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avevale_intelligencerNever, never, never blame the victim. That's what we're always told. And most of the time it's absolutely right. No woman should ever be blamed for being raped, or for daring to seek an abortion. No gay or bi or trans person should ever be blamed for being assaulted or bullied or driven to suicide. No one who belongs to an ethnic minority should ever be blamed for the insane acts of racists, and no atheist or member of a different religion should ever be blamed for the hate crimes committed against them by extremists of any religious stripe. The people who commit these atrocious acts are simply and solely to blame for them. Nobody else, and least of all the victims.
But. The Charlie Hebdo case is not entirely like that.
Let's take this a step away from reality. Suppose you are Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and young Captain Carrot brings you a report on the clacks from Quirm. A gang of dwarfs have stormed the offices of a satirical magazine and butchered the entire staff plus several innocent bystanders. Nobody knows which dwarfs they were, but there's been bad feeling among the more extreme grags and deep-downers ever since Koom Valley failed to turn into a war. Nonetheless, dwarf communities in Ankh-Morpork and all across the Disc have declared their sorrow and outrage at this terrible crime, while of course lamenting the fact that they don't know who did it either. Seems a simple enough issue.
And then you discover that this particular magazine made a habit, indeed a feature, of publishing offensive caricatures of dwarfs, and trolls, and vampires, and werewolves. (Hardly ever humans.) You find that they put on their cover, for instance, a picture of Tak, the dwarf god, being buggered by a troll. You discover that, in the wake of this incident, various groups of humans are saying that well, it's the principle of the thing, innit, if you can't say things like that about the rocks and the gritsuckers what's happened to freedom of speech, eh?
Now, you're Vimes. You're used to seeing offensive caricatures of yourself in the Times, and mostly you pay no attention. But maybe you think, just for a moment, that if they printed a picture of you being buggered by Lord Vetinari, you might just get a trifle irritated yourself, as indeed might he. Not that they would, of course. But maybe you think, just for a moment, that while a terrible crime has most certainly been committed, perhaps the issue isn't quite as simple as it at first appeared, and perhaps there's such a thing as taking a principle too far. And you wonder what Vetinari would have done if such a magazine had been started up in his city.
But then, this is Ankh-Morpork, where no-one would think of suggesting that a person who stood on top of a tall building in a thunderstorm wearing a copper helmet and shouting "All gods are bastards" was not, in point of fact, asking for it.
Maybe I'm wrong. But maybe I'm not. Those people should not have been killed, and the people who did it (whether Islamic extremists or not) are cowardly murderers trying to incite hatred and division and start a war. But it's arguable that, in their non-lethal way, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were doing exactly the same. And some of the responses I have seen to this crime have been deeply alarming.
Freedom of speech is not just a right. It's also a responsibility.
That's what I think, anyway.
EDIT: interesting. Only one commenter seems to have noticed my repeated statements that the crime (a) was a crime, (b) was perpetrated by murderers, (c) should not have happened, et cetera et cetera. Apparently, not condoning either the cartoons or the murders is not an option. Sides must be chosen and nobody is excused. Oh well.
FURTHER EDIT: and when I said they were trying to start a war, this is what I was trying in my fumbling way to hint at. I think this writer is correct; the thing was done entirely to polarise people and "sharpen the contradictions," and I have seen too many on the net who seem all too willing to allow themselves to be polarised.
But. The Charlie Hebdo case is not entirely like that.
Let's take this a step away from reality. Suppose you are Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and young Captain Carrot brings you a report on the clacks from Quirm. A gang of dwarfs have stormed the offices of a satirical magazine and butchered the entire staff plus several innocent bystanders. Nobody knows which dwarfs they were, but there's been bad feeling among the more extreme grags and deep-downers ever since Koom Valley failed to turn into a war. Nonetheless, dwarf communities in Ankh-Morpork and all across the Disc have declared their sorrow and outrage at this terrible crime, while of course lamenting the fact that they don't know who did it either. Seems a simple enough issue.
And then you discover that this particular magazine made a habit, indeed a feature, of publishing offensive caricatures of dwarfs, and trolls, and vampires, and werewolves. (Hardly ever humans.) You find that they put on their cover, for instance, a picture of Tak, the dwarf god, being buggered by a troll. You discover that, in the wake of this incident, various groups of humans are saying that well, it's the principle of the thing, innit, if you can't say things like that about the rocks and the gritsuckers what's happened to freedom of speech, eh?
Now, you're Vimes. You're used to seeing offensive caricatures of yourself in the Times, and mostly you pay no attention. But maybe you think, just for a moment, that if they printed a picture of you being buggered by Lord Vetinari, you might just get a trifle irritated yourself, as indeed might he. Not that they would, of course. But maybe you think, just for a moment, that while a terrible crime has most certainly been committed, perhaps the issue isn't quite as simple as it at first appeared, and perhaps there's such a thing as taking a principle too far. And you wonder what Vetinari would have done if such a magazine had been started up in his city.
But then, this is Ankh-Morpork, where no-one would think of suggesting that a person who stood on top of a tall building in a thunderstorm wearing a copper helmet and shouting "All gods are bastards" was not, in point of fact, asking for it.
Maybe I'm wrong. But maybe I'm not. Those people should not have been killed, and the people who did it (whether Islamic extremists or not) are cowardly murderers trying to incite hatred and division and start a war. But it's arguable that, in their non-lethal way, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were doing exactly the same. And some of the responses I have seen to this crime have been deeply alarming.
