 Solidarity with Charlie Hebdo
The shooting at the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is yet another sign of the decay of democracy in France.
The 9/11 attacks touched the symbols of American power— the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House. The 1/7 2015 shooting in Paris touched the symbols of the French contribution to the world since 1789, its true power—ideas, writing, tolerance, secularity, freedom of speech, caustic humour and good-natured joshing, fraternity, imagination, transgression, disrespect for the power-that-be, among many other things.
One can only hope that the new Charlie Hebdo will keep bearing the same torch as the victims of that barbarian act of cruelty. It is to be hoped indeed as Charlie Hebdo is the only remaining media to be faithful to real left-wing ideals, but it will not change a hard fact—France has suddenly become a society deprived of its freedom.
The political establishment, in France and elsewhere, will not be affected. They will carry on lunching together, including with those who are directly responsible for the shooting. Things will go on as if nothing had happened. Nothing will be done because the politicians do not want to do anything about it. Soon, no one will be able to do anything about it.
The 1/7 shooting will become a simple date to celebrate, like 9/11. People are already crying over the victims, over Charlie Hebdo as a symbol. We do not want to be ordered to weep by the very politicians who have shown their incompetence, not only in this instance but in all the fields of life. By their very political and social choices they are responsible for the violent spirit of intolerance and hatred that erupted yesterday.
The horror we’ve just witnessed comes directly from more than 40 years of weakness and complacency on the part of our leaders, in the whole world and especially in France, regarding a racist and aggressive ideology, grounded on a religious set of beliefs that still hasn’t amended its most violent texts and still considers them to have ruling power. Whatever the countries and the ways of presenting their beliefs, the founding texts of that ideology are the same and stay the same. The weakness and the complacency towards that ideology are the same everywhere because of the economic corruption that reigns supreme.
This weakness is opening the door to various non-democratic ideologies, for whom racism and authoritarian power are a raison d’être.
Fundamentalisms of all kinds, religious or non-religious types of Nazism (according to geographical diversity) and despotic powers always converge to stifle the democratic impulse that has tried to survive for a couple of centuries in the few countries where it has been established. That democratic spirit has only survived because of the strength of the people, including through violence when necessary. Today the French people is powerless, with no weapon to defend itself. And even the left has contributed to that.
Not so long ago, in France, the left and the far-left were able to fight the violence of the Nazis or of would-be Nazis and various fundamentalists. Since the new Nazis have been wearing the Islamic robe, the left is dismayed, anguished at the idea that they could be accused of racism while rightfully fighting those who truly are racist. It is a paradoxical situation, the roots of which are difficult to disentangle, and we’re struggling to find a way out of it.
The contemporary left seems to have forgotten that fighting obscurantism in all its forms required for their predecessors to actually fight religious obscurantism as it was then a ruling power. This struggle has produced the basis of French secularism, a more or less conscious reference to the French Revolution before that.
In France Charlie Hebdo is the last example of that political tradition and they are very marginal. What they had to say was often said through satirical drawings (and some excellent texts as well), which did not diminish the depth of their positions, the true offshoot of the French intellectual tradition.
Today French freedom was killed. There is no organic solidarity within French society for the establishment is affiliated to world oligarchy while the people has been weakened through mass-marginalization. The people has little margin of action to respond politically in any strong, united and wilful capacity. French society is now devoid of orientations, of the secular principles that have been denied by politicians of all parties for 40 years in every conceivable dimension.
Racist and xenophobic responses are now a likely danger.
Politicos will weep over Charlie Hebdo but the people are literally helpless. The left has wiped itself out after betraying its principles for 30 years.
Against Nazism (and this shooting is simply a religious version of that ideology, as is the case in Syria, Irak, Afghanistan and wherever you can see its catastrophic effects), the only response is violence, locally, regionally and internationally—except that we are now, collectively and humanly, completely incapable of that.
Non-violence did not stop Nazism in its budding form. Nazism only became stronger. And the shooting at Charlie Hebdo used the same methods and principles under the guise of Islam. This lesson in history is not so far in the past that we should be unable to remember it. And yet, it is all coming back. The French are reputed to have a short memory, like all the peoples it seems. Politicians, on the other hand, have a perverted sense of memory.
Charb, Cabu, Tignous, Honoré and Wolinski are dead. There is no hierarchy in a death toll but we loved those particular persons, especially Cabu who was so fond of jazz and had been so incredibly talented in portraying it.
Today, 7th January 2015 at 3pm. we are left with nothing.
Yves Sportis
translation by Jean szlamowicz
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