"Je suis Charlie". Is western hypocrisy revealed once again?

It’s what happens when you deal with assholes: they turn equally offensive to you as they are to anyone else.

Although, the offended ones here are not only hypocrites, but stupid as well: if someone’s words towards others are not nice, don’t think they would be nice to you.

and the world runs on hypocrisy anyways, this is a minor, banal example

Charlie Hebdo does not need the world’s solidarity each and every time they offend someone. That would be way too often. The day an Italian goes on to murder Charlie’s journalists, we can wear that pin again…

While bringing the case to court is ridiculous, it is far better than Islamists shooting up the place.
Charlie Hebdo proved they are non-denominational offenders and do not discriminate. .

Well, just because we don’t think people should be killed for their opinion doesn’t necessarily mean the opinion doesn’t piss us off. That’s the general “we”.

People have the right to be angry, they just don’t have the right to kill people over it.

Just because I see ‘fuck you’ written on a bathroom wall, doesn’t mean I take it personally.

Aren’t there REAL problems in life to get upset about?

People need to get a grip on reality, and find some perspective. The cartoonists make a living drawing controversial cartoons.

Controversy is a gift to humanity. It allows us the opportunity to try and see things differently.

If controversy is SO terrible, perhaps those who oppose it can join Hitler in burning all things considered different from their own beliefs.

Satire has no limits & long may that continue, not a breath of hypocrisy here…hoorah!

There is no hypocrisy as the situations are quite different. There was widespread sympathy for the cartoonists who were killed. On this occasion the sympathies are with the earthquake victims. Perhaps the original dead cartoonists would have responded differently to the earthquake disaster but that is something we will never know.

@ucme The cartoonists are not the ones accused of hypocrisy here.

@Sneki95 Bless ya, the “here” was of course referring to myself, give ya head a wobble ;-}

Let them have freedom of speech. But also expect them to reason it.

Since I didn’t chant last time, I’m not on the hook this time.

@ucme Oh. Sorry. I misunderstood.

Je n’étais pas Charlie puis, et je ne suis pas Charlie maintenant.

I’m all for free speech, but that includes both the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish their cartoons and the right of others to criticize them for those cartoons. Nor do I think that phrases like “it’s satire” or “it was just a joke” automatically wash away all culpability. Some jokes are in bad taste. Others aren’t even funny (meaning they lack the saving grace upon which their defense is built). That someone shouldn’t do something, however, doesn’t always mean they don’t have the right to do it. And those might be the cases in which our own right to criticize how others use their rights is most important.

As I said at the time, I think Americans were awfully quick to say “Je suis Charlie”, without even stopping to find out who Charlie was. Charlie is pretty much a racist asshole. Having been attacked by terrorists does not automatically mean they are the good guys.

@Sneki95 That’s okay old bean, least said soonest mended & all that ;-}

There’s kind of a Larry Flint element to the situation. It’s not gently crossing a (extreme for extremists ) line, it’s intention is to be over the line. Just not for the ‘evil’ motives that their attackers suggest.

They are cage rattlers. Their intentions, IMO, were to simply get people thinking about taboo subject matter, through comical introduction.

Like the Daily show in the USA, (and many others ) these are outlets to reach broader audiences, and hopefully stimulate more minds. Not with any agenda except to open minds.

You can see the drawings in question here

They are in bad taste, yes. However, they do not justify violence against the newspaper.

@filmfann Who is advocating violence against them? I see an article about lawsuits.

@dappled_leaves As I said at the time, I think Americans were awfully quick to say “Je suis Charlie”, without even stopping to find out who Charlie was

Not sure why you single out Americans here. “Je suis Charlie” was a global thing.

Charlie is pretty much a racist asshole. Having been attacked by terrorists does not automatically mean they are the good guys

Charlie Hebdo has an excellent anti-racist track record. You’ve been sold snake oil.

@olivier5 “Je suis Charlie” was a global thing, but Europeans are much more familiar with Charlie Hebdo. Their statement was informed. I stand by my assessment that most Americans had never even heard of Charlie Hebdo before the attack, and few bothered to do any research before “becoming” Charlie.

“Charlie Hebdo has an excellent anti-racist track record. ”

<laughing>

Let’s laugh together. Did you ever read them?

