Charlie Hebdo and the Agony of Free Speech

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

04 May 15

f you like a good fight, you’ll love the literary spat over the PEN American Center’s decision to give its award for courage to the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, twelve of whose cartoonists, staff, and contributors were massacred in Paris on January 7 by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. Islamist groups had previously warned the paper to stop its offending portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed and had even burned down its offices in 2011. But opposed to all forms of authoritarianism, especially from religion, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo continued to express themselves freely, while those who killed them claimed to be avenging the insult to the founder of their faith.

Super-sophisticates may downplay the tragedy as a simplistic morality play between French anarchoids who took their Enlightenment faith in free speech much too seriously and Islamist Fools of God who got caught up in their medieval fervor. But, however anachronistic, the drama seems destined to become a classic trope of our times.

Start with Charlie Hebdo, the massacre, and the mega “Free Speech” march in Paris that the Socialist government used to build support for a growing denial of free speech at home and a renewed commitment to US-led military intervention in Syria and Iraq. These set the stage. Add the huge marches in Islamic countries protesting Charlie Hebdo, the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo, and the debate the award is provoking. Together these and more to come could well dumb down the world’s understanding of free speech. They could change how we are expected to conduct public discourse. They could even color the way courts around the world interpret laws, treaties, and Constitutional provisions that supposedly safeguard our liberty of expression.

The issues at stake are not wholly legalistic nor at all trivial. Should free speech permit denying Hitler’s Holocaust, inciting racial hatred, or arguing in defense of terrorist acts? All these are now illegal in most of Europe and have been for many years. Should free speech include the right to offend religious and ethnic minorities, such as the underdog French Muslims? Should it allow blaspheming their God or ignoring the prohibitions some Muslims observe against any visual portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed? Should free speech include the right to offend the religious beliefs of America’s Christian majority , a large bloc of whom are creating a Christian nationalism that would impose its will on the rest of us? Should it allow degrading satirical caricatures of Arabs and Jews with big hooked noses and blacks with big lips, or depicting Mohammed, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Pope performing sexual acts?

Tough questions, and purposely provocative. But these are the big issues and the answers are surprisingly simple. To keep speech free as part of what it means to be human, our governing legal systems and the hall monitors of public discourse must permit all of the above and far more. Individuals may freely choose not to express themselves in these ways. Some may sadly choose not to honor the courage of those who do. But we will inevitably lose more and more of our free speech if we permit governments, universities, religions, media, or cultural elites to regulate the content of our political and artistic expression, or to set limits on how we can and cannot express it.

This is the risk we now face, and the danger comes not just from authoritarians who explicitly oppose giving “too much freedom” to individuals. Far more insidious are the self-proclaimed liberals who insist that they are all “for free speech, but …” How similar they sound to all those well-meaning liberals during the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s who always insisted, “We support your ends, but not your means.”

If I had my way, I would never have picked Charlie Hebdo as the poster child for the cause of free speech. Its cartoons cross the line far too often for me and are much too crude and sophomoric. But its cartoonists, staff, and contributors are the ones who got killed for what they drew and said. They are at the center of the drama none of us got to cast, and that’s not all bad. Who can honestly deny the enormous courage they showed in their exercise of free speech? More to the point, who among their current literary critics, most of whom have shown no courage at all, can make a serious case that here in the 21st century, Islam and the Prophet Mohammed should be any more immune from satirical attack than the Front National and Catholic Church, which have long been Charlie Hebdo’s favored targets.

Defend Charlie Hebdo as critically as you want, but defend it as vigorously as you can. If you do not, we will all see the further demise of meaningful free speech as a universal human right. This is the uncomfortable sense in which we are all Charlie Hebdo.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.