Revenge of the East

The best tribute to the dead of Charlie Hebdo is the debate on freedom of speech that has now opened up.

The shocking killing of the cartoonists and staff of the Charlie Hebdo weekly in Paris has turned out to be a watershed event in that it has put the spotlight on the fundamental right to free speech and divided global opinion in ways which are perhaps unprecedented. The resurrection of the debate on the freedom of speech – its ideology and its practice in the world today – is perhaps the best tribute that can be paid to those who were shot for their writings and drawings.

A small publication with dwindling readership in France, Charlie Hebdo was practically unknown outside the country and definitely outside the Francophone world until the shootings. Along with the news of the killings, images of the cartoons, which were a staple of the magazine, started circulating; images that led the terrorists to kill the cartoonists. Most people who had never heard of or read Charlie Hebdo reacted with disbelief at these cartoons as these were, where they pertained to Islam and Muslims, clearly provocative and meant to lampoon. While the condemnations of the killings were forthright, many started asking questions whether these cartoons were appropriate and could be defended. In the global spread of the “I am Charlie” slogan where people identified themselves with the magazine and its right to publish these cartoons, a voice emerged that a condemnation of the killings could not lead to a defence ofCharlie Hebdo and its contents. These cartoons were seen to be racist, Islamophobic and sexist.

There is a disagreement over this characterisation of the weekly with many of its readers pointing out that it was anti-religious, anti-rightwing, pro-immigration and anti-colonial, with its editor and some other staffers long-time associates of the French Communist Party; that it poked fun at the Pope and Christian religious images far more than it did Islam or Muslims. However, those who criticise Charlie Hebdo’s humour and contents point out that laughing at a group of people who are discriminated and marginalised is very distinct from lampooning those in power. There are also questions about the politics of its aesthetics and the manner in which the caricatures reinforce racist prejudices against an already stigmatised minority.

For those who argue that Charlie Hebdo is in the long tradition of a particular form of eviscerating French humour, located in the historical ground of “Laïcité” and particularly sharp on religion and tradition, there is the counterargument that this historical ground also includes French colonialism and the racism that Muslims, particularly Algerians, face in France. The differential treatment of Jews and Judaism, who are not caricatured in the same manner as are Muslims and Islam, is used as an example to buttress the argument that Charlie Hebdo is racist.

What has been quite unprecedented is how quickly this has become a global debate, a conversation over time zones and political, cultural and legal divides. It is not the first time that there has been such a global conversation but this may be the first time that it has happened in a world connected through social media. The ramifications – that a rapidly growing number of people in the world are in something akin to direct conversation with each other – are enormous and will take time for us, its participants, to fully understand and appreciate. Is there a reconfiguration of the mental architecture, the mentalité, of people at a global scale? Are these the first signs of the emergence of a global public?

To return to Charlie Hebdo, the question that has emerged at the centre of this global conversation is whether the right to free speech is absolute or whether it is inherently contextual and conditioned by its genealogies stretching through capitalism and colonialism. There is clearly no agreement on this and there is unlikely to be one. But reading even a small selection of the mass of articles, blog posts, speeches and cartoons that have been expressed in response toCharlie Hebdo, the attack and the debate around the event, it is clear that both sides to the argument need to rethink and rework their positions. Just when the established middle ground of the old debates between rights and responsibilities, and between the rights to equality and liberty were beginning to get clarified into their two pole positions, new ways of looking at these old debates have begun to emerge.

The larger, long-term implications of this debate are still unclear to us, caught up as we are in the heat and dust of the present intellectual and political skirmishes. Yet it does seem that the debate will only flourish in the days to come, opening up new ways of understanding our world and of building solidarities, despite, it must be added, all the cynical attempts to appropriate the slogan of freedom of speech by those with blood on their hands.

What the attack on Charlie Hebdo and its global response suggests is that we now inhabit a world where the langueand parole of fundamental rights, like the freedom of thought and expression, can only be engaged with on a global scale. The revenge of the East is to force the West to engage in a truly universal conversation.

source epw