Rostock, Germany, 2007. Riot police (and helpers) ahead of a global summit of G-8 governments.
‘Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defence.’
Repressive governments are eager to crack down on dissent when they know they are being challenged. From their perspective, that’s the easy part. More complicated is when citizens mock their rulers. Authoritarianism and a sense of humour rarely go together. That’s where protesters can gain the upper hand – or at least find an excuse to laugh at their rulers or other powerful players (who, in turn, have little clue how to react).
‘Laughtivism’ – a reminder that serious issues can also be a laughing matter – can be a winning mixture, even in circumstances where there seems to be little prospect of change. Mischief and humour do not, by themselves, bring solutions. But they can help destroy the sense of invulnerability that unwanted rulers need in order to sustain themselves. For, as the Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak put it in 1978, in the end it turns out that ‘they are the ones who are afraid the most’.
PUTIN’S GUYS AND SIBERIAN DOLLS
In 2011, after eleven years in power, Vladimir Putin announced that he wanted to be president for an unprecedented third term, by creatively re-interpreting existing rules. For many Russians, this was the last straw, especially after evidence had emerged of electoral ballot-stuffing earlier that year. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Moscow and across the country, and many were arrested. But it turned out that the authorities weren’t just afraid of people.
An assortment of toys – including teddy bears, Kinder Surprise toys and South Park figurines – were planted in the snow in the Siberian city of Barnaul as substitute protesters and ambassadors of protest. The toys carried slogans like ‘I’m for clean elections’ and ‘A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin’.
‘Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently.’
ROSA LUXEMBURG
On the face of it, the dolls could hardly have been less threatening. But the authorities reckoned they represented an ‘unsanctioned public event’. They noted that the toys were ‘not citizens of Russia’ (‘especially the imported toys’). The protest was banned. Police recorded the slogans in their notebooks, and the action was shared on social media so that Russians could laugh at their rulers’ paranoia. For organizer Lyudmila Alexandrova, it was simple: ‘We wanted to show the absurdity and farce of officials’ struggles with their own people.’
Barnaul, Russia, January 2012. Cuddly toys in the Siberian snow were seen by the authorities as subversive. The action was deemed illegal.
‘You can deal with everything that is scary with laughter.’
‘JAMEEL’, DIRECTOR OF TOP GOON: DIARIES OF A LITTLE DICTATOR
In late 2011, when Syria was already descending into a spiral of violence, a group of courageous Syrians responded not by picking up guns but by creating a puppet show.
Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator included a pastiche of the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The excitable presenter of To Kill a Million referenced the uprisings and death tolls of previous competitors. ‘Hosni Mubarak reached three thousand dead! … Gaddafi reached twenty thousand dead! … And today … our new contestant, Bashar al-Assad!! [cheerful fanfare]. Our expectation is: he will kill a million!!!’
At that time, nobody could guess how close the satire would come to reality. But Syrians loved watching the series online, despite and because of its dark humour. The show’s director, ‘Jameel’ (a pseudonym), said the idea was to ‘break down the wall of fear’. In any case, he added, ‘It gets a little laugh.’
The assembled puppets of Top Goon and the chief villain ‘Beeshu’, with Assad’s distinctive features.
In 2013, the Top Goon marionettes performed live in the rebel-held town of Manbij, near Aleppo. Manbij was bombed by Assad’s forces as the show was about to begin. The timing of the attack seemed deliberate. But the show went ahead, creating what the performers described as ‘a haven in a storm even as tempestuous as Syria’s’.
Newer episodes of Top Goon: Reloaded address the failures by international politicians to confront the humanitarian catastrophe that has unfolded. Puppets tell truths that politicians on all sides are reluctant to hear.
DONKEY-HEADED
In the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, human rights activists are harassed or jailed for speaking out about the situation in their country. Even talking about the levels of corruption has become a criminal offence. It can seem difficult to imagine a way of confronting such asinine repression. But asinine became the defining word. In 2009, dissident bloggers organized a mock press conference, with a donkey as honoured guest.
‘In Azerbaijan, if you are donkey enough, you can succeed in probably everything,’ the donkey-head told a group of respectfully nodding journalists. ‘In Azerbaijan, I would try to be even donkeyer than before.’
There was only one glitch, the donkey admitted – that the government of Azerbaijan seems determined to silence the voices of civil society (including, the donkey implied, even the voices of well-meaning animals like himself). ‘It will be impossible for me,’ the donkey concluded sadly, ‘to have any social activity.’
