A Low cautionary tale

Do you know David Low's cartoons?

Low was a New Zealander who spent most of his working life in Britain. There he developed a style of sharp satirical cartoons on the politics of his time - particularly from the 1920s through to the postwar period - which can still be counted on to generate smiles. More to the point, they have a quality which makes them highly relevant today.

Keeping the hate fires burning in 1920
to block the League of Nations

For instance, he ridiculed the inability of the powers of his time to give the League of Nations - forerunner of the United Nations - any real clout as an organisation to preserve international peace after the bloodbath of the First World War. Instead, the most powerful nations, in his words, seemed to want to "keep the hate fires burning".

He saw the tariffs imposed on imports by the US as nothing short of an aggressive act - and hypocritical too, given American demands on Europe. Indeed, Low would point out later that it's hard to expect to earn income from exports to, say, Europe if you're starving Europe of the funds they need to buy their imports. Counterproductive, you might say.

1929: tariffs can be as aggressive as an act of war

This cartoon, of tariffs as a gigantic artillery piece, was drawn in July 1929, only three months before the US economy was brought down by the great Wall Street crash. That might just be a lesson for Trump supporters wanting to make America "great again" by abandoning free trade raising protective tariff barriers, as they have done just recently.

Nationalism was a recipe for disaster to Low. In 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany, he satirised the powers who, on a raft of "world statesmanship" with nobody rowing, adrift on chaotic seas of economic nationalism, debated whether to pull together but failed to do so.

In 1933, the powers fail to pull together against the chaos
of economic nationalism

The result was that "Civilisation 1933" was reduced to a series of nations hiding in their own molehills, refusing not only to work with together but even to see each other.

Civilisation in 1933: the nations down their boltholes

Low painted a dismal picture of the world. But isn't it sadly similar to today's? Where the League of Nations was being undermined in the twenties and thirties, today Britain is setting out to undermine another institution for international collaboration, the EU, by pulling out and retreating into economic nationalism. The same economic nationalism Low saw as a source of chaos in the 1920s. Meanwhile, in Trump the US has a President committed to isolation behind tariff walls, and even physical walls along its borders. Other nations too have hard right parties keen to emulate the American and British examples of isolationism.

In some cases, indeed, it isn't just the hard right. The far left sometimes come close to the far right in its commitment to nationalist economics. There is a trend on the left in Britain, for instance, indistinguishable from the populist right in its commitment not just to Brexit but to a hard Brexit.

Oh, well. Perhaps today's nationalists have forgotten that back then, isolationism led to rather a spot of bother in Europe between 1939 and 1945. After all, these aren't the only lessons nationalists and xenophobes have forgotten, with Muslims attacked today as Jews were in Low's times. Walls between peoples are going up as quickly as those between nations. 

Colonel Jessop, powerfully portrayed by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, proclaims, "we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns." As Low showed in 1929, those guns don't have to be actual firearms - economic measures can be just as damaging. But let's not forget that ultimately the problems of the thirties led to a shooting war with real guns - that particular spot of bother left between 50 and 80 million dead.

The charm of Low's cartoons is that they provide us a satirical smile along with a cautionary lesson on the sad effects of going down that road again.