The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.

  —Arthur Koestler

  By not admitting that it exists, self-censorship aligns itself with lies and spiritual corruption.

  —J. M. Coetzee

  The violence, destruction, and killings that occurred during the Cartoon Crisis took place in countries without freedom of speech and religion. The conflict was much more peaceful and civilized in countries that enjoyed extensive freedom of speech and of religion. And yet, the Crisis saw renewed calls in the West for stronger protection of minority religious sentiments. Some called for new legislation: blasphemy codes, such as every country in the West once had, that severely punished speech against God. Others, as we’ve seen, advocated self-censorship.

  Was it not completely insane to react to the issue with demands for tighter legislation to criminalize speech? Wasn’t that just legitimizing the violent reactions? Closer scrutiny of the violence yields an ambiguous picture of its origins. Nigeria, a country with 150 million inhabitants, of whom just over half are Muslim, was the scene of the worst riots that occurred during the Crisis. Demonstrations against the drawings turned into mob rule. A Catholic priest and members of his community were burned to death in the province of Borno on Saturday, February 18, 2006. Three days later, acts of retaliation were carried out in another province. The number of killings varied from 150 to 165, according to local reports; some put it even higher.

  In fact, the drawings were unlikely to have been the direct source of the violence. Nigerian newspapers the Daily Independent, This Day, the Vanguard, and the Daily Champion carried no mention of the drawings in their coverage of clashes, killings, vandalism, and retaliation; that omission was probably because rioting and religious violence had been rising dramatically in Nigeria since 2000, when Sharia law began to be established in several areas.1 That is, the rioting and religious violence were not something rare and attributable to drawings in a Scandinavian newspaper that the vast majority had never set eyes on. A survey of events in the Washington Post in February 2006 concluded, “The cause of the latest outbursts is less the Danish cartoons than the legacy of Muslim–Christian tensions that began long before the European cartoonists caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.”2

  The same applied in other countries. In Libya’s medieval city of Benghazi on February 17, protesters trashed and burned the Italian consulate. Police opened fire: 11 died, and some 50 were badly wounded. Two days before, an Italian government minister had appeared in public wearing a T-shirt printed with Kurt Westergaard’s drawing. Libya was once an Italian colony, and in the view of Libyan leader Mummar el-Qaddafi, the attack on the Italian consulate was triggered by continuing hatred of the former colonial power rather than by the cartoons. A young protester later wrote on his blog that the target of the protests had been Qaddafi himself: “For us, the youth of Benghazi, this is our chance to rise up against this Pharaoh. . . . The protests are to draw attention to the plight of young people—no education, no work, no money, no opportunities.”3

  Many critics of the Muhammad cartoons and Jyllands-Posten’s reasons for publishing them claimed that self-censorship is a positive thing, a sign of good behavior and common sense. That claim bypasses an important distinction between self-censorship and good manners. I am a sworn devotee of good manners. Being with friendly people who do their best to make one feel comfortable, who speak nicely, don’t interrupt all the time, and never act aggressively, is a pleasant experience, no question. But we decide to be well mannered of our own free will; self-censorship stems from coercion exerted by fear. The Danish illustrator who chose to remain anonymous in the context of Kåre Bluitgen’s book on the life of Muhammad, thereby prompting Jyllands-Posten to commission the Muhammad drawings, was not declining to have his name on the front cover in order to be polite, or to show consideration, or to demonstrate modesty. He wanted to illustrate a children’s book about the life of the Prophet, but he was afraid of threats and violence.4

  The self-censorship to which I drew attention in the autumn of 2005 and identified as a problem for the European democracies became more visible in the years that followed. It became clear that the Muhammad cartoons had hit a sore spot. Self-censorship continued following the cartoons’ publication; new examples, new crises, were appearing all the time.

  In Sweden, conceptual artist Lars Vilks received death threats, was physically abused, and was subjected to an arson attack after he drew Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007 and attempted to exhibit the work in order to test the boundaries of the art world. In the spring of 2010, Swedish intelligence uncovered a plot to murder him. Police sources revealed that Muslims from several countries were involved, among them an American convert calling herself “Jihad Jane.”5

  In Norway, angry Muslims protested against Oslo daily Dagbladet, which had published a drawing of Muhammad as a pig writing the Koran. It was a drawing that had originally been done by an Israeli woman, who in 1997 had attempted to post it in on the wall of a Palestinian store in Hebron on the occupied West Bank before being stopped by police. Her actions cost the 28-year-old Soviet immigrant two years in prison for inciting racial hatred and offending religious sentiments.6

  In April 2010, the animated comedy program South Park poked mild fun at Muhammad dressed up as a bear, prompting one incensed Muslim to threaten the program’s creators. In a clear instance of self-censorship, the network reacted by removing the infamous episode from subsequent airings. Their action prompted South Park fans on Facebook to organize an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”: if millions drew Muhammad, the terrorists would hardly be able to kill all who in the eyes of Islamists had defamed Islam, and the threat would thus deflate. The intention was not to offend personal religious sentiments or to demonstrate disrespect for Islam, but to reiterate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech.7

  The incident’s initiator, cartoonist Molly Norris, would later distance herself from the idea, but others went through with it. More than 10,000 Muhammad drawings were submitted to the Facebook group, and in Pakistan, authorities blocked access to Facebook to prevent people from seeing them.

