It seems more to me that Alice spent many years denigrating Bob’s car. Spent a lot of time telling the public how Bob drives around an ugly, beat up Geo Prism, and how it’s just a stupid and unreliable piece of garbage. Then when she posted a photo of a Geo Prism, Bob went apeshit and ran her over.
Speech and vandalism are very different phenomena. We don’t even have to worry about whether Bob had a right to be angry, or whether he was provoked. That’s still not the important thing here. It’s not Alice causing damage to the car sparking things off. It’s entirely Bob choosing to be offended by words Alice said all along.
It detracts from the real issue at hand, which isn’t whether Charb was nice or had a valid message. The real issue is that people are being killed by fanatics for saying things. Cross-examining Charb’s work here is pretty much victim blaming if you ask me. It’s looking for reasons to feel better about the fact that people were killed because religious people felt like they weren’t getting the respect they deserved. Arguing over whether Charb was nasty doesn’t make a difference here, and they have just as much of a right to say shitty bigoted things as anyone else.
It’s more like for years people kept throwing bricks through the windows of Bob’s car. All sorts of people. The local mayor, businessmen, hoodlums, teachers, policemen, doctors, judges, and plenty of other people besides. Sometimes the bricks had notes attached - telling him that Geo Prism drivers go to hell, or should get out of town, or threatening him or his family.
Then, if we take the lenient view, one day Alice decided that she’d had enough of people picking on Bob so she made a fake brick out of foam rubber, and took a photo of herself throwing it at Bob’s car, then mailed copies to everyone.
Of course, when Bob spotted her crossing the road and ran her over, he was wrong. But under the circumstances it’s difficult to see how he is supposed to have recognized that unlike all the others, Alice’s actions weren’t an attack or an exhortation to attack.
What I’m saying is: I think everyone’s already formed their opinion on whether CH was offensive or not, and that the offensiveness of their expression only factors into the history of CH’s reputation, but doesn’t have any bearing on their place in the shootings. The reason being that the responsibility for violent acts are on the ones who commit those acts, and not on an instigator’s speech unless that speech was directly threatening to the individual (eg cases of assault that resulted in the victim harming/killing their assailant.)
In any case, the place for offensiveness in discourse and expressed speech doesn’t have much importance in discussion than the actions people take, especially when they hear such speech. Basically, since you can’t censor what people say (notwithstanding that some media submits to censorship, although not all media.) it’s far more important that everyone understands that violence isn’t an acceptable response to speech.
Either we’re talking about the history of CH, or we’re talking about the killings back in January, but to say that the offensiveness/nature of their non-violent speech (IE human individuals aren’t being explicitly threatened with credibly executable violence) is acceptable as part of the explanation for the violence they encountered only serves to offer a justification to the individuals who committed the violence. In other words, discussing CH’s vileness (“they punch down”, “they insulted the prophet”, “they had issues with antisemitic speech”) seems to me like going over reasons why we can feel justified in not being outraged about the elephant in the room.
Actually, that image makes more sense from my research of CH than a lot of the discussion so far.
A lot of the discussion I have seen (yes, I’m trying to be cognizent of the fact that I don’t know everything about this issue, and I’m sorry about prior absolutism) splits down to either:
people giving each other HJ’s over how bad and nasty CH was, as if that’s a justification for what happened to them.
people decrying how muslims are all evil devil-worshipers who are out to destroy the world, and this is just another sign of that.
people not giving any f’s about the social standing of CH, and not caring whether they were anti-semites or real satirists, but instead focusing on the fact that people are being killed because of their non-violent speech, and that such violence is horrifically fucked up, and that society shouldn’t tolerate that kind of violence ever.
atheist groups taking this as an opportunity to show solidarity, and either conceding no-true-scottsman fallacies, or saying that since muslims were the killers, islam is 100% harmful to everyone to the same extent that muslim terrorists are harmful to the innocent victims.
I side with the third camp because I’d rather focus on the root issue to what happened than fuck around talking about CH’s history, or spending time denigrating religions (as much of an anti-theist as I am, I think this is an issue for the secular state and secular attitudes to intervene and point out that reason-based laws are being violated to a mind-baffling degree here, and that it doesn’t matter whether or not the motives for such a violation are religious or based in a grudge.)
I think that’s a simplistic view of things, and I’m always amazed at how often people can’t accept the difference between explaining and excusing. The reason that the shootings occurred is a lot more complicated than some evil extremists that materialised out of nowhere and a repugnant strain of humour. In a different set of social circumstances, the same jokes might not have been so easy to construe as offensive, for a start.
However, a reflexive defense of free speech with no other examination of the circumstances (and in fact France has cracked down on free speech rather than defending it, turning into a ‘defense of free speech that the status quo find acceptable’) does nothing to solve the problem. Teachers were telling their classes to say ‘Je suis Charlie’. Kids who refused has been expelled and have had visits from the police. So I don’t think the ‘Je suis Charlie’ defense of free speech is in fact a very honest one.
Here’s my point of ignorance. I don’t know that happened or not, and while I’m glad you’ve brought that to my attention, I need to research that further.
