reactions to my drawing have made me stronger in my faith.” Confronted by criticism and charges that he was to blame for the violence and deaths that occurred during the Cartoon Crisis, Westergaard had an anecdote he liked to recount about his favorite artist, Pablo Picasso. During World War II, Picasso ran into a German officer. When the German officer figured out whom he was talking to, he said,

  “Oh, you are the one who created Guernica?” referring to the famous painting of the German bombing of a Basque town by that name in 1937.

  Picasso paused for a second and replied, “No, it wasn’t me, it was you.”

  Kurt Westergaard had always been a storyteller as a child. Kurt’s father ran a grocery store in the village of Døstrup in North Jutland. With the whole village as customers, having a son who went round making up stories about people often proved to be a strain.

  “Much later, I discovered there was a synonym for lies—imagination. That changed my whole perspective.”

  As the son of the village shopkeeper, it was imperative that he maintain friendly relationships with everyone. Causing trouble and fighting with the other children were out of the question, and the subject of religion was particularly charged. With religion came taboos: sex, the body, tales of sin and perdition, devoutness and piety, heaven and hell. Neither of Westergaard’s parents was strongly religious; he refers to them as “culturally enlightened” Christians. But as the shopkeeper’s son, he was forced to attend Sunday school out of deference to his father’s customers. The school was run by the so-called Inner Mission, a pious, 19th-century revivalist movement that had arisen as a reaction to the rational approach to Christianity that had issued from the Enlightenment.

  “Nowadays we’d call them fundamentalists,” Westergaard muses. “If you did certain things you were damned—swearing, using dirty words, thoughts about sexuality. If, like me, you had a lively imagination and were branded a liar, there was a lot of anger. I felt unable to navigate my way around in my imagination without running into the fear of God that the teaching instilled in us.”

  Westergaard found himself gazing up at a blue sky one day after Sunday school, thinking: there’s a long way to heaven, but Satan is just beneath my feet. “The way I was taught, religion was all about hell rather than God, damnation rather than salvation.”

  In 1951, Kurt Westergaard began attending a high school in the town of Randers. In the summer months, he lived at home with his parents, cycling the first seven kilometers from the village to Hobro, and then taking the train. During the winter, he had his own room in student housing. A teacher introduced him to the so-called cultural radicals, a liberal intellectual movement that in many senses was to transform modern Denmark. Poul Henningsen’s texts in particular sparked Westergaard’s interest: his defiance of Nazism, his rejection of bourgeois conservatism, his dismissal of the religiously infected sexual morals of the day.

  “All the authorities I had felt to be so oppressive in my childhood were brought tumbling to the ground one by one,” he explained. “Poul Henningsen bemoaned what he called the infamous ability of humans to adapt. He let fly at it all: morals, architecture, religion, nationalism.”

  Westergaard wanted to study art; his parents talked him out of it. Instead, his father suggested he become a teacher. He did, and gradually he became more interested in subjects involving storytelling: history, geography, and art. Toward the end of the 1960s, he developed an interest in teaching children with learning difficulties, ending up heading a school for severely handicapped children for 25 years. Much of his work consisted of devising teaching materials for children with handicaps. A major challenge was to establish low-readability, age-relevant materials capable of capturing the attention of the older pupils. During that time, Westergaard illustrated some 120 books. “It wasn’t great art. It was all about creating a straightforward and unambiguous form of expression that could be easily understood and that we could apply in our teaching.”

  In 1982, Westergaard joined Jyllands-Posten as a freelance cartoonist, his work in a smaller paper having been noticed by one of the editors. His contributions became a regular feature. It was a dream come true: “It was a huge luxury to be able to sit on my own and concentrate on my drawing. At the school, I was used to being interrupted all the time, so for me it was marvelous. I’ve never regretted taking the plunge.”