  British visual artist Grayson Perry is a man well known for his provocative approach to many subjects, including religion; he has, for example, done a piece involving a teddy bear being born out of a penis in the shape of the Virgin Mary. However, Perry said in the autumn of 2007 that he was too frightened to tackle Islam:

  I’ve censored myself. I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it. With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction, so I just play safe all the time. The reason I haven’t gone all-out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.8

  In January 2006, Norway’s most famous newspaper artist, Finn Graff, said he would be afraid to draw the Muslim prophet. Graff was not a man who had trouble satirizing other sensitive issues. Six months before, he had depicted two Norwegian politicians as copulating pigs, and in connection with a debate concerning Christianity, he had drawn marching Christians clad in brown shirts, the swastikas replaced by crucifixes. He had also done a number of very controversial drawings about Israel, including depicting Menachem Begin as a concentration camp commandant looking the other way while two German shepherds devoured a prisoner.

  In the summer of 2006, Graff drew Israeli leader Ehud Olmert standing on a balcony in a concentration camp, armed with a rifle, while a Palestinian lay bleeding from gunshot wounds. It was an image inspired by a scene in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie Schindler’s List, in which a sadistic camp commandant picks off Jewish prisoners from his balcony for target practice. Graff’s drawing prompted the Israeli ambassador to Norway to lodge a formal complaint with the Norwegian Press As
sociation, which found that the drawing could not be considered a breach of sound press ethics. (I would have liked to have included Graff’s depiction of Ehud Olmert in this book so that readers might judge for themselves, but Graff declined permission, being reluctant to be seen keeping “bad company,” as he put it in an email to my publishers.)

  But Graff drew the line at tackling Muhammad. That was about fear.

  “When there’s a certain likelihood that reactions come in the shape of threats and violence, or you risk getting your throat slit open, that’s it for me,” he told Norwegian paper Magazinet. Then—somewhat inconsistently for a man who time and again had demonstrated that he held precious little in reverence—he went on to say that he respected the ban on depiction in Islam. “So my decision is just as much about respect for the religious idea as it is based on real fear,” Graff concluded.9

  The same kind of ambiguity surfaced elsewhere. Of one of the directors of the 2008 Danish animation movie Rejsen til Saturn (Journey to Saturn), Thorbjørn Christoffersen, explained how the Muslim main character had been spared the scathing satire to which other characters in the movie were constantly subjected. Christoffersen told Berlingske Tidende:

  Unfortunately, making fun of Muslims’ religion has become nogo. I do think we deliver a few blows to the Jamil character in the movie, but it’s certainly true that we don’t mess with his religion. It’s simply too sensitive an issue, and I can’t take on the responsibility for broaching that. I’ve a family to think about, and a place of work. I’m no fighting man, and certainly not one to relish the prospect of fanatical Muslims knocking at my door.10

  A few days later, Thorbjørn Christoffersen and his codirector Kresten Vestbjerg Andersen expounded on their views in an interview with Politiken:

  My favorite part in the script is where the Danish astronauts land on Saturn and say: “We are the white Gods.” It’s so cool. “We come in the name of democracy and freedom of speech.” We wanted to take the piss out of the conservative reality we live in. As an artist you’re kind of an anarchist. You become that automatically when you’re funny.11

  From that point of view, then, the movie was mordant satire, a form of edification in reverse. When confronted with his comments on self-censorship and reluctance to turn the sting of his satire toward Islam, Christoffersen replied:

  We do stuff we know people will laugh at, however crass it might be. I mean, we’re pretty crude about the Queen as a symbol of nation. But Muhammad cartoons aren’t funny. If we started being critical of Jamil’s religion it’d be like ‘them and us,’ ‘Ha, ha, ha’ and ‘Fuck you,’ that kind of thing.

  At that point Christoffersen’s codirector added: “The only thing we’d achieve from that would be to show disrespect, which just wouldn’t be funny. It’d be the same as shooting the Queen. It’d just be totally tasteless.”

  The self-compromising hypocrisy of the two animators could have almost brought tears to the eyes. Those brave humorists apparently considered satire targeting religious ideas to be a much more serious offense than attacking living individuals. And the parallel drawn between religious satire and murder was revealing. Theocracies and religious fanatics could not have worded the rationale behind their worldview better or more succinctly than those two funny guys.

  Grayson Perry, Finn Graff, and the directors of Rejsen til Saturn all subjected themselves to self-censorship. Those are merely three random examples. There were hundreds more, all over Europe, and good manners had nothing to do with it.12 It was self-censorship governed by fear, though in some cases, the individuals involved had difficulty standing by their decision, finding it embarrassing and at odds with their self-image, thus attempting to explain it away with reference to respect for the faith of others and a reluctance to provoke. That was exactly the kind of intimidation of the public space that had given rise to our cartoon project in the first place.

