Je Suis Charlie

[rowyn]

"In any war, the goal is to put your enemy in a position where he has no good options."

I don't exactly agree with the conclusions in the New York Post article linked above, but Goldberg makes a good point about the lack of good options in response to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. As does this article on how the polarization that terrorists attacks inspires helps the terrorists.

(Links from Twitter, courtesy of stryck and the_gneech respectively, if I recall correctly.)

I don't know what you're supposed to do instead. Okay, obviously if I have to pick sides between "people offended by intentionally offensive cartoons" and "people who are threatened with murder or murdered for making said cartoons", I'm on the side of the cartoonists. This part is easy. I am opposed to murder a whole lot more than I am opposed to intentionally offensive cartoons. That is not a close decision. Everyone should have the right to make offensive cartoons without fear for their safety.

But this obvious fact does not particularly make me keen on offending people. I try not to do mean things on purpose. My accidental cruelties are more than sufficient. Maybe if there were a 1:1 correlation between "people offended by offensive cartoons" and "people who will attack or threaten to attack the creators of such cartoons", I'd be more gung-ho about offending them. If I were to make a list of "people who do not deserve common courtesy", "terrorists" would place high on it. And I am one small unimportant person in a sea of billions of Internet voices: I'll be in more danger driving to a friend's house to play games today than I will ever be at personal risk of terrorist attack. I am not worried about retaliation.

But there is no such 1:1 correlation. Actual terrorists are probably less than 0.0001% of the people who feel slighted, marginalized, insulted, and unhappy by intentional sacrilege against Islam. Terrorist sympathizers or supporters are surely a much large fraction, but I bet there's still way more innocent bystanders than people who've done anything to merit rudeness.

So I don't particularly want to draw pictures of Mohammed myself, or republish them, even ones that strike me as well-done, fitting, and that I can barely imagine anyone being offended by. I don't even really want to encourage other people to do so. Certainly everyone has a right to do so, but "things that are right to do" is a small subset of everything a human should have the right to do.

I don't suppose it helps not to do it, though.

I don't suppose anything I can do would. Heads you win, tails I lose.

Comments

[rowyn]

Nnng.

Reiterating a few things: absolutely, people should have the right to draw whatever pictures they want without fear for their safety, regardless of whether those pictures are tasteless, crude, offensive, hateful, racist, etc. I support the magazine's right to exist and publish whatever they like 100%.

I am not saying that their stuff is going to offend all right-thinking people. (The cover of Mohammed kissing a cartoonist on that tumblr link made me giggle, in point of fact. So did the cross-as-sex toy one, for that matter.) It shouldn't be offensive to everyone. In general, we would live in a better and happier world if people were offended by fewer things.

And yet, I am not going to say "oh hey it's great that you're posting sacrilegious images! Thank goodness someone is willing to insult and belittle the sacred and deeply-held beliefs of a huge number of people, many of whom do not fall into the narrow category that is your actual target. The world would be a terrible place if we didn't have so many people insulting and belittling others."

Because I don't really believe that what we need now is to alienate each other more.

Also, I am sure the magazine covers a huge variety of topics, and I'm not judging the publication as a whole here.

I am speaking to the narrow question of "If a small percentage of a religious group (in this case, Muslims) responds to sacrilege with violence, is the appropriate response 'commit more sacrilege to show them they're not the boss'? And drawing Mohammed is sacrilege to hundreds of millions of Muslims who have no terrorist leanings whatsoever, and the whole thing feels unnecessarily rude to me, so I don't like it. It feels counterproductive, like we're alienating people who should be our allies against terrorists.

But I dunno what the right response it. I'm kinda rambling and repeating myself at this point, so I'll just stop here.

[alltoseek.livejournal.com]

"If a small percentage of a religious group (in this case, Muslims) responds to sacrilege with violence, is the appropriate response 'commit more sacrilege to show them they're not the boss'?"

Well, yes. The only reason we enjoy any religious freedom here or anywhere else in the world is that when the first people who committed sacrilege (worshiped a different god, spoke the name "god", refused to worship the god, wore something sacrilegious (trousers, for example), dressed sacrilegiously by refusing to wear something they're supposed to, said something heretical, wrote something heretical, drew a heretical picture, etc.) were responded to with violence by the small percentage of people with a huge investment in maintaining the complete obedience to their religious instructions, those sacrilegious people kept committing those sacrileges. They continued to encourage others to commit sacrileges, too.

Thus spread a variety of religions, with different rules; and finally there were so many, and so many wars over religions and sacrileges, that some countries said screw it, we don't care if someone does something sacrilegious in the eyes of someone's religion, we ain't gonna respond to sacrilege with violence anymore. If you do, you're the one in trouble, not the people committing the sacrilege.*

If those first committers of sacrilege hadn't kept going in the face of violence - if every act of sacrilege with a negative repercussion had resulted in nobody ever committing sacrilege (saying what I really believe isn't worth it, I'll keep wearing this skirt/veil/hat/beard/burqa cuz dress is trivial what dif does it make, I don't really need to write or draw this thing, etc.) then we would all be living under the religious thumb of some authority who determined what was sacrilegious and what wasn't; who dictated what we would do, wear, say, and speak.

Cartooning and images are an important aspect of how we communicate in our culture. Satirical cartooning is supposed to offend those satirized - especially the more powerful institutions, such as government (Charlie went after politicians constantly) and religion (Charlie went after all religions; they didn't single out Islam. They didn't omit Islam).

Satire is an extremely important and useful aspect of culture that keeps people from taking the powerful too seriously. People in power are already prone to abuse that power; satire is one of the forms used, traditionally and successfully, to keep such powerful people at the level of us ordinary humans. Cuz they are ordinary humans liable to foibles just like everyone. And the world needs that reminder constantly.

So OK, refraining from depicting images of Muhammad seems like an easy polite thing to do out of consideration for the hundreds of millions Muslims in the world. You could substitute a little * spot like Trudeau did for Bush, or something.

But if I had art skillz and an audience, my response to this tragedy would be an image of Muhammad crying over the killed victims.

Charlie has skillz and an audience, and yes, they damn well better keep creating satirical cartoons that offend powerful people, including Muslims - all the ones working to enforce their religious control over others through violence (including government-endorsed violence through police and judges and punishments); including Catholics, and Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians and McDonalds and Disneyland and everyone else they want to satirize.

Je Suis Charlie


*Yes, there's a very good reason we don't blame the victims, even when we think they could/should have refrained from their "provocation". Cuz women shouldn't were skimpy clothing if they don't want to get raped, right? They shouldn't go to their boyfriend's room if they don't want to have sex, yes?

Charlie publishes satirical cartoons for excellent reasons, as explained above. Their reasons are as good as those of women who wear skimpy clothing - but that doesn't even matter, because neither of those actions requires defending. Neither of them justify violence. End of story. We condemn the killers, without judgement of the dead.