How to Save the West from Islam
The founding legal code of Rome, the Twelve Tables, made mockery of high-status individuals a capital offense. When Augustus became Rome’s first emperor, he went further and turned insulting the ruler into treason. Under that law, a famous orator named Cassius Severus was forced to watch his books burned in public before being banished to a barren island for the rest of his life. Under the next emperor, Tiberius, a historian named Cremutius Cordus was put on trial for calling Brutus, Julius Caesar’s assassin, “the last of the Romans.” He starved himself to death while the Senate ordered every copy of his work destroyed. Even Ovid, the most celebrated poet of the age, the Shakespeare of Rome, was banished to the edge of the known world for writing a poem.
Even Athens, the birthplace of democracy and supposedly of free expression, had its limits. The playwright Aristophanes, the father of political comedy, was hauled into court by Cleon, the most powerful politician in the city, for the crime of making Athens look bad in one of his plays. And the same democracy that invented satire forced Socrates, its greatest philosopher, to drink poison, for disrespecting the gods of the city. Further east, the Great King of Persia required every man who approached him to perform proskynesis, to throw himself face-down on the ground, the posture of worship. When Alexander the Great conquered Persia and adopted the practice for himself, his own court philosopher, Callisthenes, refused to bow. He did not survive the refusal.
In 1579, an English writer named John Stubbs published a pamphlet objecting to Queen Elizabeth’s plan to marry a French Catholic prince. For that, the state laid his right hand on a block and severed it with a cleaver. Fifty years later, a lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book attacking the theater as immoral, at the very moment the Queen of England happened to be enjoying performing in court plays. Reading his book as an insult to her, the state cropped off his ears. And in France, a young writer was thrown into the Bastille, the royal prison, for circulating verses that mocked the man ruling the country. His name was Voltaire, the future giant of the Enlightenment, and his career in free thought began in a cell for the crime of a joke. Europe had a legal name for this crime: lèse-majesté, literally, “injured majesty.” To mock the ruler was treated as sacrilege, as violence against something holy.
Power has never feared the sword as much as it fears the joke. An assassin can kill a king, but the king dies a king, a martyr, even. A satirist makes the king ordinary. He drags the throne down to eye level, where everyone can see that the man sitting on it sweats, lies, lusts, and fears like everyone else. Armies can be defeated and replaced. Awe, once punctured, never fully reinflates.
This is why every despotism in history has criminalized laughter. Ridicule is a solvent. It dissolves the invisible substance that authoritarian power is actually made of, not tanks, not treasuries, but sanctity.
Any figure protected from criticism, satire, and ridicule becomes, in practice, a god. It does not matter what the figure is called, king, führer, general secretary, supreme leader, prophet. The moment mockery of him becomes dangerous, he has crossed the line from the human to the divine. Sanctity is not an attribute. It is an enforcement mechanism. Nothing is sacred except that which you are punished for profaning.
The Civilization That Sanctified No One
Around the tenth century before Christ, the king of Israel took another man’s wife, impregnated her, and arranged for her husband to be killed at the front to cover it up. This was standard behavior for a Bronze Age monarch; the pharaohs and the kings of Babylon did worse before breakfast, and their court scribes recorded only their glory. But into David’s throne room walked a prophet named Nathan, a man with no army and no title, and he told the king a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. When David burned with anger at the thief, Nathan pointed at him and said: “You are the man.”