Freedom of speech is not just a right. It's also a responsibility.
That's what I think, anyway.
EDIT: interesting. Only one commenter seems to have noticed my repeated statements that the crime (a) was a crime, (b) was perpetrated by murderers, (c) should not have happened, et cetera et cetera. Apparently, not condoning either the cartoons or the murders is not an option. Sides must be chosen and nobody is excused. Oh well.
FURTHER EDIT: and when I said they were trying to start a war, this is what I was trying in my fumbling way to hint at. I think this writer is correct; the thing was done entirely to polarise people and "sharpen the contradictions," and I have seen too many on the net who seem all too willing to allow themselves to be polarised.
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no subject
Date: 2015-01-08 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-08 09:09 pm (UTC)Charlie Hebdo, from examples I've seen online in the last day, skewered everyone, so the equivalent to the hypothetical cover with Vimes and Vetinari exists.
And the Charlie Hebdo folks were not massacred by the emissaries of some political figure that they skewered, nor by someone with a fanatical devotion to the Pope.
The people who did this are not trying to start a war.
They are trying to win a war.
It would appear that the situation, from their point of view, would be "So far, so good."
no subject
Date: 2015-01-08 11:39 pm (UTC)If you dislike something a magazine has printed, whinge on your blog, start up an alternative magazine, tell your significant other, write a stiff letter to the Times, but do not - do not - kill people in retaliation.
Killing people is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 01:16 am (UTC)Subsequently, passing out copies in Medina would be a different matter entirely and more in the neighborhood of "asking for it".
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 03:02 am (UTC)The "Je suis Charlie" meme going around is pretty damn upsetting. If one is a vile little racist ass, one doesn't become less of a vile little racist ass by virtue of having been murdered by far viler individuals than oneself.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 08:33 am (UTC)It is, however, the religion of the people who hit upon the idea of the racist slave trade. (Previously slaves could be anybody.) Enslaving only people with very dark skins ensured that any escapees would be unable to disappear into the crowd.
Of course, the Koran says that no Moslem may keep another as a slave, and that any man who utters the proper words is officially a Moslem... but Shari'ah law says that a eunuch is not a man. So they castrated the male slaves they kept. Including their own sons by the female slaves they raped.
Je suis Charlie.
Tu ne suis pas vrai.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 09:23 am (UTC)They ridiculed French intellectual writers (whose sales went through the roof afterwards) and the Catholics and the government and everybody.
Which is why I don't necessarily believe the killers were Islamists (and when they announced that one of them lost his identity card in the getaway car this was the moment when I really felt taken for an idiot!). There are lots of people with a motive.
It's totally possible that the journalists who got killed were personally unpleasant people.
They certainly enjoyed stirring things up a bit, and you might even say they did not shy back from trouble.
But never, under no circumstances, "trouble" may equal "murder".
At least that's what I believe.
I could say "Oh well, you're not that innocent" if someone had slashed the tyres of a journalist's car or so. Perhaps.
But what happened is not justifiable.
Re: Your edit
Date: 2015-01-09 10:46 pm (UTC)I just dipped my oar in to point out that your analogy had a hole in it, because the Charlie Hebdo people were equal-opportunity offenders. I'm quite of the opinion that you aren't required to condone the cartoons, but I'm always in favor of people making the strongest arguments that they can (in a logical sense, not in the sense of being strident).
Re: Your edit
Date: 2015-01-09 11:39 pm (UTC)And the point of the analogy, I think, is that the Vimes/Vetinari cartoon would not have happened in Ankh-Morpork (or, if it did, would not have been followed by anything further in that line--tyrants can do that sort of thing) but that the freedom of the ordinary person to speak would not thereby have been in any sense curtailed, and that, Vetinari being Vetinari, the artists responsible would in all probability have still been alive. As these would have been if Charlie Hebdo had been shut down by government order, and not by a gang of (as
Freedom of speech is a basic human right and must be defended. No-one should be allowed to murder anyone for offending them. But it has to be recognised that there are people who will push and push and push till something like this does happen, for no better reason than that they enoy shocking people. And that's no crime, but it's not heroic either.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-10 04:16 am (UTC)You don't tug on superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don't mess around with heavily armed, fanatic murdering scum bent on martyrdom.
But I disagree with you from two directions. First, they had been bombed before and knew the seriousness of what they were doing. Second, there was a police guard responsible for protecting them from further assaults who did not do their job.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-10 12:56 pm (UTC)"I’ve already seen what happens when you get a culture that, rather than asking to what end we defend free speech, valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech more the more pointlessly offensive it is—because only then can you prove how devoted you are to freedom by defending it.
When the only thing you’re reverent of is irreverence, when the only thing you hold sacred is the idea that nothing is sacred, well, you eventually get chan culture, you get one long continuous blast of pure offensiveness and taboo-breaking for taboo-breaking’s sake until all taboos are broken and there’s nothing left to say. You get people who shout racial slurs in unbroken succession all day and think they’ve accomplished something in the name of “free speech” by doing so."
no subject
Date: 2015-01-10 06:40 pm (UTC)Though I probably would have mentioned off-switches in there somewhere.
And also the massacres currently being carried out by the killers' "co-religents" in Nigeria.