HUMOUR AND CENSORSHIP by Harry McAvinchey

Humour is a hugely powerful and significant tool. Satire and  its efficacy at deflating the   pomposity, barbarianism and anti-intellectualism  of bloated   persons, states  or regimes  has always been an tool of cartoonists and  writers. The kind of people who fear knowledge  will always ban books and censor films and art. Their philistinism will at times even stretch to violence and outright lawlessness.

We’ve seen this behaviour once -again , today in the assault on  the Paris office of the  French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo”, killing 12 people and injuring seven in an apparent Islamist attack. That’s like bombing the offices of “Private Eye” or “Mad” magazine or  attacking any comedian for cracking a joke. It’s like gunning down Eddie Izzard because you didn’t care for a joke he told. If that is what  Islam’s answer to laughter is , it’s a form of ungovernable lunacy and needs to be addressed. Apparently the attackers shouted that they had avenged the Prophet Mohammed. Well that’s like something Doctor Doom would shout at the Fantastic Four in a Marvel Comic, isn’t it ? It’s the kind of thing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby might have written and drawn to entertain with their own brand of modern mythology . Let’s just remember what is real and what is in  fact unreality  and  the fantastical imaginings of some very disturbed minds . It’s one thing believing in a blessed deity or ancient prophet or “holy” man in a vague poetic way , but it is a step into madness to believe that the  blurred poetry of some ancient thinker  is something to be defended by some murderous act here on planet earth. .Like I’ve said before , religion is a private landscape, best kept within the boney carapace of the skull

In the case of the killings in Paris today , it is an attack on free thinking and free speech . These murderous people  are the same kind of  disturbed individuals who can attack school-children in a school for daring to learn, We already have some insight into this kind of behaviour in Norneverland  and how emotionally uneducated people can be led into violence by religion and now we can  see the ultimate result in the deaths of these cartoonists and journalists when  democracy and modernism is under siege by  extreme fundamentalists.

These people do not understand humour or they are very afraid of it.