‘Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.’
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The video of the mock press conference, with the reporters listening attentively to donkeyish absurdities, went viral. The organizers were jailed. After their release, donkey bloggers and prisoners of conscience Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli remained unrepentant. In Milli’s words, ‘Spending sixteen months in jail has, of course, made me stronger. It made me believe that the ideals I fight for are very powerful – because otherwise I would not have been put in jail.’
Azerbaijan, June 2009. A donkey holds a spoof press conference to highlight the absurd levels of repression of free speech.
‘I fight like hell to pay as little as possible.’
DONALD TRUMP
Around the world, wealthy individuals and companies go to great lengths to avoid paying much (or any) tax. Understandably, many people are unhappy that the rich can find legal ways of paying not more but less tax than average citizens.
In 2010, General Electric reported worldwide profits of $14 billion. More than a third of that came from the company’s operations in the United States. But, the New York Times reported, the multinational giant paid little or no US tax. Indeed, it claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. This ‘innovative accounting’, as the New York Times described it, caused unease. But nothing changed.
Then, however, came an apparent about-turn. Associated Press reported in 2011 that General Electric had had a change of heart. The corporation was intending, the news agency reported, to ‘repay its entire $3.2 billion tax refund’. The news caused rejoicing in some quarters. The markets, however, were unimpressed; GE’s stock value fell.
Luckily for General Electric, their version of ‘sanity’ was quickly restored. Their spokespeople jumped in to insist that the news story was false. In reality, they said, they had no intention of changing their tax procedures. Whereupon the share price jumped back up. Everything returned to what passed for normal. The responsibility for the ‘let’s do the decent thing’ stunt lay with the Yes Men, professional pranksters with an ethical bent, working together with the pressure group Tax Uncut. In the words of the Yes Men, ‘Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth.’
Inequality – and the reluctance of the wealthiest to pay the taxes that match their wealth – has been a growing theme around the world. In 2011, the protesters of Occupy Wall Street – and similar protests, including Los Indignados in Spain and Occupy movements worldwide – demanded change on behalf of ‘the 99 percent’, instead of the privileged and powerful 1 percent.
In 2016, millions of documents known as the ‘Panama Papers’ were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The document exposed the global tricks of tax evasion in more graphic detail than ever before. In Iceland, one in fifteen of the entire population of the country went on to the streets of Reykjavik, until the prime minister, who stood accused of hiding millions of dollars offshore, eventually resigned (still insisting he had done nothing wrong).
The pressures for tax reform – for corporations and wealthy individuals alike – continue to grow. In 2016, one enticing headline declared: ‘General Electric to Pay Taxes in Boston’. The story turned out to be an April Fool. But who knows: if pressure continues to grow, the fantasy might yet become a reality, in different contexts around the world.
Berlin, April 2016. Activists in suits – and, naturally, Panama hats – demand transparency in connection with revelations of tax evasion by the wealthy on an industrial scale.
‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
MILAN KUNDERA
It is sometimes claimed that all in China have long since forgotten the massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, when the Chinese army and security forces killed hundreds of peaceful protesters for daring to demand basic rights. The killings are officially denied. And, at the same time, they are said to be irrelevant to today’s concerns. Odd, then, that the authorities have banned a selection of words from internet searches – not just ‘Tiananmen massacre’, but also ‘anniversary’, ‘6/4’ and ‘1989’. But those who want to refer to the bloody anniversary still have a trick or two up their digital sleeves.
In China, one of the most forbidden images of all is the famous photograph of the lone man, armed with nothing but his courage and a plastic shopping bag, standing in front of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square. In June 2013, ahead of the anniversary of the killings, four yellow plastic ducks were digitally inserted into the photograph. The tanks were thus erased – and at the same time highlighted and remembered – with children’s bath toys. In a single gesture, those who cared about truth both mocked the censors and challenged the cover-up.
The hashtag #bigyellowduck became another way of referring to Tiananmen Square, thus avoiding the censors’ intrusive gaze. ‘Big yellow duck’ became the most popular search phrase on the Chinese social media site Weibo until search engines began to exclude the words, declaring that ‘according to relevant laws, statutes and policies’ the results of the search ‘cannot be shown’.
But it was clear where the small victory lay. In the words of one Twitter user, ‘Chinese netizens: 1, Chinese censors: 0’. Commemoration of the murder of hundreds of Chinese citizens can be prohibited. But the subject cannot be entirely suppressed.