Wait, what? Because I don’t support people being executed by ad hoc executioners operating unilaterally, then I should support every damn fool thing they say? Is that how it works?

Obviously, then, and by extension, since you currently support everything German, then it’s clear that you would have been in whole-hearted support of everything the Nazis (or the Stasi, for that matter) ever did or tried to do, right? After all, consistency is consistency, isn’t it? You certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of hypocrisy…

For the record, and to be very clear: I did not support everything or even most of the things that Charlie Hebdo has ever said, lampooned, cartooned or suggested. But I fully support their right to say offensive things. How is that an inconsistent approach to liberty?

I didn’t realize it was an issue until I read @ragingloli post. Despite myself I laughed out loud when I saw the cartoons. People are all for free speech unless it’s something that they disagree with, then they feel it should be shut down. We see it all the time in the US, both on the Left and the Right.

@olivier5 Americans (like myself) and Canadians (like @dappled_leaves) tend to have different ideas of what it takes to be anti-racist than Europeans. Europeans set the bar pretty low and often fail to recognize that it is possible to be racist even while intending to be anti-racist. Good satire is difficult to pull off. One wrong move and the message gets muddled.

Take this comic, for example, which depicts Aylan Kurdi (the Syrian child who was found dead on the Turkish shore). The caption reads: “What would little Aylan have grown up to be? An ass groper in Germany.” This was a reference to a series of sexual assaults that occurred in Germany at the beginning of 2016 and were blamed on “Arab” and “North African” men.

I’m sure you could come up with some rationalization to explain how the comic isn’t racist, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is no context given in the magazine to frame it one way or another. Any attempt to defend the comic necessarily goes beyond the text and would be based on the predetermined conclusion that it isn’t racist (which merely begs the question against anyone who thinks it is racist).

I’ve read some discussions of this particular cartoon. The best its defenders can come up with is “they were trying to satirize [insert target here], but it’s not a great attempt.” But you know what happens when you make a bad attempt to satirize racism? It usually comes out being pretty racist itself—especially in a context where the majority of racism is institutional rather than personal.

@CWOTUS I think the idea behind the question is that “je suis Charlie” was previously used as an unmitigated statement of support for Charlie Hebdo and frequently appeared alongside overly broad statements about the scope of the right to free speech and the incontestability of any statement made under the auspices of that right.

And indeed, this is an error that we see all the time in political discussions. Person A makes a statement, Person B criticizes that statement, and Person A defends their statement by invoking their right to say it (rather than demonstrating the truth of the original statement and/or pointing to errors in Person B’s criticism).

As far as I can tell, the question doesn’t call out those who expressed their solidarity in a more nuanced or logically rigorous fashion.

^‘Comic? ’ WOW!!! Paradox. Not comedy.
I didn’t know they got that bad.

@SavoirFaire I don’t understand your argument about this cartoon, or lack thereof. My point is simply that passing judgements on things that you know little or nothing about is a very good way to look ridiculous. When you say: ”there is no context given in the magazine to frame it one way or another”, does that mean you read the magazine cover to cover and didn’t find any context?

I’m not their lawyer and I don’t even read them. I must say that I had a lot of love for Cabu and Wokinski, two genuises of cartooning, but i’m put off by their present set of cartoonists, which I find vulgar, heartless and artless. Poking fun at the death of a child does offend me deeply. So nothing I say above should be taken as a defence of their present editorial line. But to know nothing about them or of the political culture within which they operate and call them racist out of a superficial analysis of one cartoon among millions of CH cartoons out there, does strike me as facile and somewhat contemptuous.

^It’s a pretty offensive cartoon. Like you said nothing funny about the death of a child.

But if I burned a cross in your yard, you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking I was racist. Despite it being an isolated event.

^ i suppose it would depend on your intention while burning this cross, the meaning of the symbol. If you mean it as a KKK ritual, it has a racist meaning. Intent is key.

Come on @olivier5 . What other intentions would there be for cross burning, by a white man, in a black man’s yard?

If you were my neighbor, who got a cross burned in their yard, I would be PISSED. And you could count on me retaliating, one way or the other, against those who committed the atrocity.

I know very little about cross burning… It’s seems an American thing. Likewise, Charlie and aggressive satiric magazines seem to be a French thing. Even in France it’s a SUB-culture, a minority, underground kinda thing. CH was a fanzine read by no more than 10,000 people a week before the attacks.

