In 2012 Stéphane Charbonnier was asked by a journalist from Le Monde how he felt about the death threats he was receiving because the magazine he edited had dared to depict Muhammad and mock the Islamic faith. He famously replied that “I would rather die standing than live on my knees”. On Wednesday Stéphane Charbonnier was murdered by two machine gun wielding fanatics in his Paris office. Thankfully his murderers are now dead, along with an accomplice who shot a police woman in the back and took twenty people hostage in a Jewish supermarket, killing four of them. What did Stéphane Charbonnier die standing for? And would it not have been better to kneel?
In the debate since the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked there has been a strand on the (presumably illiterate) hard left who believe that the magazine didn’t satirise Islam but race bated muslims. The proponents of this view hold that whilst no one should be killed for drawing a cartoon (they are generous enough to give us that) the cartoons were offensive, racist and should never have been drawn, let alone printed. The people who believe this are apologists for murder and terrorism. No matter how many “no one deserves to be shot” caveats they laden their spineless sentences with what they are saying is that, at least in part, the blame for these murders rests with the murdered and thus not wholly with the gutless psychopaths who carried them out.
We have heard this before. This is the same dull crowd who believed that every time a lunatic blew himself up in a market in the middle of Baghdad the blood flowed onto the hands of Tony Blair. It is the same crowd who blame the economic disadvantage for the stabbings in Hackney or social exclusion for shootings in Peckham. The fault is never wholly that of the perpetrator, whose failing is merely that he failed to resist the prevailing economic and social conditions which drove him down the path of mindless violence. Such a view is, as the late Christopher Hitchens put it, an affront to the idea of moral responsibility. In the case of this weeks Paris massacre the people who believe such things are not just craven quasi-appeasers, they are wholly wrong.
Most people who don’t crave tyranny would willingly concede that you do have the right to be offensive. As the old adage goes, offense is taken, not given, and you don’t have a right not to be offended. What happens when you try to stop people being offensive was shown by the introduction of Section 5 of the Public Order Act: you end up arresting carol singers and those who are rude to horses. But this was not what Charlie Hebdo is about. It was not a paper which set out to offend just because it could. Charbonnier did not mean we should stand tall and be obnoxious for the sake of it.
What the murdered cartoonists believed was that religion should be critiqued, criticized and, where if fell short, mocked lampooned and ridiculed. Religion is human. The animals don’t have it, nor do the trees or the rocks. Religion came into the world with humans and will leave it with us, unless we are sensible enough to dispense with it before hand. There is nothing of the supernatural about religion. Religion is manmade and must be seen that way.
People mock everything that is human. I can think of jokes I have heard about the most terrible parts of human nature and history; from cancer to the Holocaust, we mock them because they are part of the world as we find it and as we have made it. Possibly we would not be able to deal with reality if we could not laugh at it. Possibly our existential angst would make life inoperable without humor; we can only deal with the apparent fruitlessness of existence and the finality of death by laughing at it. Laughing makes us who we are; it makes us human.
The second you say something is out of bounds, that it cannot be laughed at, you are saying that it is inhuman, it is higher than us, stronger or better than us. That we should defer to it and revere it. This is the road to tyranny.
Why can dictators not abide satire and people mocking them? Why couldn’t Hitler stand Charlie Chaplin? Why would that silly fat man in North Korea rather start a war than see a terrible Hollywood comedy about him be released? Because their power rests on the belief that they are super-human.
In psychoanalytic theory this is known as belief through the other. I believe in the leader because he knows things that I don’t. In mediaeval christendom the common man did not have a clue what was said when the priest mumbled the mass in Latin, but it didn’t matter because the priest knew, and that was what counted. The belief in God was mediated through the belief in the priest and the church more broadly. It was only with the introduction of the Bible in common languages that this con began to break down.
Likewise, Hitler was allowed to lead the Reich into the abyss because everyone around him believed he had a secret plan which would lead Germany to a glorious victory, it didn’t matter that everyone could see the country steadily disintegrating under a hail of allied ordinance, Hitler would see them through, he was the all-powerful Fuhrer.
The moment that the dictator is exposed as merely human, imbued with all the frailties of the human race, his power fails. This is what satire does. In the hands of the satirist Hitler was a diminutive mustachioed ego-maniac. In the hands of the comedian the Bible is a set of improbable and absurd fairy stories, as much of man as the Brothers Grimm. A satirist exposes the fantasies which surround and support the tyrant for what they are: fantasies. It is not enough that they could be exposed, it is imperative that they are.
Stéphane Charbonnier and his fellow cartoonists knew that the absurdity of religion was not a secret to be whispered between liberals on the Left Bank, it was something to be proclaimed. They knew that We are not free because we have to right to laugh at religion, we are free because we do. That is what they stood for, and that is why they died standing.
