By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
Cartoonists matter.
When gunshots echoed down the streets of Paris and images of a blood soaked office hit the press – the world was shocked. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, had become ground zero for the violent core of cancel culture. Twelve people were killed including five cartoonists because they dared to poke fun at intolerant Islamic extremism. In particular, the cartoon in question mocked the relationship between fear and laughter.
‘A 100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!’
Well, there is nothing tyranny hates more than a good joke at its expense.
It wasn’t long before the press watered down their overwhelming support of Charlie Hebdo to a tepid, ‘well, maybe they deserved it?’ After all, particularly left-leaning publications went on to argue, the cartoons were hate speech. Blasphemy is a minefield for the modern left. On the one hand, they love to scorn the Christian religion as part of their wider Marxist portfolio, but where blasphemy crashes into Islam it interferes with the more powerful movement of identity politics.
In reality, blasphemy is a form of political rebellion against a system of authoritarianism. It is no different to Chinese teenagers mocking Xi Jinping with memes of Winnie the Pooh or unpleasant, satirical drawings of Marie Antoinette during the prelude of the French Revolution. Are satirical cartoons hate speech? Sure, but then, when did we decide that as humans we were not allowed to hate things that are dangerous to our survival or morally objectionable?
Cartoons are a warning – a buoy bobbing in the swell, outlining the shadow of a reef.
Yesterday, Johannes Leak found the outline of submerged political rocks right next to the boat. His cartoon, published in The Australian, depicted presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. In doing so, he highlighted a glaring hypocrisy inside the fabric of the Democratic party and boy are they mad about it.
The cartoon consists of two frames, the first is Joe Biden proclaiming, ‘It’s time to heal a nation divided by racism.’ In the next, Kamala Harris stands beside him and Biden continues, ‘So I’ll hand you over to this little brown girl while I go lie down for a while.’
Johannes found an uncomfortable truth and in one fell swoop an Australian cartoonist ruined the favourite propaganda of the Democratic party.
Since President Trump was elected, the Democrats have been stoking the fire of racial tension by ramping up their commitment to identity politics. There isn’t a single campaign but rather damaging shrapnel splitting the political landscape. Democrat mayors have thrown their support behind the Marxist movement Black Live Matter – a borderline Communist outfit that snapped off Black Power which has a habit of making white people kneel, demanding reparations and marauding through the city looting and burning. Less violent but more frightening, is the infestation of social politics inside universities that has brainwashed two generations of kids into thinking their value as a person is a tally of their race, gender, sexuality and class – an idea institutionalised by Democrats un-doing racial discrimination law to allow ‘positive’ discrimination.
Far from ‘healing a nation divided by racism’, the Democrats are at the centre of the push to radicalise race politics and change the conversation from one of class, to that of race. Anyone with a working knowledge of history knows the very last thing you do if you’re leading a nation is deliberately go looking for racial unrest.
Somehow or other, the Democrats never got this memo and when it came to picking Joe Biden’s running mate, they made an announcement that they would only be selecting a candidate from a pool of coloured women. Like it or not, at this moment the Democrats openly publicised that their selection process was not one of merit but rather a declaration of racial and sexual discrimination. By excluding the rest of the candidate field they strongly implied that women and people of colour were not capable of winning the coveted position themselves but, like all quota-based systems of employment, it is something the godly regime gifts to them.
Without realising it, Biden reduced Kamala Harris to a coat of paint on the side of his campaign bus.
Plenty of furious Australian journalists pointed out that the quote Johannes used was inaccurate. What Biden actually said, was this:
“This morning, little girls woke up across this nation — especially Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society — potentially seeing themselves in a new way: As the stuff of Presidents and Vice Presidents.”
Joe Biden
Setting aside how appalling it is that political leaders are now referring to people’s colour as a matter of habit or the insulting notion that it’s how people look that matters, not their achievements, the cartoon was never about the specific quote – it was about the collective ideology of the Democratic party.
For those who thought the cartoon was racist, I wonder if you consider cameras to be racist when they catch despicable actions on film? Are the journalists who document racism racist themselves for printing the crimes of others? If this Johannes Leak cartoon fiasco has taught us anything, it is that the left are like vampires – unable to see their monstrous reflection when the mirror is held up.
That is what cartoonists do; they mimic in order to mock.
Remember, at least forty-five churches were burned down when the printing presses at Charlie Hebdo resumed, but nobody burned a Christian church because of a blasphemous cartoon published in secular France. They burned churches because religion is at war with itself, as it has been for thousands of years and any excuse will do.
It is the same with the media storm we experienced yesterday, where even our taxpayer funded ABC sent out its advance guard of shills to cancel Johannes Leak and, if possible, their competition at The Australian. Anger directed at cartoonists comes from a place of weakness. Regimes, ideas, and political parties that know that their foundation is rotten are the first to reach out with claws in the direction of a cartoonist.
Humour is, after all, a beam of light pressing through a crack in a dusty window. It gets into otherwise complex ideologies and reveals their absurdity in a single frame. Making a citizen chuckle at tyranny is a form of unmatched power.
Identity politics is a serious business. It represents a new system of sorting human civilisation where the features of your birth assign you to a pre-determined glass ceiling. The meritless can climb over the invisible chains of intersectionality and all of a sudden, the Civil Rights movement is a smudge on a redacted paragraph.
When you’ve found a short-cut to the White House, the last thing a political movement wants is the world throwing their heads back in laughter as the lyrebird mocks.
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
ellymelly 