In the wake of the horrific attack on the offices of the
French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,
many have adopted the slogan “Je suis Charlie,” expressing solidarity with the
beleaguered magazine. At the same time, there has been push-back against the
slogan because Charlie’s cartoons often
leave readers uncomfortable. I don’t pretend to add much to this debate, but do want to
underscore three points often lost in the discussion.
When Le Monde said “We are all Americans”
after 9/11,
nobody took this to mean that the newspaper supported everything Americans do
and have done. By the same token saying “je suis Charlie” does not imply you
agree with everything Charlie Hebdo ever
published, nor even with broad patterns in its coverage and satire. Indeed,
regular contributors to the magazine did not always agree with everything it
published.
At the same time, the widespread, rather un-thinking, chorus
of “Je suis Charlie” risks turning Charlie Hebdo into a symbol, in a way its
regular contributors, not surprisingly, detest (Luz, Willem). So it is worth thinking a bit more about what it is about Charlie that you support, and acting on that.
As a common formulation of what satire is supposed to aim for, this describes much of what Charlie aims to do. There
is, then, a certain hypocrisy in criticizing the magazine for allegedly "afflicting the afflicted" (i.e. targeting weaker groups
in society). After all, the magazine itself is, at the moment,
undeniably “afflicted”. Kicking them while they are down because they are
deemed to have been guilty of the same sin is uncharitable, at best.
Moreover, religious beliefs do not fit neatly into this dichotomy. Certainly Islam, as such, is hardly afflicted: it
is a global religion, it is the second religion in France,
and many of its adherents are immensely wealthy and powerful. At the same time, many Muslims in France disproportionately find themselves on the lower rungs of the
socio-economic ladder.
So when Charlie publishes a cartoon poking fun at certain
features of Islamic doctrine, is it punching up (at a successful religion whose authorities do not like being questioned), or down (at poor people for whom
religion is central to their identity)?
Significantly, Charlie’s cartoons lampooning Islam generally
attempt to be careful not to focus on particular non-religious characteristics of its adherents. For
this reason, Joe Sacco’s comparing such cartoons to his drawing (as a deliberate provocation) “a Jew counting his money in the entrails of the working class” misses the point:
There is an enormous difference between believing that some people, simply by
birth, share characteristics worth criticizing, and believing that some people
subscribe to a particular interpretation of a religion that is worth criticizing.
Charlie’s cartoons are vulgar, puerile, smug. Often they appear designed to be crude and
provocative merely for the sake of being so, rather than in order to make a
deeper point. However, the level of offensiveness is very context-specific. It
is very difficult for outsiders to interpret political cartoons, and many observers
have jumped to erroneous conclusions about some widely-republished
Charlie cartoons (as Olivier Tonneau nicely points out).
Claims that the magazine is systematically racist or
xenophobic have come almost exclusively from people living outside France
who have not bothered actually to look at the evidence, relying instead on
what they have read or seen second- or third-hand (I've decided not even to bother linking to some of these misguided rants). Fortunately, the covers of Charlie Hebdo are available for anyone to look at.
By my count, over the past 100 issues, 39 of these covers have attacked
mainstream French politicians (mostly president François Hollande), 13 have
targeted the French far right (mostly Marine le Pen and the Front National), 18
take aim at French VIPs, 10 at Christianity (mostly the Vatican), 6 at
xenophobia, 6 at Islam, and 5 at anti-semitism (some of these are
double-counted). Less common targets include sexism (3) and racism (2).
The picture that emerges is of a virulent distaste for any
kind of authority — religious or otherwise — that prefers obedience to
questioning. (As Scott Sayare notes in the Atlantic, “Charlie Hebdo preaches a stringent interpretation of laïcité”)
If your favoured authority is among those attacked, you may find Charlie quite
offensive. Fortunately, most people, including the vast, overwhelming majority
of Muslims, simply ignore or laugh off such offense.
Some people, however, are either unable or unwilling to
laugh off any perceived offense. Allowing such sociopathic, humorless,
irrational zealots — call them shits,
for short — determine what can and cannot be published is a
losing proposition. (A relevant example in the present context: the 1977 movie The
Message did everything it could to avoid giving offense, but still failed to satisfy the shits). Declaring “je ne suis pas Charlie” on the grounds that
its cartoons were likely to set off some shits is thus a very bad idea. First,
because there is no end in sight, and second, because doing so concedes not just that the pen is not mightier than the sword, but also proposes that the former ought to bow to the latter.
As Ted Rall points out (in an article with a rather unfortunate title), political cartooning is widely on the retreat, both because people fear the shits and because the traditional employers of political cartoonists — newspapers — are in decline. If you support political satire, rather than (or in addition to) changing your Facebook picture to "Je suis Charlie", consider doing one or more of the following:
1) donate money to Charlie (via the link on their website) to support continued publication (and the increased protection its contributors will undoubtedly require)
2) if you find Charlie problematic, support the work of other political cartoonists and satirists. Two excellent books by American cartoonists which publish cartoons alongside the artist's notes on why, and to whom, they were controversial are Rall's America gone wild and Aaron McGruder's All the rage (which appears, unfortunately, to be out of print). Also, although I challenged Sacco's response to the Charlie attacks above, just about everything he has ever published is great (including, most recently, The Great War, and Bumf).
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