After the initial, immediate shock and outrage over the Charlie Hebdo murders last week, an undercurrent of contrarian ambivalence began seeping through some of the commentaries I was seeing, both on social media and in the mainstream North American press.
An increasing number of commentators — not a majority, but a sizable minority — began to dump on Charlie Hebdo as being a publication not worthy of our support, even though the authors of these comments deplored the deaths themselves. “I am not Charlie” is the go-to hashtag for this view.
Charlie Hebdo, according to them, is itself a poisonous purveyor of racist, intolerant hate. Nobody in North America has actually said it, as far as I can see, but the underlying, unspoken message seems to be that, in its own way and on the opposite end of the political-religious spectrum, Charlie Hebdo is almost as bad and just as hateful as the murderous fundamentalist extremists who massacre people for their cartoons.
When Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed in 2011 (with no casualties), some French commentators actually did say, more or less, “They deserved it.”
I obviously disagree vehemently with them, but I’m not going to get involved in that argument right now. If you want relevant counter views to that position, here are links to two French writers’ blogs, one aimed at American critics of Charlie Hebdo and one at British.
(And before you start yapping at my heels — yes, I find some of the Charlie Hebdo drawings very unpleasant, downright hurtful too. So what? Read on.)
In fact, Charlie Hebdo not only acknowledged — and dismissed — such criticism, it defiantly revelled in it. After the 2011 firebombing, Charlie Hebdo began running a tag line on its cover that said “Journal Irresponsable” — Irresponsible Publication.
Instead of me trying to explain why it’s so important to defend free speech — all free speech, not just the particular variety you or I approve — I’m going to quote some of the greatest (and perhaps some of the more subversive) minds of Western civilization on the subject. Hopefully their words will resonate more than mine.
As for me, je suis Charlie — still.
By the way, here’s a link to a good New York Times article giving an inside look at how the first post-massacre issue of Charlie Hebdo came together.
(And, yes, I know the “massacre” of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris pales in comparison to the 1,000-2,000 Nigerians slaughtered by Boko Haram — with relatively little world reaction — in towns and villages near Lake Chad around the same time. But a massacre is a massacre, a horrendous slaughter, regardless of scale. And both massacres were part of the same jihadist assault on the non-jihadist world.)
As we go through this, I’m going to drop in photos of some of the better-known Charlie Hebdo covers — and some you probably haven’t seen before because, well, they’re offensive.
Much as we like to boast about our traditions of freedom on this side of the Atlantic, we actually have a much lower tolerance for real freedom of expression than most European countries do.
And, much as I hate to say it, I’ve chosen not to show many Charlie Hebdo covers — that’s covers, not even inside cartoons, which are often worse! — because they were just too offensive for even me. I’ve imposed censorship and attempted to curtail free speech as surely as any jihadist or despot of another stripe. We all have a long way to go.
I think most people know Voltaire’s famous dictum:
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
(And it really is a Voltaire quote, despite what some trolls will say.)
Not so many people know Oscar Wilde’s amendment:
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
And that’s the point: One doesn’t have to be right to have the right to say something.
Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, murdered last week.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” — George Orwell
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” — George Washington
“The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” — George Orwell again
“Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.” — Albert Einstein
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — Harry Truman
“If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.” — Stephen King in a 1992 guest column in the Bangor Daily News
“Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.” — Neil Gaiman
It’s probably a good time to remind ourselves of the words of Nazi resister Martin Niemöller (one version of Niemöller’s words, anyway — he said much the same thing in a variety of ways over the years):
“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
“Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor, had been a supporter of the Nazis in the late 1920s because of his strong anti-communism. But when the Nazis seized power in 1933 and Niemöller finally realized how monstrous they were, he organized opposition to Hitler among (some) church leaders. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 and survived the next eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps before being freed by the Allies in 1945. After the war, Niemöller was much criticized for his early support of Hitler and slowness to resist the persecution of Jews, communists and other “enemies of the state.” He always admitted his guilt and expressed profound regret for not having stood against evil from the beginning.
“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.” — Philip Pullman, who wrote a fictionalized biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ. Pullman is also the Carnegie Medal-winning author of best-selling children’s books.
“Most people do not really want others to have freedom of speech; they just want others to be given the freedom to say what they want to hear.” — South African philosopher and social critic Mokokoma Mokhonoana, himself a satirist and cartoonist who has been vilified and threatened for his work as well.
“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.” — Christopher Hitchens.
Regardless of what you or I or the great (and subversive) thinkers of history have to say, the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre will keep putting out their offensive publication, attacking, ridiculing, defaming and scandalously portraying targets of every political, religious, sexual, ethnic, social, cultural and judicial rank and variety.
As for their new-found sympathy and popularity, the Charlie Hebdo crew are not counting on that to last and certainly aren’t seduced by it.
Here’s what Dutch cartoonist Bernard Holtrop, a Charlie Hebdo mainstay who was not present at the time of the attack, said a few days ago:
“Wij kotsen op al die mensen die nu ineens zeggen dat ze onze vrienden zijn.”
(We throw up on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.)
But, in the end, my very favourite quote comes from Renald Luzier, the cartoonist known as Luz, whose drawing is the cover illustration for this week’s Charlie Hebdo.
Luz had missed the editorial meeting where his colleagues were murdered because last Wednesday was his birthday; he stayed late in bed with his wife that morning and had stopped to buy a cake on the way to work. He arrived at the Charlie Hebdo offices soon after the attack.
And here are his words:
” I was saved by love and gluttony.”
I think I’ll get that printed on a T-shirt as my own personal Charlie Hebdo tribute and as a celebration of life.
I was saved by love and gluttony.
Je suis Charlie.