France is holding huge rallies for free speech after the Charlie Hebdo murders, but they have arrested a comedian for his antisemitic speech. Now the Pope, while condemning the terrorist attack, is underscoring that mocking religion is wrong in itself. Issues of free speech are apparently more complicated than is often assumed.
Meanwhile, the sold-out new issue of the satirical magazine that was attacked makes clear its distinct ideological position, namely, a militant atheism. The editors say how they laughed when the bells of Notre Dame would be rung in their honor, and that those who say “‘I am Charlie’ need to also know that that means, ‘I am secularism.'” The point is, both the terrorists and their victims are iconoclasts.
After the jump, Stephen Richert, while condemning the killings and insisting that he is not blaming the victim, argues that freedom of speech is NOT the primary value of civilization and that leftist iconoclasts and Islamic iconoclasts have more in common than either of them realize.
From Scott P. Richert, Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo | Chronicles Magazine:
Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? Even to ask that question seems absurd.
Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? Even to ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and “moral equivalency” between “medieval barbarians” and “heroic defenders of freedom of speech.”
Yet the second question may be even more important than the first, if only because everyone outside of the confines of the putative “religion of peace” knows the proper answer to the first, but few understand why the proper answer to the second may very well be the same.
I do not wish to make too much of the rapid embrace of the phrase Je suis Charlie Hebdo by good people horrified by the meticulously planned and surgically performed strike by militant Muslims on the Paris offices of the “irreverent” weekly. Few who posted those words on Twitter and Facebook and every other form of social media this week know much at all about the actual content of Charlie Hebdo (as the all-too-frequent use of the line “It’s the French version of The Onion” makes clear). Most would undoubtedly be horrified had they seen the viciously antisemitic and anti-Christian cartoons that Charlie Hebdo routinely ran alongside the anti-Muslim images that have been widely circulated. Few (I trust) would be willing to defend, for instance, the cover that depicted the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity sodomizing one another, as a show of support for homosexual “marriage.”
Yet even among those exposed to the truth about the vile content that Charlie Hebdo routinely published, many continue to stand behind the slogan, because as a society we have become so beguiled by the words “freedom of speech” that we regard the quotation routinely and wrongly attributed to Voltaire—“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—as the very foundation of civilization.
Of course, we don’t act like we believe that. Je suis Charlie Hebdo, cry those on the left, who normally spend their days screaming “Racist!” at those on the right. Would they defend to the death the right of someone to question affirmative action, much less the right to call someone a “nigger”? Of course not, nor should they.
Je suis Charlie Hebdo, shout those on the right, who routinely denounce the antisemitic ravings of Muslim clerics. Would they defend to the death the right of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call Jews “swines,” or even the right of President Obama to call Islam a “religion of peace”? Of course not, nor should they.
And the good news is that they don’t have to. Civilization, thankfully, does not depend upon the right of freedom of speech, neither the concrete right guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution nor the abstract version ripped from the historical circumstance of that amendment by activist jurists and honed to a weapon lethal to civilized discourse first by leftists in the 1960’s and then by “conservatives” in the 1980’s.
Indeed, in its abstract form, elevated above all other principles and above the complex realities of actual human society, “free speech” has largely become cover for the behavior of those who either do not wish to conform to the norms of civilized society or who wish to undermine those norms with the ultimate intention of destroying civilization itself. It has become, in other words, an ideology, a distortion of reality.
In this, the partisans of free speech and the evangelists of Allah are much closer together than they or we tend to think. A few years after the pseudonymous S.G. Tallentyre Evelyn Beatrice Hall inserted her high-sounding words into the mouth of Voltaire, another English writer pointed out the parallels between the beliefs of Islam and those of modern liberalism. In G.K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn, we see Islam not as the “medieval religion” of atheist and neoconservative screeds, but a thoroughly modern ideology, sibling to liberalism in an iconoclasm that doesn’t simply ignore reality but tries to destroy it. Unlike the Triune God of Christianity Who deigned to become man to save His Creation, Allah is an abstract principle—like “free speech”—to which all of human society must submit, by force if necessary, and through which it must be violently transformed. And just as the most radical proponents of “free speech” can justify anything under its banner, the most radical acolytes of Allah can insist that any action they take in his name is demanded by Islam.
That Islam does not merely prohibit images of Allah or images of Muhammad but all images of creation is telling, because through this prohibition it reveals a fundamental hatred of the created world, and not simply a fear of blasphemy in the case of images of Allah or sacrilege in the case of images of Muhammad. But the iconoclasm of modern liberalism is the same. The promotion of vile obscenity à la Charlie Hebdo isn’t “courageous”; it is a rage against reality, a desire not only to destroy the norms of civilized life but to strike at the very roots of the created order that gives rise to those norms and makes civilization possible.
HT: Paul McCain
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