In any case, I think that knee-jerk reactions are still prevalent regarding this topic, and while I know that I can’t stop myself from acting out of emotion, and that emotion contaminates my reasoning, I’d rather be upset and hyperfocus on a constitutional issue of liberty rather than on the adversarial religion-secularism angle, nor should I attempt to evaluate the satire because of numerous reasons, some of them being: I’m not French, nor familiar with French culture, I can’t get a handle on CH’s history with any objectivity in sources (I’m having a hard time balancing what I hear, read and see), and I don’t know to a great extent the history of islam in France, so I’m disadvantaged from that socio-cultural standpoint as well.
If I may elaborate on my personal position (not an excuse, but an explanation, and yes, I’m acutely aware of the implications of possible hypocrisy I’m showing):
I’m an (christian fundie) apostate. I am blasphemy by simply existing at all. Yet I am not stoned to death. By the reckoning of the three abrahamic religions, there are adequate grounds to kill me by religious adherents.
What I see happened to CH is no different than if the pastor or one of the congregants of the neighborhood church decided to go out by a glock and shoot me to death where I work, because I said things that contradict their religious doctrine, even if what I was saying was in their service and they were simply confused.
That I was actually defending them in an obtuse way that they mistook for offense against them makes the issue that they killed me for my speech any better.
And while I recognize that there are complicated relationships between satire/media/secular society and the religious adherents who are also embedded in the society, the very rules of the society say being offended by speech isn’t grounds to kill anyone, and explaining why the perpetrators were offended mistakenly doesn’t help the situation any more than saying “oh, that LDoBe guy made the christians angry by saying mean shit while trying to be funny, so they killed him. He probably shouldn’t have said those mean things, even though he meant well.”
It keeps hitting me like people saying “she always was a slutty dresser, it was inevitable that she got raped eventually.”
It was funny, and still is to those who are aware of the codes. These codes used to be common knowledge, now they’re not. The codes Charlie Hebdo uses are not arcane to those who live in the culture. They’re as accessible as National Lampoon is for people who remember the 70s.
As noted, the Lampoon may be a case of satire that veers into actual racism. Racists, even today, pull the ‘satire’ card, and are sometimes called on it. Sometimes non-racists are called on it. As I said, if it was easy…
It’s become an article of faith among the Charlie Hebdo that, being satirical, they are incapable of actually being racist or insulting, and that anything seemingly racist or insulting is actually making fun of the other guys.
The problem with this argument is that it’s non-falsifiable. Someone can be as racist as possible, and you can always say “no no, their just being satirical and making fun of racists.”
Certainly they have been satirical with many of their cartoons, such as with their seemingly-racist cartoon about Christiane Taubira which was widely-misinterpreted.
But their first real foray into “controversial” Muslim cartoons was back in 2006, when they republished the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons.
In what way was that actually making fun of the anti-Muslims?
It’s possible to be satirical and deliberately make fun of/insult Muslims. The whole point that many of their defenders repeat is that they’re equal-opportunist offenders. Well, you can’t both claim that and also claim that they never deliberately offend Muslims, and that any perceived offense against Muslims is actually just offending anti-Muslims.
Exactly. It’s possible to believe that the CH comics were offensive, stupid, unfunny, insulting, and irresponsible, but at the same time believe that they should not be prevented from doing so by the government and should not have been gunned down in their offices.
Similarly, it’s a reasonable position to condemn the killings, and at the same time condemn CH for publishing the comics to begin with. Note that I don’t say they are responsible for their own deaths and I don’t say they should have been prevented from publishing their comics by the government.
Note also that my opinion of the comics is not relevant here. I’m not arguing that they are or are not appropriate, or funny, or insulting, or reasonable, or other. Just that people can have their own opinions on it, and even though those opinions may be critical, it doesn’t mean they support the killings.
Hell, some people like Garfield. Live and let live, you know?
I get the whole ‘don’t speak ill of the dead’ thing, but I also think that the conversation about whether the CH comics were stupid or not is a reasonable one to have. When’s the right time to do so?
Everyone, based on their own criteria, which informs their own reaction to it. And then if they feel strongly about it, they can endlessly debate the merits of their view at any volume they desire.
I am my own fun police.
As long as they don’t shoot people while they’re doing so, I think the debate itself is valuable.
Trudeau is no more saying that Hebdo artists deserves to be killed, than Boiling is saying that Trudeau deserves to be killed.
Just because an artist died for his beliefs, does not mean that his critics now have no more freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not mean a world without criticism, a world where people aren’t allowed to react to what others say.
Well, I’d be really interested in hearing more about how they’ve signalled that they don’t really mean it in some of the famous cartoons - because it’s pretty clear that not all of French society is privy to that information either (and I don’t mean only the shooters). Whether that supports a narrative of social exclusion or of Islamic fifth-columnism is probably up for grabs, I guess.
And yeah, bullying/discriminatory humour often gets excused as ‘satire’ (“You know, like in Top Gear?!”); in the UK, the term used is usually ‘banter’. The user/excuser who uses this word is automatically definitely a total bellend.
