THE STORMER COMIC TRIAL IN SEPTEMBER 1981
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How the anti-fascist magazine SEARCHLIGHT viewed the background to the creation of THE STORMER comic in May 1981, four months before my trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London in September. I was convicted of "aiding and abetting, counselling and procuring the publication of material likely to incite racial hatred" and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. 

Link to The Art of Controversy review

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From the press 
 
 
"The Stormer was a controversial one-shot comic published in the early eighties. Copies of it were left outside school gates in batches of fifty. Amongst its strips was "Sambo! The Chocolate-Coloured Coon", which ended with the title character being burnt by his classmates, who wore Ku Klux Klan uniforms. 

A complaint was made by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1979. The cartoonist was summoned to Old Street Magistrates court 18 months later, to be referred to Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London for trial.

Political commentator Martin Barker wrote that The Stormer "took delight in portraying a bomb being thrown in the faces of black people", but questioned its worth as propaganda on the grounds that only people who were already racist would find it appealing. Times journalist Paul Hoggart described The Stormer as a "sick" variation of more mainstream educational comics: "Green Cross Man instils road prudence, birth-control advice for teenage girls is given in picture-strip stories, and at the sick end of the scale, a racist organization recently circulated a comic called Stormer about burning a black boy." 

The comic's artist, Robert Edwards, was in September 1981 put in prison for his work. He was sentenced to 12 months imprisonmen 

t for "aiding and abetting, counselling and procuring the publication of material likely to incite racial hatred". 

 



The following is my version of events and the people involved, most of whom are now dead. I pleaded not guilty for some very good reasons as will be revealed. Aiding and abetting, counselling and procuring being the most contentious points. "Likely" to incite racial hatred is another anomaly in this ill-conceived law as no evidence is required to convict.All that is required is a complaint and the main complaint came from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.Some people might ask why is Edwards going on about an incident that goes back 35 years and for which he served a 12 month sentence. Surely it is all now water under the bridge and so forth. Who cares, you might ask? I feel that it is now the time to raise it again after the Charlie Hebdo publicity a few years ago when the cry then was that we must have freedom of expression in the West and that cartoonists, in particular, are a special group of people who need to be protected. Indeed, they went further to claim that we have this freedom of expression while other parts of the world do not. That satire is a peculiar Western thing which, if it offends anyone, then too bad ... because it is part of Western (European) tradition. The magazine Charlie Hebdo is notorious for offending most sections of society through the medium of caricature and has this impunity. Added to this, an immunity from criticism, you could say.In the late 1970s, I embarked on a project designed to shock and possibly show how far you can go using the medium of the cartoon in the worst possible taste. Many cartoonists in the past have indulged themselves this way, notably the American 'underground' cartoonist Robert Crumb with his When the Blacks Took Over the US and a similar strip exaggerating Jewish power in the United States. He was later commissioned to provide the artwork for an illustrated version of the Bible. But, then, the United States jealously guards its Constitution and the bit about freedom of expression.We have no such protection in Britain.
I had no ideas regarding the purpose of this enterprise and simply designed the frames for the cartoon strips. But the masthead, with its title, was to come first. Der Sturmer was to be the model for the title's striking front page ... as shocking as possible. I confess, it was an exercise in bad taste for the sheer hell of it. Now, today, there is a campaign by oppressive Leftists to eradicate anything of which they do not approve. Wokeism is from the darker corners of the United States and has now impregnated the Tech Giants.
 
to be continued

This web page is maintained by Robert Edwards