  Westergaard points to three artists in particular as exemplary Danish cartoonists in the 20th century: Hans Bendix, Arne Ungermann, and Bo Bojesen. Bendix was a master of the immediate, spontaneous expression, his work always shaped with a lightness of touch that on occasion gave the impression that his pencil strokes had been sprinkled casually onto the paper. Ungermann was an intellectual artist, whose drawings often accompanied lengthy texts. Bojesen’s satire manifested his detailed scrutiny of the society in which he lived.

  “When it comes to satire, I’ve always been inclined toward a sharpness of expression, which probably can be seen in my Muhammad cartoon,” Westergaard said. “There’s a saying along the lines of ‘While humor laughs and irony smiles, there’s nothing funny at all about satire.’”

  Working for Jyllands-Posten in the 1980s, Kurt Westergaard sensed that certain themes would be better left alone. He remembers three in particular: U.S. President Ronald Reagan, naked women, and the apartheid regime in South Africa. “That was beyond me completely. Why the hell shouldn’t we make fun of South Africa?”

  Readers reacted strongly to some of Westergaard’s cartoons. One depicted a crucified Jesus with dollar signs in his eyes; it illustrated an article on organized religion’s pragmatic stance on money matters. Letters to the editor accused Westergaard of blasphemy. On another occasion, he illustrated a piece on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with a cartoon equipping a Palestinian with the Star of David. A few years later, and on the same theme, Westergaard delivered an image of a Palestinian fenced inside the Star of David, peering through barbed wire. Another showed the Star of David with a bomb attached to it—reminiscent now of his depiction of Muhammad in 2005. On that occasion, he received an indignant phone call from Arne Melchior, a prominent member of Jewish society in Denmark who was also a member of the Danish parliament. Reactions from readers were angry and plentiful, though no death threats were received.

  “Melchior dressed me down and lectured me about the symbol being of such significance for Jews that it could not be turned 180 degrees in a satirical cartoon,” Melchior said. “I pointed out that it was just a drawing. I said it was a pity if the drawing had offended people, but I had to insist on my right to visualize the content of an article, even if it offended some people.”

  It was a line of reasoning Westergaard maintained as fundamental to his work. Although describing his relationship to religion as “untroubled,” he has always reserved the right to mock any kind of religious malfeasance or misbehavior:

  In that way, I’m immensely satisfied with my drawing of Muhammad, though I do have a rather ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, I can see all the t
rouble it’s caused. On the other, I genuinely feel that I’ve expressed myself in a way that has found resonance. I’m glad I did it so late in life. It stands now as the culmination of my work. “You succeeded,” I think to myself. “You kept going. And now there’s a small price to pay.”

  The drawing was done on September 21, 2005, the same day that he and other members of the Danish cartoonists’ society received my letter inviting them to depict Muhammad as they saw him. Westergaard liked the idea. It was a perfect opportunity to target people who exploit religious faith in order to legitimize violence and spread fear:

  The idea came to me immediately. The bomb is an age-old symbol of terrorism, and I thought if I use the Arabic inscription from the Islamic creed I’d be able to make the point clear that Islam is the terrorists’ spiritual ammunition. It proceeded from there. It took maybe an hour, all told. It was just another day at the office, really.

  Westergaard did not immediately see his drawing as being particularly controversial in any way. “My feeling was, it was on the button—a bit severe, perhaps, but the creative process had been smooth. You get an idea and then do a drawing right away. It was just like you want it to be. I felt it all hung together very well.”

  From his own family, however, he is well aware that different cultural codes can lead to misunderstandings. In February 2006, Westergaard was visiting his son and his Peruvian daughter-in-law in the United States. He had been sitting in the garden sketching, portraying the couple’s two little girls with wings, making them look as though they were floating in the air. His son’s wife was aghast when she saw what he was doing. To her, the wings of angels portended that the children soon would die. Westergaard erased them. It was an incident that took place in the middle of the violent reactions to his cartoon in the Middle East and other Muslim countries. “I was sitting out by the pool,” he said, “and could see that the television was on in the living room. I saw the Danish flag and went inside to see what was going on. As it happened, there were riots, and Danish embassies had been burned to the ground. I was shocked.”