  Besides the issue of self-censorship, the debate following the cartoons revealed a number of fractures in European culture and self- understanding. One of those issued from an event that Europe wished to avoid repeating at all costs: the lesson learned from the Jewish Holocaust was that words could kill, and hateful words can beget hateful actions. It was widely held that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists’ verbal persecution of the Jews in the years before Hitler’s rise to power, or if the Nazis had been prevented from pursuing their propaganda of hatred following 1933, then the Holocaust would never have happened. Proponents of that view saw a parallel between unfettered freedom of speech, demonization of the Jews in Nazi propaganda, and their subsequent genocide in the concentration camps.

  It was the same train of thought that prompted Denmark’s then foreign minister Per Stig Møller in 2009 to warn that free speech could be abused to incite violence. “We see it today in the message being sent out by Osama bin Laden. And we saw it in Germany, where anti-Semitic rhetoric eventually led to die Endlösung [the Final Solution], by which six million Jews were killed,” he wrote.13

  Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment; that is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned is stretching a point. Let’s separate out some facts here. Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic sparked violence and calls for Jews to be deprived of all rights. Under Nazi apartheid, Jews were excluded from German societies; their civil rights were annulled; and pogroms and the Kristallnacht occurred. During World War II, there was the Holocaust. What unites them is that at no point during those periods did freedom of speech exist unhindered in Germany.

  In my view, we are generally misguided to speak of the “abuse of free speech,” particularly in the case of dictatorships. Hitler’s morbid, paranoid propaganda prior to the Final Solution had little to do with abusing free speech, not least because no free speech existed. No logical link exists between Hitler’s propaganda in a totalitarian regime and the call for constraining freedom of speech in democratic, open societies.

  I often heard it said that Jyllands-Posten had “abused its freedom of speech” by its decision to publish the Muhammad cartoons. Authoritarian regimes also clutch at the phrase when incarcerating dissidents. Chinese dissidents are deported to labor camps for “abusing their freedom of speech.” Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim was imprisoned for “abusing his freedom of speech” by criticizing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya “abused her freedom of speech” by penning articles critical of the wars in Chechnya. If Hitler’s propaganda within a totalitarian regime and activist criticism of a totalitarian regime can both be termed “abuse of freedom of speech,” the phrase is clearly meaningless, insipid, and open to manipulation.

  Following the Holocaust, European democracies concluded that a ban on hate speech could prevent or at least contain racist violence.14 History provides no evidence for that reasoning. Nonetheless, legislation to that effect was passed in Germany and Austria, and it became a driving force in international human rights efforts in the decades after the war.

  Following its inception in 1949, the Council of Europe took steps toward establishing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, one of the world’s first human-rights treaties. A European Court of Human Rights was set up to monitor and to address complaints by citizens who believed their rights had been violated. That development was quite momentous and indeed laudable. For the first time, individuals were accorded rights across national boundaries. The court was not a court of appeal. It was not empowered to nullify the ruling of courts of law at the national level, but it could order a member state to align its practice with the human rights convention in the case that it ruled in favor of a plaintiff.15

  Since 2000, however, the constraints on free speech contained in United Nations and European conventions have become a significant instrument for grievance fundamentalists and for authoritarian regimes th
at use them to justify oppression of dissidents and minorities. Their use has tended to occur with particular reference to two articles: Article 20, paragraph 2, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.16

  The first runs as follows: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”17

  The second, taking as its point of departure a rather broad definition of “racial discrimination,” declares that the state “[s]hall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination . . . against any race or group of persons of another colour or ethnic origin.” Moreover, states were obliged to prohibit organizations and propaganda activities that promoted or incited racial discrimination, just as participation in such organizations or activities was to be made punishable by law.18

  The wording is awkward and technical, though the intention is clear: there is to be no difference in principle between saying something discriminatory and doing something discriminatory. With time, definitions of “racism” and “discrimination” widened, and the distinction between words and actions became even more blurred. In the European welfare states, that blurring of distinction coincided with the state undertaking to realize an ideal of equality that involved positive discrimination for those deemed weak or considered to be victims, and sometimes a corresponding negative discrimination of those whose personal resources were found satisfactory. As an increasing number of groups were classified as weak, it also seemed more important to protect them against speech that might be interpreted as discriminatory.

  With large-scale immigration to Europe from the Islamic world, European welfare states suddenly found themselves under pressure. The gaps that emerged in cultures, religions, and lifestyles in Europe’s newly diverse countries meant, on the one hand, that the welfare state had to impose demands on its new citizens to make them adapt to the norms of the society and thereby to ensure a continued community of values; while on the other hand, the state was forced to take measures against indigenous citizens who expressed discontent with the new demographic developments in language it considered discriminatory or a threat to social stability. Wide-reaching freedom of speech essentially ran against the grain of the welfare state in a multicultural society.