There’s no such magazines in the US, or the UK or Canada for that matter, and no other US newspaper ever reproduced the various ‘Mohammad cartoons’ published in Denmark way back when. So this sort of in-your-face offensive cartooning is not in your culture. Leave it at that.

As an example, you don’t need to pass a judgement about every single sub-culture from Papua New Guinea either, right? But IF you want to pass a moral or political judgement on some Papuan magazine, the least you can do is learn Papuan language and read the darn magazine. otherwise you risk coming across as pretty err… racist vis-à-vis the Papuans, or at least quite silly and condescending.

^I’ve much to learn.

Don’t we all?

I appreciate your attempt to find nuance in the OP’s question, @SavoirFaire, but I think you’re trying to mock up something that simply doesn’t exist. Your follow-up reasoning is familiar to me, as it is to many libertarians who frequently deal with the illogical argument that “if you don’t support mandated government payments for ‘X’ then obviously you’re opposed to ‘X’ in all ways and at all times.”

Well, you and I know that isn’t necessarily so.

In fact, the OP went as far as to state pretty explicitly that if we opposed the Charlie Hebdo massacre with “je suis Charlie” statements of support and solidarity, then we must therefore be in pretty much complete agreement with any idiotic thing that they may say or do afterward. I just turned that reasoning around by exposing the lunatic analogue that if you’re in supportive agreement with the perfection of a current society such as Germany, then you must have been in complete agreement with everything that every German government has ever done.

It’s not a perfect analogue, but I’m not being paid for this stuff; it was the best I could do at the time and extemporaneously.

”if you’re in supportive agreement with the perfection of a current society such as Germany, then you must have been in complete agreement with everything that every German government has ever done.”
I do not know what kind of drugs you are smoking, but I want some.

Hmm. Well, I don’t know what you’re on either, but I would like to know just so that I can be sure to avoid them.

@olivier5 “I don’t understand your argument about this cartoon, or lack thereof.”

No, you clearly don’t. If you had understood, you would have realized that the argument was used as an example and was not itself the subject of any argument.

“My point is simply that passing judgements on things that you know little or nothing about is a very good way to look ridiculous.”

No one disagrees with this. And it is disingenuous for you to pretend this is the only claim you have made. You also took a stand regarding Charlie Hebdo‘s putative history of anti-racism. It is this that @dappled_leaves took issue with, and it was her disagreement that I was trying to help you understand.

“When you say: ‘there is no context given in the magazine to frame it one way or another’, does that mean you read the magazine cover to cover and didn’t find any context?”

No, it means that I read the magazine cover to cover and there wasn’t any context.

“But to know nothing about them or of the political culture within which they operate and call them racist out of a superficial analysis of one cartoon among millions of CH cartoons out there, does strike me as facile and somewhat contemptuous.”

Fortunately, I do not know nothing about them or of the political culture within which they operate, and I didn’t call them racist out of a superficial analysis of one cartoon among millions of CH cartoons out there. In fact, I know quite a lot about the political culture of France. And if you read carefully, you’ll see that I never called anything racist beyond the one cartoon itself.

“If you mean it as a KKK ritual, it has a racist meaning. Intent is key.”

No, intent is not key. Racism is not always personal. Sometimes it is institutional. And institutional racism can persist even after racism has been driven out of the hearts and minds of the people that run that institution if they do not look back and analyze ways in which it might perpetuate racial oppression. Ignorance has consequences. One can be a racist or do something racist without intending to do so.

@CWOTUS Just because @ragingloli likes to ask questions in a provocative (and sometimes incendiary) manner doesn’t mean that we aren’t still obligated to interpret them charitably. The OP does not say that anyone who expressed solidarity or support after the Charlie Hebdo massacre is a hypocrite if they condemn the magazine now. It says that anyone who previously expressed unnuanced support for them on the basis of a particular interpretation of the right to free speech is a hypocrite if they now condemn the magazine over another instance of them using that right. I know I am not a target of the question because I expressed only a nuanced form of solidarity at the time. If you did the same, then you are also not a target of the question (which makes your response a non sequitur).

@SavoirFaire You also took a stand regarding Charlie Hebdo‘s putative history of anti-racism. It is this that @dappled_leaves took issue with, and it was her disagreement that I was trying to help you understand.