  Westergaard admits that it was hard to comprehend exactly what was going on. None of it, however, gave him second thoughts as to the wisdom of his drawing:

  I can’t see myself being responsible for the fact that certain despicable regimes in the Muslim world, which are unable to fulfill the basic needs of their peoples, send them out into the streets to work off their aggression on cartoons that a newspaper has published in some far-off country. Every time my drawing has sparked off threats and violence, it makes me more defiant. As I see it, I did a job. I’m entitled to my opinion, and what I expressed in the drawing is true.

  Although Westergaard’s cartoon triggered strong reactions in the Islamic world, and many Muslims felt that it touched a sore spot, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), which weighed in with an international campaign against Westergaard’s drawing and Denmark in general, acknowledged that extremist ideas have spawned acts of terrorism that have indeed been perpetrated in the name of Islam.

  “We do not have the luxury of blaming others for our own problems. It is high time we addressed our national and regional problems with courage, sincerity and openness,” Ihsanoglu stated. He stressed the need to combat poverty, illiteracy, and corruption in the Muslim world, saying that “when these issues are not addressed properly by legitimate means, they are used as an excuse to push for extreme ideas.”3

  At the Muslim World Congress in Mecca in December 2005, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah likewise deplored the way extremists had hijacked Islam. “It bleeds the heart of a believer to see how this glorious civilization has fallen from the height of glory to the ravine of frailty, and how its thoughts have been hijacked by devilish and criminal gangs that spread havoc on earth,” he said.4

  As a youth seeking to rebel against oppressive religious and cultural norms, Westergaard was inspired by Poul Henningsen’s denunciation of “the infamous ability of humans to adapt.” He understood that view as a critique of inaction, of the passive acceptance of injustice that had been a widespread attitude in Denmark during the 1930s, following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany and his National Socialists’ initial moves to exert pressure on Germany’s neighbors. In fact, Denmark witnessed several crises that foreshadowed the attempts of totalitarian regimes and movements to restrict the Muhammad cartoons. The first of such cases concerned one of Westergaard’s own idols, the artist Hans Bendix, who together with the multitalented Poul Henningsen and other critics of Hitler’s new regime, began publishing the first anti-Nazi journal to appear in Danish.

  Aandehullet (Breathing Hole) was the name of the new publication, and it carried in its first issue an article by Bendix that attacked the fawning Danish media’s appeasement of the Nazis. Most Danish institutions at the time upheld a distinction between supporting free speech in domestic politics but maintaining strict neutrality abroad, particularly with countries stronger and wealthier than tiny Denmark. Bendix called that distinction “cowardly and stupid.” That kind of appeasement was to surface again during the Cartoon Crisis, when three of Denmark’s former ministers of foreign affairs took it upon themselves to lecture their compatriots on diplomacy, and the European Union’s commissioner for foreign affairs Javier Solana assured Middle Eastern potentates that publication of the Muhammad cartoons would not be repeated. The question of who had equipped him with such a mandate on behalf of the citizens of the EU was unclear.

  Aandehullet brimmed with satirical drawings and caricatures skewering Hitler, National Socialism, and its supporters. And after only three issues, Hans Bendix was summoned to the office of the prime minister, who threatened to remove him from his full-time job on the Social Democrat Party newspaper unless Aandehullet was shut down.5 Bendix did so, and Denmark’s first caricature crisis thus ended in victory for those who believed that free speech should bow to pressure from foreign powers and those who wished to appease them.

  It was a pattern that repeated during the Cartoon Crisis, though pressure in that instance came from rather different quarters: the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Muslim countries’ ambassadors in Denmark, Islamic clergy in Denmark and abroad, three former Danish foreign ministers (Mogens Lykketoft, Niels Helveg-Petersen, and Uffe Ellemann-Jensen), and various retired Danish diplomats, as well as parts of the media and much of the business community.

