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Êtes-vous Charlie Hebdo?
Learning from Paris
The story of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo has gone everywhere in the past week: into meditations on free speech and blasphemy, into declarations of cultural and actual war, and high-wire geopolitics.
It’s a fresh attack, meaning high emotion and demands for ‘moral clarity‘ — and not yet a serious reckoning. If the civilized idea is that no one should be killed for their cartoons, then of course we’re all on “Team Civilization,” as Jon Stewart likes to say. This video from 2006, showing three of the 10 staffers killed sitting around a table, drawing and chuckling, is a poignant reminder of the warmhearted, tweaking work done at Charlie Hebdo.
But as we react in pain and solidarity to the deaths of these cartoonists and the hostages and policemen killed, too, we’re still puzzling about what we should be learning.
It’s a story of the global spread of radical Islam, an ideology we’ve spent a decade and more trying to ‘contain’ with violence. It’s a story of 21st-century France: humanist, secular, but still tense when it comes to inclusion and identity. It’s a story of clashing fringes in Europe’s rightward drift: nativist National Fronts against deep-dyed Islamic extremists, cooperating in a violent ‘Muslim panic’ that runs counter to the facts. It’s a story, maybe, of comedy gone tragic, raising questions of the use and abuse of the satirical pen. And it’s a story of a world that still seems ready to think in terms of a nightmare clash of civilizations.
What does Charlie Hebdo tell you? Help us sort out the angles and ideas for this week’s show by leaving a comment or recording a message.
English translator of hundreds of French books (including Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century), blogger on French politics, and author of the novel, Shooting War.
Internet eminence, commenting daily on the Arab world and Islam at Informed Comment, and author of The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East.
comic artist, writer, and author most recently of Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910 - 2010.
James Van Otto, Ann Telnaes, Khalid Albaih, Annette Carlsen, JJ McCullough, Safdar Ahmed, and Manu
First, hear it from the cartoonists, who put lots of thought and soul into the essays on Matt Bors's graphic magazine, The Nib.
Jeremy Harding, the London Review of Books blog
We were drawn to this show by stories of the French reaction. Here's an ambivalent diary entry from the massive demonstrations last Sunday, and earlier, on the night after the massacres, when "on the eve of an identity nightmare, the instincts of French men and women flickered reassuringly like lights about to be restored after a power cut."
Thomas Chatterton Williams, N +1 (online)
A nod to France's "a violent, racist, and unexorcised past" from a black American living there:
Much of the mainstream opinion in the US more or less seems to mirror what Philip Gourevitch wrote on the New Yorker website in the immediate aftermath, when he likened Charlie Hebdo’s offense-giving mission to the heroic, self-sacrificing strategies of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Or when the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy that lionized the caricaturists as “war reporters of a sort” on the front lines of a global contest between radical Islam and the West. There can be absolutely no excuse for acts of terrorism, but these are examples, respectively, of rhetorical and political hagiography and blackmail and should be rejected as such. As Susan Sontag put it, “by all means let us mourn together; but let’s not be stupid together.” To that, we might add, let us not be callous, reckless, or oblivious together, either.
Arthur Goldhammer, "French Politics"
A meditation from our guest Arthur Goldhammer on the uncertain moment in the French population, subdivided as it is into city and countryside, downtown and banlieu:
France is uneasy. Both Frances are uneasy, each afraid of the other. Decisions will soon be taken that may determine whether this anxious standoff results in a withdrawal from the brink or spills over into more overt expression of what until now has been sullen mutual suspicion, if not contempt. It is a fraught moment, a dangerous moment, and I can't say which way things will go.
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