OP-ED: I am Not Charlie

By Lou Glorie

I’M NOT CHARLIE.

It seems that almost every day some outrage is reported that sends one into a tail-spin of despair for the human soul.  The brutal attack on the Charlie Hebdo office was one of those events that seems to exterminate the possibility of a world at peace with itself, to exile hope to an ever distant La-la Land.  My despair comes not only from the act itself, but also from how quickly the tragedy has been appropriated as a moment of solidarity among the rational defenders of liberty against the irrational defenders of creed.  Free Speech is a liberty that Americans and Europeans, as descendants of the Enlightenment, hold holy.  Jefferson swore “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” But in the 21st century a question goes begging: for whom is this liberty intended? Liberty to say what, aimed at whom?

In 1990 the Gayssot Act was passed in France that made it a crime punishable by a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 to deny the German genocide of Jews. The Armenians tried to get in on this, but couldn’t pull it off. So, in France you can go to jail for denying one holocaust, but not the other. Hate speech is illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights. But the devil is in the interpretation of “hate.” The comedian Dieudonné has been prosecuted for comparing Isis executions to the guillotining of royalty during the French Revolution.  But Charlie’s hateful, racist depictions of Africans and Muslims have largely been protected. My critique of Charlie Hebdo has always been that what it does best is ridicule drenched in contempt for underdogs. Seldom does it do what I would call satire which aims high, lampooning the mighty.

Why am I writing this?  Am I trying to justify the actions of the criminals who slaughtered and maimed the staff at the Charlie office?

What I’m trying to do is follow the squiggly line of cause and effect that doesn’t always lead directly to blame.  We’ve got a situation here.

In France, three words are carved above public buildings: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The thought behind this tripartite motto is that Liberty, as a stand-alone right, divorced from the communal responsibilities demanded by equality and fraternity, can easily be wielded by the powerful against the weak and marginalized. And indeed, the sentiments widely held in France regarding religion in general and Islam in particular don’t encourage a sense of fraternity with Muslims.  What is rarely acknowledged are the interdependencies of culture and religion and the ways that fundamentalism flourishes among people whose culture is threatened, whether by war, the imperatives of global capital or just everyday contempt for the other.

This is the context of my refusal to canonize the victims of this attack as martyrs to the cause of free speech.  I think it is enough to say they were fellow humans who did not deserve to be brutally murdered.  As for the killers, is it helpful to label them terrorists?  In a country where free speech is sometimes celebrated, sometimes prosecuted are we to believe that this act will deter free expression because of the fear of being gunned down? Have the French no other sources of worry about how an irreverent comment might lead to trouble?

Depicting this event as a battle between Saints and Terrorists sets it too far beyond the ken of mere citizens. If it’s terrorism, then what are we to do? It follows that only the state and the military are equipped to solve such a problem.   Whether the murderers were thugs on meth or holy warriors upholding an abstraction, their actions were evil.  Placing the murderers in the pantheon of “haters of freedom,” we fall into the same web that entangled them—perceiving ourselves as defenders of holy abstractions that are forever set above and apart from the real world we live in.

The real world of ours is at war. There are 70-some ongoing armed conflicts. Ten thousand children die each day of starvation. But we think we should be insulated from the turmoil. To protect ourselves we vilify one religion; we outlaw some forms of speech;  we send in the troops and bomb villages.  But, what do you know, it keeps getting worse and closer to home.

I’m not Charlie. I am a human being and as a human, I mourn these deaths, and I mourn the birth of more hated and fear from which more death will follow. We need the courage now to look beyond facile objectifications of good and evil. We need to take pity on the imperfectible human soul.

Lou Glorie is an Ann Arbor resident who lived in France for many years.