Well, you didn’t do a very good job at that, mainly because @dappled_leaves never actually took issue with “Charlie Hebdo‘s putative history of anti-racism”, she just laughed it off. I find it interesting that some people can be so quick to accuse victims of a terror attack of being racist, but have only laughs to provide when they are asked to explain… If she said that 9/11 victims were racists, and just laughed it off when you asked her to explain, what would you think of her argument? And what would you think of her character?

if you read carefully, you’ll see that I never called anything racist beyond the one cartoon itself.
I’m certainly not going to defend that particular piece of shit of a cartoon. The team has changed since most of the old guard is dead, and the new ones don’t seem tyo know what they’re doing. But anyone saying that this magazine is or was essentially racist to the core, makes a mockery of two decades of anti-racist engagement and doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, and is basically helping the National Front, which invented this canard that Charlie is racist in order to fight back at them.

No, intent is not key. Racism is not always personal. Sometimes it is institutional.

Still, in the case I was asked about (the racist character of a burning cross), intent is key. Symbols do not have any intrinsinct meaning, by themselves. They only mean what we mean by them.The burning cross was historically used in Scotland to call for war: its meaning back then was simply “war”.

I think you Americans set the bar pretty low when it comes to labelling someone racist, maybe because expressing racist ideas is perfectly legal in the US. It’s not in France and it’s not in Germany either. Expressing racist opinions in these countries is punishable by law, and therefore there are legal criteria to fulfill, and if you call someone racist without proof, there’re legal avenues that someone can pursue (trial for libel) against you. In contrast, in the US anything goes because it’s not binding by law. It doesn’t really count. People use it as a cheap shot in conversation all the time, frivolously. They call it “playing the race card”. We take the issue more seriously and more carefully.

@SavoirFaire I guess I am a target of the question, then, because my support at the time of the massacre was not at all nuanced in support of their right to life – obviously – and their right to publish, no matter how much anyone else – or I – agreed with what they published. And I still do support those rights fully.

It doesn’t mean that I can’t also criticize them – and strongly – for what they say, and even support legal action against them if it seems warranted. I don’t think it does in this case, no matter how much people’s feelings are hurt.

I get ‘provocative’ questions and I understand your injunction to read charitably, but there’s a line between provoking and just trolling, too. Maybe I’ve been trolled too often by this particular questioner, and should just stop answering its questions. This questioner has the same rights as Charlie Hebdo – the right to live and to publish untrue, mean and even spiteful things, and we all have the right to criticize those things. But I will try to be more charitable. Or less obvious.

“Well, you didn’t do a very good job at that, mainly because @dappled_leaves never actually took issue with “Charlie Hebdo‘s putative history of anti-racism”, she just laughed it off.”

Laughing something off is a way of taking issue with something. It’s just an indirect way. But you asked for some sort of explanation of it, and I knew she was unlikely to oblige you given the time that had passed since your request. So I tried to give you some perspective about how racism is understood over here. If you didn’t want the answer, you shouldn’t have asked the question.

“I find it interesting that some people can be so quick to accuse victims of a terror attack of being racist, but have only laughs to provide when they are asked to explain.”

If you go back and read the responses, you’ll see that the laughs came before the request for an explanation.

“If she said that 9/11 victims were racists, and just laughed it off when you asked her to explain, what would you think of her argument? And what would you think of her character?”

I’m not here to adjudicate your exchange with @dappled_leaves. In any case, laughing something off isn’t an argument. It’s a dismissal. And I think the two cases are different enough that your attempt to compare them is a red herring.

“anyone saying that this magazine is or was essentially racist to the core, makes a mockery of two decades of anti-racist engagement and doesn’t know what he or she is talking about”

You’ll have to point to where anyone made that strong of a claim. All I can see is a denial that the magazine has an “excellent” track record of being anti-racist. “Racist to the core” and “has an excellent track record of being anti-racist” aren’t mutually exclusive options, so one can believe that Charlie Hebdo exists somewhere in between them.

“Still, in the case I was asked about (the racist character of a burning cross), intent is key.”

I disagree. Intent might be a mitigating factor in how we judge the person burning the cross, but it does not exonerate the act. If the person is culpable for his ignorance, then his intent does not necessarily get him off the hook.

“Symbols do not have any intrinsic meaning, by themselves.”

