October 17, 2006
UN Hosts Cartooning For Peace 10/16
The United Nations
hosted a full-day conference called Cartooning For Peace: The Responsibility of Political Cartoonists yesterday. It was the fifth in their series of "Unlearning Intolerance" seminars and you can find a 2.5-hour webcast of the event
here.
A decent round-up of the opinions offered up
can be found here. It's hard for me to comment, since I agree with people a lot more politically strident than I am that the notion seemingly represented by Jean Plantu in the statement "We have a job to be more sensitive" is achingly dumb, and it's difficult to articulate why without bringing in some political detritus with which I don't agree.
Basically, though: the reason this seminar hits the wires is because of the
Danish Cartoons Controversy. I object to the line of reasoning that casts what happened earlier this year as some sort of pure confrontation of First Causes -- Free Speech Vs. Religious Freedom -- as the historical record suggests that a very specific sequence of political moves played a critical role in the shape, size and severity of the riots, protests and political turmoil. This kind of summary thinking, divorced from vital detail, not only serves to alter history in a way that should put a knot in our stomachs, I believe it legitimizes a chain of permission that makes it more likely for this kind of thing to happen again.
So if we have to have a UN seminar on these matters, right up there with "We have a job to be more sensitive," if not supplanting it outright, needs to be some thinking along the lines of "Perhaps we should not participate in provocative editorial stunts without thinking through how that can be used to awful results." I might end up disagreeing with both notions, but at least one has a firmer connection to the awful reality of people dying over a set of cartoons.
posted 2:16 am PST |
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