A cartoonist foresaw Hitler’s invasion of Poland. What about those working today?

Cartoonists won’t easily let go of that moment. Britain’s star cartoonist David Low got that war right, ahead of prime ministers and kings. For him, the war began unsurprisingly. Not that he had any mystical gift for predicting or mind reading. He had fewer illusions. As an adversarial cartoonist, he would habitually question and disbelieve. Also, given his professional standing, he worked with much autonomy for publisher Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. What he gave back to the paper was rigour.

David Low did better homework than his own government on the man who started the war. Adolf Hitler ordered German troops to march into Poland from the west at daybreak on September 1, 1939. In just over a fortnight, in choreographed timing, Soviet troops entered Poland from the east. Three days later, Low’s iconic cartoon appeared in the Evening Standard. Under the one-word title ‘Rendezvous’, two vastly dissimilar political entities, Hitler and Stalin, were on the same page in the same frame bowing to each other over a man lying dead on a Polish battlefield.

To the world, the Nazi and the Communist were sworn enemies till their non-aggression pact went public. The deal was announced just a week before Hitler struck. Low had no inkling on what led up to the instant bonding. But when it occurred, he wasn’t shaken, having sized up the players over the years. Both would do exactly what suited them. The cartoon said it.

There was nothing hurried or slapdash about the drawing. The artwork had all that one associates with the master – riveting composition, rehearsed brush strokes and gestural language in perfect sync with the message. Which was that big guys can violate national borders jointly or severally. A series of such violations ensued to build up a war worldwide.

Low was a known critic of his own PM, the conflict-averse Neville Chamberlain. “War” wasn’t a word the cartoonist shied away from. He had more than hinted at it in the weeks and months before the outbreak, so much so that friends of the PM had called him a warmonger. Across the maritime border, Goebbels agreed that the cartoonist was an alarmist and must be restrained. Hitler’s propaganda minister did know the truth which was that Britain’s PM was more clueless than its cartoonist. To cut a long story short, Chamberlain went down appeasing the German regime. Low celebrated the exit with a gleeful drawing of a Nazi tiger with swastika stripes. The well-fed creature is in post-prandial repose with the prime ministerial remains strewn around — dentures, moustache, and the ubiquitous umbrella.

In the annals of cartooning, this is an oft-repeated success story. In a world yet to recover from its first big war, a young cartoonist zeroes in on the one who would start the second. Is anything like that happening now, when the world has shrunk too much to keep secrets? Did any contemporary cartoonist anticipate Putin’s strike the way Low foresaw Hitler’s? Today, the world over, cartoonists are digitally savvy. They couldn’t have missed much. They have been following Putin as well as Low and his peers tracked Hitler.

Putin has been around since 2000, a good 22 years and he is by no means low key. He lacks the toothbrush moustache but offers a lot more to the caricaturist. While the German Chancellor was almost always seen in formal military wear, the Kremlin celeb goes about bare-bodied on trips to catch pike and battle bears. Cartoonists often fill up the torso with tattoos. He was the biggest cartoonist’s delight till a bigger challenger popped up. In 2017 President Donald Trump appeared and the global cartooning space got seriously contested for the next four years. Trump packed a surfeit of everyday misanthropy into his presidency, enough to exhaust the cartoonist.

“Oh, good lord”, was Pulitzer winner Ann Telnaes’ reaction the day after the election of Donald Trump, “when it dawned on me that I would be serving my year as the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists during the same time as the guy who wanted to ‘open up’ libel laws and weaken the First Amendment so he could sue journalists more easily.” A year into Trump’s presidency, she bemoaned that there was not a single day she could keep the man out of the cartoon. Putin had been squarely beaten.

The Russian supremo had better luck with Patrick Chappatte, perhaps the most globally watched editorial cartoonist today. Born in Karachi to a Lebanese mother and Swiss father, raised in Singapore and Switzerland, the 55-year-old works out of Los Angeles and Switzerland. Can’t get more global than that and true to form, he did try to set universal standards by letting Putin in whenever he could. Even so, most days Trump clung to the cartoon. When finally, he was voted out in 2020, it was the pandemic that came into cartooning focus. Putin waited for the virus to recede.

The last century was good to cartoonists. It gave them a world war to hone their skills on tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin and apply these skills to question all authority including what prevailed in labelled democracies. The practitioners were far from kind to Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon and the Bushes. But none confounded the cartoonist more than Donald Trump. How do you cartoon a caricature who distorts everything he touches?

Unlike David Low, the jaunty New Zealander who went to work in pre-war London, it is a demoralised cartoonist who faces the war on Ukraine. Hardly the state of mind to sit back and reflect, leave alone predict.

(ep.unny@expressindia.com)