Yes, and this is precisely why context is important and why we cannot go by intention alone.

“They only mean what we mean by them.”

This is not how meaning works. I cannot unilaterally change the meaning of words. If I walk into the Palais Bourbon and start calling everyone gathered there “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” it would be silly of me to protest that “I meant it in a good way” when I’m expelled from the chamber. Symbols only mean things in a context. I cannot indicate anything to you if I do not believe you are able of deciphering my attempt at communication. In short, “speaker meaning” is not the final word on how meaning works in a conversation. (For more on this, see the work of Bertrand Russell, Paul Grice, Stephen Neale, and Mitch Green.)

“The burning cross was historically used in Scotland to call for war: its meaning back then was simply ‘war’.”

Which just underlines my point about the importance of context.

“I think you Americans set the bar pretty low when it comes to labeling someone racist, maybe because expressing racist ideas is perfectly legal in the US.”

We certainly set it lower than Europeans. And while this has some drawbacks, it also allows us to have a more robust discussion about the issue that goes beyond surface racism. Sometimes this gets us into places where people see racism that isn’t there. But even that is an important step in moving forward. Progress is made by correcting misapprehensions, not by silencing them.

“It’s not in France and it’s not in Germany either. Expressing racist opinions in these countries is punishable by law”

Well, no. Particular ways of expressing racist opinions are punishable by law in those countries. The bar is set artificially high in order to prevent these laws from being draconian, and so only certain types of explicit racism are forbidden.

“We take the issue more seriously and more carefully.”

Your system buries the more serious types of racism by patting itself on the back for punishing the type of racism that the overwhelming majority of people already recognize as abominable. I’m not saying that the US doesn’t have a race problem. It absolutely does. But I don’t see how we can solve those problems by forbidding people to talk about them in all of the awkward ways that are unfortunately necessary to move forward.

@CWOTUS Now you’re failing to read my responses charitably. You’ve already introduced nuance that most Americans did not by qualifying your support by retaining your right to criticize. What a lot of Americans did was say things along the lines of “free speech means you don’t get to complain about what people publish.” That is what is being criticized. If you disagree with that claim, and if you think that people who made it are hypocrites if they now turn around and complain about the magazine’s coverage of the Italian earthquake, then you agree with @ragingloli (as distasteful as that prospect may be to you).

The mother of all French satirical magazine, le Canard Enchaîné, is a venerable institution, a century-old pillar of the republic. They use language very creatively for reasons including self-protection. In fact they put out there the hardest French prose to understand, full of obsolete slang, nicknames, puns, irony, sarcasm, double-entendre and literary quotes. I tried to use it as material to teach non-native speakers once but it’s harder on them than Proust…

One of the words they invented over the years is “bla bla”, which made its way into English as “blah blah blah”. A very useful word, i find… and not only to describe French politics. ;-)

o5: anyone saying that this magazine is or was essentially racist to the core, makes a mockery of two decades of anti-racist engagement and doesn’t know what he or she is talking about

@SavoirFaire You’ll have to point to where anyone made that strong of a claim.

That would be where @dappled_leaves said: ”Charlie is pretty much a racist asshole”.

“One of the words they invented over the years is ‘bla bla’, which made its way into English as ‘blah blah blah’.”

This is actually false. Le Canard Enchaîné first used the term “bla bla” in 1946. But “blah” has been used this way in English since at least 1918, and “blah blah” has been used since at least 1921. Furthermore, the term may go back all the way to a similar saying used in ancient Greece (“bar bar bar”). There’s a BBC article about this here. The term can be used in various ways, but the Greeks used it whenever they didn’t want to bother trying to understand something. I find that it often gets used much the same way these days.

“That would be where @dappled_leaves said: ‘Charlie is pretty much a racist asshole’.”

I think that is significantly different from saying that the magazine is racist to the core (to be racist to the core suggests something foundational or inextricable), but I can understand why you might read it that way. Regardless, that statement is no part of our conversation. As I have already said, I am not here to adjudicate your exchange with @dappled_leaves.

Ok, so blah blah is first attested in English. I stand corrected. Still, it was made popular in France by the Canard earlier than the 60s. In the 40’s, I read.

Charlie Hebdo cartoonists made it to heaven…

(They’ve already drawn…. everywhere)