  The parallel with the 1930s gained particular salience following the attempt to assassinate Kurt Westergaard in January 2010, when critics of Westergaard and Jyllands-Posten declared outright that Westergaard and JP had invited the attack. Hans Bendix and Poul Henningsen had provoked the wrath of the Nazis in exactly the same way in 1935, the year after Aandehullet closed. A pamphlet of drawings by Bendix triggered an eight-hour debate in parliament after Nazi mouthpiece Der Völkische Beobachter denounced one of the cartoons, which showed Hitler washing blood from his hands beneath the heading “Dolfuss in memoriam—the latter-day Pontius Pilate.” (Austrian leader Engelbert Dolfuss was murdered by Nazi agents in 1934, though Hitler denied any connection with the murder.) Bendix was sharply criticized from both sides of the chamber, which deplored the detrimental effects the cartoon could have on Danish exports. Prime Minister Stauning ended the session with a warning to the press against poking fun at foreign leaders.6

  In the spring of 1933, another cartoon crisis descended on Denmark. On April 30, Copenhagen daily Berlingske Tidende published a caricature by Norwegian newspaper artist Ragnvald Blix, which triggered a crisis between Denmark and Germany. It depicted Hitler in the company of Gestapo founder Hermann Göring and Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels with a text reading, “That happy-go-lucky Austrian attitude is anti-national, but how do we throw people in jail for being nice?”

  A week after the drawing appeared, the paper’s correspondent in Berlin received a visit at home from five uniformed men and two in civilian clothes; they displayed a copy of t
he paper with the cartoon and searched the house. Later that same year, a German advertiser and hotel owner in Hamburg lodged a complaint with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin on the grounds that his guests had on several occasions expressed their dissatisfaction with the Berlingske Tidende’s cartoons. The Danish foreign office reacted promptly, approaching the paper’s chief editor with criticism against Blix. From then on, many of Blix’s cartoons were shelved.7

  In 1938 came a third cartoon crisis, this time with Copenhagen daily Ekstra Bladet cast as the bad guy. Niels Spott—a pseudonym of Arvid Møller—repeatedly incurred the wrath of the German ambassador on account of his scathing satires of Hitler and his henchmen. Former foreign minister Erik Scavenius was head of the board of the publishers of Ekstra Bladet. He was incensed in particular by one of Spott’s cartoons that showed a barber being led away by a Gestapo officer after attempting to use a curling iron on Hitler’s hair. According to Scavenius, that was a blatant case of scorn, mockery, and ridicule of a foreign leader; he had made it quite clear on several occasions that he would not accept his paper’s publishing cartoons that poked fun at the Führer. Indeed, Section 107 of the criminal code expressly prohibited personal insults to leaders of foreign governments. However, as Ekstra Bladet’s legendary editor Ole Cavling noted in his diary, Scavenius “was never the slightest bit bothered about even the most vicious caricature targeting the British.”8 Niels Spott was removed from Ekstra Bladet’s back page, and the paper’s foreign coverage was placed under Scavenius’s direct control.

  Poul Henningsen was a free-speech fundamentalist, who had little time for lamentations about offense to religious sentiments, retorting that the world would be a better place if reason, rather than religion, could be protected. Many of the discussions in which he became involved proved relevant to the Cartoon Crisis. He emphasized the importance of distinguishing between words and actions and pointed out that the more a society asks its citizens to accept common norms and values, the more crucial it becomes to maintain unrestricted freedom of speech. In the tense climate of impending war, Poul Henningsen—the man who would later inspire Kurt Westergaard—was impressively unyielding in his insistence that free speech should be permitted to people whose opinions he did not share, be they anti-Semites and racists, Nazis, or communists working to establish a Soviet regime in Denmark. He adhered to English writer George Orwell’s notion that freedom makes sense only if it involves the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.