“Red” Charlie doesn’t change its colors
Why should I be writing about French politics? French journalists, as we have seen this week, are fierce combatants in words and images, “committed” in the Existentialist sense, and, above all, political. Surely, they will keep us well informed, and agitated, in the aftermath of the fanatical murder, by two Muslim brothers, of ten journalists and cartoonists employed by the publication Charlie Hebdo, and of the two police officers assigned to protect them—a dozen brutal shooting deaths in the name of Islam and Mohammad—its primitive, preposterous prophet.
Well, yes, except that I am sitting, this evening, in a café on Seventh Avenue, at the corner of Bedford Street in New York City’s West Village, enjoying my neighborhood’s best “happy hour” less than a mile north of the World Trade Center.
I was working uptown when the attacks by 19 Saudi Arabian Muslim men begin on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, attacks that left almost 3,000 Americans dead—blown apart, incinerated, killed in airline crashes, buried in tons of rubble, just a mile from where I sit. That day, my wife, Robin, was working at a well-known West Village school, just a few blocks from here, where children lined the school’s windows to watch the planes explode into the Twin Towers. Not all of the parents of those children came to pick them up, that afternoon—or ever.
Officially, New York City responded to the attacks with vows to rebuild the $10 billion or more worth of city structures demolished that day. With vows that the city and its life would continue without fear. With vows that we would “Never Forget,” a bumper sticker still common around the state and beyond.
The United States, led by the administration of President George W. Bush, enacted legislation that made “Homeland Security” a new national behemoth. It was a typically American “massed assault”—in the legislative sense—on the enemy. Today, in New York City, the only concrete manifestations of the Act are seen in Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Station, where National Guardsmen in camouflage gear, with automatic weapons, hang around day after day, year after year, and in the airports, where the new “national security” scrapes most painfully against our lost sense of free movement.
Yesterday, with the Paris massacres in every headline, Penn Station had teams of NYPD officers and National Guardsmen at every corner.
The New York Times today reports that more than 10,000 French soldiers are being deployed around France to guard “sensitive” facilities, especially Jewish synagogues, schools, and stores. There are calls to increase electronic surveillance and crack down on the disturbing outflow of thousands of French-Muslim citizens to Syria and Iraq to join the brutal, primitivist armies of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Benjamin Netanyahu called on French Jews to “come home” to Israel.
The French were critical of America’s National Security Act and the proliferation of federal security in the wake of 9/11—but, as the press reports, the French government now is “under pressure” (tell me about it). In the immediate wake of the brutal killings at the offices of the Paris satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo (literally, “Weekly Charlie,” a play on both Charlie Brown and Charles de Gaulle, whose death the publication mocked), the French interior ministry has deployed its troops mostly to protect Jewish religious and education sites. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–one of more than 45 national political leaders worldwide who joined more than one million Parisians in a march of solidarity with the butchered French journalists–called on French Jews to “come home” to Israel. French politicians and intellectuals responded with statements that “France is not France without Jews.”
Practically speaking though, in days after the murderous attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish kosher deli—and the uprising of popular and political support–there has been a series of attacks on Muslims in at least 13 French cities, with the desecration of mosques, arson, and gunfire. Plus the usual hijinks of the bigots who enjoy it all and who, in Corsica, placed pig guts in Muslim prayer halls and, in Alpine France, beat a Muslim boy after a moment of silence in his school for the shooting victims. “Death to Muslims” is appearing on walls in French cities.
Meanwhile, the surviving editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, given refuge and space in the offices of the leftist newspaper, Liberation, has published another issue, with a cover that again parodies the prophet Mohammad—the supposed incitement to the murders–and a title, “All is Forgiven.” So far, some 3.0 million copies of the issue in 16 languages have been printed.
A spokeswoman for Charlie Hebdo explains that the title means that the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo does not hate the two killers who gunned down their colleagues. This should be a time of forgiveness and healing, she says. In particular, the fault is with the “ideology,” or religion, and not with the two murderers. The surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo understands that, and, as the headline announces, “All is forgiven.” On the cover, the sacrilegious image of Mohammad sheds a great tear for the Charlie Hebdo victims.
And so, I do not proclaim “Je suis Charlie”—although I understand its profound importance in proclaiming that each and every one of us is assaulted when freedom of speech is attacked.
The right to freedom of speech is absolute. It is an inalienable and unqualified human right, one of the human rights defined and delineated within the context of the rights that specify my freedom of action in a society of other individuals with equal rights. To that extent, there is little to discuss about the terrorist murders at Charlie Hebdo and the Parisian kosher deli.
Charlie Hebdo, apart from being a great symbolic victim, does not stand for much, either politically or philosophically. It is a publication of the French political left, which, for decades, was an adherent of Soviet communism and today is an opponent of such capitalism as still exists in Europe. But without property rights there can be no other rights, no right to freedom of speech and the press. Those who organized the huge demonstration in Paris, supposedly an expression of sentiment by all groups, excluded Marine Le Pen, a leading French right-wing politician whose party, the Popular Front, the leading lights of Charlie Hebdo sought to have legally banned.
A century of unrelenting extermination of the economic “class enemy” is exonerated in the name of class conflict.
The statement by the Charlie Hebdo spokeswoman in support their shocking and sickening “All is Forgiven” cover is virtually explicit in saying that ideology bears the blame for the murders–a classic Marxist premise excusing all personal responsibility in a world where individuals are shaped by their economic class. And so a century of unrelenting extermination of the economic “class enemy” by communist regimes from Russia to China to Vietnam to Cambodia to North Korea to Cuba is exonerated in the name of class conflict and the future of the proletariat.
The demonstration in the streets of Paris, including national leaders from dozens of countries, exceeded anything in the wake of the 9/11 massacre in New York City. That may seem baffling, but perhaps the sheer magnitude of the shock in New York City, and the months-long urgency of digging out survivors and then bodies of victims, absorbed all energies. It is like the Parisians, though, to turn out, brimming with emotion, to march and cry out for some ideal—though it be layered in ambiguity. To be more demonstrative about an often obscene, nihilistic, and ideologically dubious little satirical rag than the attack on my city of New York, which was about the most murderous foreign attack ever carried out on Western soil.
I wish I had been there to march with them. Some of my deepest private moments, still cherished, were of the City of Light, and one of my oldest, dearest friends lives there. I would like to be with him, this evening—most certainly drinking wine at a corner café—to talk about what all of it means.
I know that we would agree, as we do not always agree, that this above all must be defended, our absolute freedom to speak our minds—certainly to be judged, and even ostracized for what we say, or write, or draw—but never stopped by a law or a bullet. If we cannot reason together, with no fear of a fist or gun, we cannot be human. Any ideology that denies this is the enemy of humanism—that philosophy and frame of mind that struggled for centuries to prevail in the West.
We cannot temporize with the enemies of reason, argument, and persuasion, which are quintessentially human attributes. An ideology can be the enemy, certainly; but the carriers of that ideology are human.
We cannot temporize with the enemies of reason, argument, and persuasion, which are quintessentially human attributes. An ideology can be the enemy, certainly; but the carriers of that ideology are human—and they threaten us most directly. There can be no forgiveness of the killers. Surely the French should understand that; some still living saw the occupying Nazis swagger in the cafes of Paris.
My friend and I would agree, nod, and lift a glass to those philosophical props of civilization itself that let us sit fearlessly in a café in New York or Paris and ask what is true. And even joke about it.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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